Old Norse Þión and Its Old Russian Relative Tiun. Or How Scandinavian Servants Became East Slavic Bureaucrats
Old Norse Þión and Its Old Russian Relative Tiun. Or How Scandinavian Servants Became East Slavic Bureaucrats
Author(s): Hana ŠtěříkováSubject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Eastern Slavic Languages
Published by: Univerzita Karlova v Praze, Nakladatelství Karolinum
Keywords: lexical interference; semantic shifts; Old Norse; Old East Slavic; medieval judicial charters; Scandinavian loanwords in Old Russian
Summary/Abstract: The Old Russian word ti(v)un is one of the few medieval loanwords from Old Norse which has been preserved in Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian to this day. Medieval judicial charters and legal texts from Scandinavia and East Slavic territories show that there was a significant semantic shift around the time of the borrowing process itself: from a name for common unfree servants to the post of a prince’s official. Besides, it has gone through quite an extensive semantic development through the cen-turies both in North Germanic and East Slavic dialects that shows quite remarkable similarities.
Journal: Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philologica
- Issue Year: 2019
- Issue No: 3
- Page Range: 27-37
- Page Count: 11
- Language: English
