Edited by Bettelou Los, Chris Cummins, Lisa Gotthard, Alpo Honkapohja and Benjamin Molineaux
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 359] 2022
► pp. 97–118
This chapter discusses the demise of Old English adjectives of fortune which came to be replaced with some new items of Germanic origin, in particular Norse-derived happy and Low German or Flemish lucky. Interestingly, in this semantic field referring to abstract ideas, English did not take Romance borrowings, except for fortunate. The adjective happy was not a direct Scandinavian loanword, but an independent regular late-14th century native derivation from the originally Norse noun hap borrowed into English at least two centuries before. In Middle and Early Modern English some Old English items fell into disuse (e.g., ēadig) while others underwent major semantic shifts ((ge)sǣlig and blīðe). Using the data from several historical dictionaries of English and the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, I trace the mechanisms of replacement in the context of lexical layering, subjectification and contact-induced linguistic changes.