OIcel. kærr ‘dear, beloved’ and the “Picardian hypothesis”

Abstract

This article challenges Fischer’s 1909 implied proposal that OIcel. kærr [9th/10th c.+] is a North French, Picardian, loan. Fischer’s etymology, which was preceded and inspired by Jessen’s 1893 work on Danish, is rejected on the phonological grounds that the initial plosive in Icelandic is palatal and not velar, cf. orthographies such as ⟨kiær⟩. Moreover, it is also demonstrated that Picardian, actually, could show an incipient palatalization of /k/ in that phonological context, as shown by orthographies such as ⟨kier⟩, so that Fischer’s initial assumption was faulty to begin with. The inadequacy of the “Picardian hypothesis” is demonstrated by reference to two other French loans, katel [1250+] and kisill [14th c., hapax]. The former, which in theory could be a loan from Picardian, is a Middle English (or even Latin) borrowing, whereas the latter, for which a Picardian source word is not attested, shows that the outcome of the adaptation process of [c] or [t͡ʃ] is invariably OIcel. /c/. A further external argument is that, in light of Icelandic and Scandinavian history, one cannot assume that both kærr and katel are loans from Picardian, because that would entail an early Picardian influence in Scandinavia which only continued in Iceland well into the thirteenth century.