The influence of Latin on somatisms in the Norwegian language

Abstract

Language interaction has always been a matter of interest to linguists. Despite the fact of profound influence of Latin on many languages in many sciences, including medicine, the question concerning the borrowings of anatomical vocabulary, namely somatisms, or body parts, from Latin in Norwegian and its influence on the Norwegian anatomical terminology is of particular interest. The study focuses on the influence of Latin on the names of different body parts in Norwegian, thereby revealing some peculiarities of somatisms in the Norwegian language. Taking into account the historical background and cross-cultural interaction, some groups of somatisms have been distinguished. The most abundant group includes single word somatisms and compounds that do not have their norwegianized Latin form. The second group consists of the Norwegian somatisms, which have identical or nearly identical morphemic form with somatisms in Latin, incorporating single word somatisms as well as some compounds where one or even two parts are norwegianized Latin forms with some semantic peculiarities. We have also singled out the anatomical terms that have a norwegianized Latin form and a parallel native form. Mostly the borrowings in this group underwent orthographic changes adapting them to the Norwegian language. The results show that on the whole the Norwegian language preserves its identity, uniqueness and selective modifying purism in anatomical vocabulary, with some instances of being dependent on Latin.