v1.0
Published 01/10/24

Aim

Old Norse Loan-Words in Scottish Gaelic is a linguistic analysis of Old Norse loan-words (excluding personal names and place-names) in Scottish Gaelic, and to a lesser extent in Irish and in Manx. It deals both with words that probably do derive from Old Norse and with those that probably do not, although they have been claimed to do so elsewhere. While it does not deal with place-names, it does deal with borrowed words that may only survive in the context of place-names today, e.g. SG beirgh ‘promontory’ (as in SG A’ Bheirgh) < ON bergi dat. nt. The focus of the analysis is on historical phonology, showing how some words in Scottish Gaelic appear to have come down to us from Old Norse and how others are unlikely to have done so.