Old Norse Þión and Its Old Russian Relative <i>Tiun</i>. Or How Scandinavian Servants Became East Slavic Bureaucrats

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.

Keywords

• lexical interference
• semantic shifts
• old norse
• old east slavic
• medieval judicial charters
• scandinavian loanwords in old russian