PerHAPs HAPpiness HAPpens: On the Expansion of the Old Norse Root hap- in Middle English Rafał Molencki University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland ABSTRACT: The Old Norse root hap- was the source of several new Middle English words, most of which did not have corresponding cognates in the donor language. First the noun hap was borrowed in the 13th century, which in the next two centuries was followed by coining the adjective happy, the verb happen, the modal adverb perhaps and their derivatives, all of them joined semantically by the common sense of ‘chance, fate, luck.’ After the words became rooted in English, each of them followed their own semantic paths. They all became high frequency words, often replacing their older synonyms of Old English origin. KEYWORDS: word formation, semantic change, Old Norse, Middle English, grammaticalization 1. Introduction In this article I trace the formation of new words in Middle English, which were all based on the Norse root hap-. All of them have already been discussed in my other publications: the adjective happy in Molencki (in press), the verb happen in Molencki (forthc.) and the adverb perhaps in Molencki (2021). Here I will try to find out what all these high frequency Modern English words have in common from the semantic point of view. The illustrating language material for the study has been taken from historical English dictionaries, mostly from Bosworth and Toller (B&T), Dictionary of Old English (DOE), Middle English Dictionary (MED), and Oxford English Dictionary (OED); and their accompanying corpora: Dictionary of Old English Corpus (DOEC) and Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse (CMEPV). The abbreviated labels of the cited texts follow the notation of these sources.
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