OE lyft and loft: A Competing Doublet?

This paper focuses on the doublet OE lyft ‘air, atmosphere, sky, cloud, wind’, and OE loft ‘air, atmosphere’, outlining their etymology and their cognates within the Germanic linguistic family. While OE lyft is a native Anglo-Saxon word, abundantly attested throughout the Old English corpus, OE loft is a loanword from ON lopt, loft which was borrowed surprisingly early, being first attested in the corpus of Ælfric of Eynsham († c. 1010). Against the general background of Norse-derived vocabulary in Old English, OE loft is atypical in at least three respects: firstly, because it is not a technical term; secondly, because it has become established in English, despite going through some semantic shifts; finally, because it is attested within a text by Ælfric, the most admired and rigorous representative of Late West Saxon. The survey of the earliest occurrences of loft in Old and Middle English shows that it was first borrowed not as a simplex but within the adverbial phrase á lopt(i). This circumstance, together with the limited number of occurrences of loft, compared to those of the much more widespread lyft, shows that the two were not a competing doublet. Conversely, their relationship should rather be best interpreted in view of the thorough reshuffle of the whole semantic domain concerning ‘sky’, ‘air’, and ‘cloud’ in Middle English. It was probably in the course of such reorganisation that the Scandinavian borrowing loft came temporarily and perhaps accidentally to prevail over its native equivalent lyft, only to give ground again when, by the end of the Middle English period, both lift and loft were supplanted by the two loanwords sky and air.