Abstract
This study investigates the origin and diffusion of a binominal construction nith and onde ‘spite and hate’ in Middle English, by using A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English as the main source. It argues that nith and onde is also used as a lexicalised unit to refer to ‘the deadly sin of envy’. Its development towards greater fixedness, or freezing, and the lexicalisation of the meaning ‘envy’ are seen as part of a broader historical process, generated by the thirteenth-century ecclesiastical reforms. The author examines the semantic field ENVY, JEALOUSY in general, which, apart from the binominal, also includes nith and onde as individual words, as well as æfest and envie, and establishes their collocates, frequencies, and distributions across regions and subperiods of Early Middle English. It emerges that the binominal had a strong association with the West Midlands, and that around 1225 it was beginning to lexicalise as the equivalent for Latin invidia and French envie. The availability of the latter from around 1300, however, challenged this situation, and the English set phrase was gradually ousted into the periphery of the lexical field, while envie became established as the core term.
Timofeeva, Olga