Old Norse þiónn and its Old Russian Relative tiun, or How Scandinavian Servants Became East Slavic Bureaucrats
2019
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 reveal that a significant semantic shift took place around the time of the borrowing process: from a name for common unfree servants to the post of a prince's official.
Furthermore, it has undergone extensive semantic development throughout the centuries, both in North Germanic and East Slavic dialects, revealing quite remarkable similarities.