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hata

Old Norse hata is not only a medieval label for an inward feeling. The Dictionary of Old Norse Prose structures 101 prose citations under four active senses before its participial and reflexive branches: persecute; despise, reject, or cast aside; mock or humiliate; and hate, despise, or stand hostile toward. That ordering is a lexicographic analysis, not a chronology of semantic change. Fritzner independently begins with pursue or seek to destroy, continues through damage or destruction, and only then gives hate opposed to love. Zoëga likewise preserves poetic damage or destruction beside ordinary hate, while Cleasby and Vigfússon record active, reflexive, reciprocal, participial, and disputed poetic uses. Lexicon Poeticum displays eleven linked rows, including variants, damage, destruction, persecution, loathing, haters, and the gold-spending formula, but warns that its concordance has not been reviewed and that dates need checking. A c1200 scan of Holm perg 15 4°, folio 89v, was directly inspected against ONP's diplomatic transcription and visibly preserves hata in the line Elſcaþu hréinlife oc hata engi maɴ. All other rows remain source-reported. The generated possible runic inscriptions on modern dictionary transcriptions are excluded, and no exact historical pronunciation is invented.

“Old Norse hate was not trapped inside the mind. The same verb could persecute, reject, humiliate, damage, destroy, and enter reciprocal hostility before a dictionary ever reached the familiar feeling sense.”