boun

adj.

Erk bone; WA boune, bowne

‘ready; bound, setting out; arranged, fixed’ (Modern English bound)

Etymology

Always derived from ON, cp. OIcel búinn (comp. búnari, superl. búnastr) ‘ready, prepared, finished, willing, favourably disposed (towards sth.)’, originally the pp. of the v. represented by OIcel búa (see further busk (v.)).  ME forms in /u:/ seem to reflect the OWN variant, as opposed to ODan bōen, OSwed bōin with /o:/ (see Bj., McGee 553).  Formally, ME boun could also descend from the (str.) pp. of OE būan ‘to dwell, inhabit’, which is attested five times in OE in the form <gebun-> (see DOE), but the sense of the str. pp. in OE is always ‘inhabited, occupied, taken possession of, settled’, and the distinctive meaning of the ME word is therefore a strong indicator of its derivation from ON.

PGmc Ancestor

*bō(w)an or *bū(w)an-

Proposed ON Etymon (OIcel representative)

búinn ‘ready, prepared, finished, willing, favourably disposed (towards sth.), obedient, submissive’
(ONP búa (2) (vb.); -búinn (adj.))

Other Scandinavian Reflexes

Icel búinn, Norw buen

OE Cognate

būan (v.) ‘to dwell, inhabit’

Phonological and morphological markers

Summary category

C3c

Attestation

Very common in ME (from Orrm onwards): especially frequent in N/EM texts and in alliterative poetry (inc. e.g. WPal.), but there are indications of more widespread usage by the later 14c. (inc. rarely by Chaucer and Gower)(see further McGee 508–9).  On the variants ibon, iboned (mainly LB) see MED s.v. ibōn (adj. and ppl.) and further Dance 2003: 342, 344, 414, SPS 430–1.

Occurrences in the Gersum Corpus

Gaw 548, 852, 1311 etc.; Pe 534, 992, 1103; Erk 181; WA 323, 534, 870 etc.

Usually parsed as an adj. in Gaw 1693 ‘were boun busked’ (since Madden and Morris), but Vant glosses it as an adv. On the usage at Gaw 548 see PSn. The MS of Erk has <bode> with <d> crossed out and <n> written above it; McGee (436) reasons that 'the misspelling was probably due to its use in the phrase bone to his bode' (see also Peterson 181n citing Savage 181n, who notes a similar phrase occurs in WA as well as Gaw).

Bibliography

MED boun (adj.) , OED bound (adj. 1) , HTOED , HTOED , Dance boun, Bj. 206, 282, DP 3–4, de Vries búinn, Mag. búa (3), AEW bū(i)an, DOE ge-būn, ge-būd