Importance of Norn Today

[DePooperit]

 

I'm up for it, just so long as I get the Stalin role.

 

I bags Trotsky!

[DePooperit]

R.E Shetlandforwirds - exactly. Who gave them the right to class the Shetland dialect as a just a branch of scots, and to me this shows where they're coming from.

 

I think this is a bit of a misunderstanding. It's not Shetland ForWirds job to 'classify' anything, they're just there to promote the dialect. Linguists class Shetland dialect as a branch of Scots. Shetland ForWirds (so far as I know, and I'm not a member so may be wrong) simply accept that linguists are correct in their analysis. It is not offensive or crazy to accept that this dialect belongs to a broader family.

The horror that the suggestion seems to evoke among some Shetlanders is nothing objectively to do with language, it's about identity and politics. Some people don't want Shetland to be a Scots dialect, so they are adamant that it is not a Scots dialect. But it's a rather senseless argument. For instance, I am a unique human being, absolutely different from all other human beings, but I'm not offended if you suggest that I share much (most) of my DNA with lots of other human beings. It doesn't make me less unique. Similarly, Shetland dialect is absolutely unique, with features that are not found anywhere else, and many things that have come from elsewhere, particularly Norn, but it's closest relatives are Scots dialects (indeed, Scots itself can be seen as a family of dialects, since there are so many unique regional variations). These dialects are each, in themselves, also unique.

 

Malachy is quite right to point out that SFW (ShetlandForWirds) did not ‘classify’ the Shetland dialect as just a branch of Scots. What I actually said was ‘it is now officially (by ShetlandForWirds) regarded as a dialect of Scots.’ In other words, I said ‘regarded’ not ‘classify.’ The ‘officially’ was a sideways comment on the fact that SFW are the only/closest thing to an ‘official’ perception of the Shetland tongue, and the ‘regarded’ was in reference to the fact that the Shetland tongue has traditionally been regarded as a dialect of English rather than Scots. In other words, as far as I can remember, the most general perception when I was young was not - as is sometimes maintained - that it was a development or deterioration of Norn, but that it was a dialect of English. Scots, or ‘Scottie’, was held to be something similar, but different. So the concept of Shetland dialect as being a dialect of Scots does, I think, show a change in perception.

 

Actually the linguistic classification of a language/dialect is not as important as the sociological perception. Swedish, Danish and Norwegian might easily have been regarded as the same language under different political circumstances, as might Scottish Gaelic and Irish. The traditional perception of the Shetland tongue as not being Scots was tied up with the traditional perception of Shetlanders as being first Shetland, and then British, rather than Scottish. While I agree that the Shetland tongue is a form of Scots - while recognising the Norn element - I would question whether the perception of it as a dialect of Scots is useful.

 

From my point of view, the question is mainly practical. As someone who speaks and occasionally writes Scots (bog standard, Doric, and other forms) I know that I have to write Shetland as an entity in its own right, separate from Scots. If Scots had a standard written form this would, I think, be obvious. Since it doesn’t, however, and the question of a written form is regarded as irrelevant both on mainland Scotland and in Shetland, where Scots and the Shetland tongue are not looked at in practical terms, it may not be a useful point.

 

I should say here that some of ShetlandForWirds are friends of mine (or at least were when I last looked!) and I have no intention of slagging them off. I don’t think the view that they’re creating the dialect in their own image is justified - as Malachy states, anyone who wants to put their oar in can go along. Mind you, I’m possibly coming from the other direction. In contrast to the criticism that says that SFW is too ordered in their approach to ‘dialect,’ I would say that they aren’t ordered enough in their approach to the ‘Shetland tongue’ as a whole. I must say, however, that they did completely ignore a paper I sent to them after the dialect conference, presumably because it recommended not following the example of Edinburgh.

 

What I would be concerned about (if I still had any hope that the Shetland tongue would survive, and wasn’t just sounding off!) would be the influence that goes along with recognition of Shetland dialect as a dialect of Scots. I’ll give a couple of examples.

 

At the time that Scots author James Robertson was due to visit Shetland, I received an e-mail from a friend in Shetland requesting that I cease and desist (not the words actually used) from criticising him on my website and elsewhere. The comment I had criticised was as follows:

 

'One argument against a standardisation of Scots spelling is that one of the language's very strengths lies in its flexibility and its less-than-respectable status: writers turn to it because it offers a refuge for linguistic individualism, anarchism, nomadism and hedonism... William McIlvanney has spoken of Scots as being like English in its underwear, stripped of all pretensions, and in some respects this is very apt.'

 

To which I made remarks like:

 

‘This illustrates the attitude of much of the 'Scots' literary establishment. Scots is not seen by them as a language like other languages, such as Gaelic, English, Catalan, Tok Pisin, which have a normative orthography and grammar in order to enable those who speak them every day to become literate in them, but as a language which writers 'turn to' when they want a particular effect which English is not degraded enough to express...lack of literacy in Scots is seen as an asset to an effete elite of largely Edinburgh based and mostly English speaking lounge linguists and literati, who wish to maintain its disreputable status so that they can turn to it, like Jekyll to Hyde, when they wish to indulge in a little fashionable literary slumming, before returning to their own comfortable standard English.’

 

It would appear that I had been identified by Matthew Fitt, one of Robertson’s friends who had visited Shetland, as ‘the man who disagrees with James,’ and in the event of Robertson (Richard and Judy reading list, no less) visiting Shetland I had become a diplomatic liability. This was another of the (many) reasons I removed my website from easy public scrutiny.

 

Now, it may be that some of the people who disagree with SFW for having too ordered an approach to dialect would sympathise with Robertson’s view of Scots (under which the Shetland tongue must presumably be included) as intrinsically disreputable. To me, however, it seems very odd to be encouraging children in Shetland to speak a dialect of a language which exists only for Edinburgh writers to express the diarrhoea of the Central Scots urban underbelly.

 

Another of the ‘names’ in so-called Scots Language promotion - who has visited SFW - is Dr Christine Robinson. It would take too long to explain how Robinson was drafted in by Orkney College to take over the (non-Gaelic) linguistic section of their course in Scottish Cultural studies. This course was supposed to emphasise the languages of the Highlands and Islands, but one of the two textbooks, along with the Concise Scots Dictionary, is now Robinson’s own Scotspeak, A Guide to the Pronunciation of Modern Urban Scots. It consists of extracts from the speech of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen, and in the first extract she devotes most of a page to pointing out where glottal stops fall. In the grammar section, she says this:

 

'As anyone who has ever learned a foreign language knows, strong verbs, the ones that change their vowels to make past tense or past participle, are very difficult to learn. English and Scots have both been making themselves easier over the years. Some strong verbs have become weak' (examples fae Aald English here). 'Thank goodness English is getting easier! '

 

‘If we compare the Scots past tense and past particuple of gi(v)e, which for many speakers are both gied, with the English gave and given, we can see that, in this instance, Scots is just a bit further down the road of simplification.

 

I gied him the ticket.(Nan)’

 

(Actually, I’m not convinced that urban Scots would say ‘I’ve gied it.’ I think they would be more likely to say ‘I’ve gave it’. But that’s BTW.)

 

 

 

Now one of the mantras of the recent Scots promoters has been that no form of Scots is ‘bad’ or ‘good’ - the urban dialects are just as ‘good’ as the more traditional country ones. But here, Robinson is representing the ‘simplification’ of urban Scots dialects - ie, the loss of forms like ‘I pat it’ an ‘I’m gien it’ and the adoption of ones like ‘I’ve pit’, ‘I taen’, ‘I seen it’, ‘I done it’, ‘I’ve took it’ as ‘simplifications’, ‘easier’ (and thank goodness for that), and ‘further down the road’ (ie, more advanced.) The implications are obvious. All are equal, but some are more equal. Insofar as Shetland dialect may be regarded as a dialect of Scots it is, under this view, a primitive one - more difficult, less simplified, less far down the road - than the more advanced dialects of the mainland cities, which she and her Edinburgh friends find so useful in representing the degradation of urban life, and in extolling the virtues of the likes of Sir Irvine of that Ilk and St Thomas de Leonard.

 

Now, it may be of course that this is what some of the more anti-order and anti-formal proponents of dialect in Shetland want (I don’t think SFW do - I just think they haven’t realised the implications.) A general category of ‘dialect’ which is useful for putting up two fingers at anything formal or educational. I don’t know. Certainly it’s the opposite of what I used to consider was meant by the promotion of the Shetland tongue and is completely at odds with the approach taken to traditional Shetland in Grammar and Usage of the Shetland Dialect, or on my former website. From my point of view - which is not, of course, general - the influence of the Central Scots literati on Shetland can only be pernicious.

 

However, it may be that some youngsters are speaking something like this already, and perhaps this may be the answer to Drew Ratter’s question about the Shetland novel. Perhaps dialect simplification and urban deprivation in Lerwick are already producing a situation and an advanced enough medium to produce the definitive Shetland novel. Pity that it’ll be at least twenty years behind literary fashion.

 

I think this also illustrates the problem with the merely tolerant, largely passive, liberal attitude towards ‘dialect’ in general, which simply accepts anything as legitimate variation (as long as it doesn’t impinge upon practical matters, of course.) Apart from the fact that, in the hands of the likes of Tom Morton, it can degenerate into a tone that I find simply patronising (‘it’s nice to hear the various dialects’) it’s just not enough to achieve anything other than perhaps what I’ve shown above. The promotion of the traditional Shetland dialect would have required a more assertive approach (including the abandonment of the term ‘dialect’ as a catch-all phrase.) But, as joenorth comments, the people of Shetland have never shown any interest in such an approach.

 

I do sometimes wonder if it would have made any difference if - perhaps even as recently as the dialect conference - a regular enough written form had been accepted to give the Tongue with no Name a focus - not to mention a name. But we will obviously never know.

[Dagfinn]

I also believe there is a Faroese man who is trying to re-create Shetland's old norn language. I think this is his website.

 

http://shetlandnorn.webs.com/wordlist.htm

 

Hi Kavi Ugl, that's my dear old Hildina-Webpage you're referring to; I spent so many hours creating that page, I've hated the Hildina-Ballad ever since

 

Here is a link to the most complete source about the Norn language, including a Norn (into Nynorn = New Norn) language revival project, with complete Nynorn Dictionary etc. :

http://nornlanguage.110mb.com/index.php?intro

I can positively confirm, that though my name is mentioned in the 'credit-section' as having assisted on the Suðuroy Dialect of Faroese and the Hildina Ballad, I am not behind that webpage. But as you can see, the people behind it are very competent.

 

I'm sure we're covering ground here that's been gone over several times in other threads, but the problem with 'resurrecting' Norn is that you would essentially have to reinvent the language. The fragments that have been recorded don't amount to anything like a full language, just a pretty small pile of words and, as far as I'm aware, the translations and pronunciations of some of those words are essentially just guesses. It's not like some other 'dead' languages that can be relearned. The language has gone. That's not to say that it's not worth teaching kids about Norn, of course; it's definitely worth teaching them about their heritage. But there's no way of bringing it back, without just using Faroese or something as a template, then adding in the few Norn words we have. Which wouldn't be very authentic or worthwhile I don't think.

As you can see on this link Malachy, the Nynorn language can even give explanation about Logarithms etc. http://nornlanguage.110mb.com/index.php?nynorn_txt

Place your cursor on 'see more' and a word list will pop up showing neologism etc.

 

And even Nynorn Dialects http://nornlanguage.110mb.com/index.php?nynorn_dial

 

But as I said, much cleverer people than me are behind that webpage

[Kavi Ugl]

Hi Dagfinn, thanks for posting the new website

 

It is most interesting and I hope many more Shetlanders will take an interest in it.

 

This research and website is what we(the Shetland people) should have spent some of our oil money on.....

 

I believe it would be possible to take what material we have and re-create an/the old norn language for Shetland....

 

[upmakk]

To me, however, it seems very odd to be encouraging children in Shetland to speak a dialect of a language which exists only for Edinburgh writers to express the diarrhoea of the Central Scots urban underbelly.

 

With respect (and I do mean that!), this looks to me like an example of the 'subordination fallacy' I was writing about earlier. Even if one Scots dialect is used `to express the diarrhoea of the Central Scots urban underbelly', there's no reason why others should be obliged to follow suit. Encouraging young Shetlanders to speak dialect neither does nor should in any way limit the uses they may put it to or the ways in which they may choose to develop it for themselves.

[DePooperit]

To me, however, it seems very odd to be encouraging children in Shetland to speak a dialect of a language which exists only for Edinburgh writers to express the diarrhoea of the Central Scots urban underbelly.

 

With respect (and I do mean that!), this looks to me like an example of the 'subordination fallacy' I was writing about earlier. Even if one Scots dialect is used `to express the diarrhoea of the Central Scots urban underbelly', there's no reason why others should be obliged to follow suit. Encouraging young Shetlanders to speak dialect neither does nor should in any way limit the uses they may put it to or the ways in which they may choose to develop it for themselves.

 

Of course it doesn't! This is what I mean when I say that ShetlandForWirds doesn't realise the implications. If it were the case that Shetlanders were developing their own dialect independently of Scottish influence it wouldn't matter. But, as my experiences show, they're not. I'm not supposed to even criticise them, and as I say, a course in the UHI (which I had a hand in setting up) which was supposed to emphasise the language of the Highlands and Islands ends up having a book on urban dialects as one of its set texts.

 

I completely accept your explanation of a subordination fallacy inasfar (is that a word?) as it relates to classification. There is no logical reason why one dialect shouldn't be used for one purpose and another for another. But there are other factors operating here.

 

The first is that that those who favour what I think of as the Edinburgh Approach, such as Robertson, don't say that they turn to 'urban dialects' or such to express disreputability. Robertson explicitely uses the term 'Scots' to refer to the thing he regards as being disreputable. This leads to a predisposition to regard the whole thing - not just parts of it - as disreputable. In fact, because they use the word 'Scots' to refer to the urban dialects, and Shetland uses the word 'dialect' to refer to its traditional dialect, the impression is easily gained that urban Scots is the main stem and Shetland a branch. The top-level terminology has been adopted by Edinburgh - Shetland is at one of the lower levels.

 

The second is that these writers are mostly, if not all, either not Scots speakers at all, or speakers of urban dialects. Therefore in adopting their influence we are adopting a view which is certainly external to Shetland, and to some extent external to any kind of Scots. On one occasion, in Lallans magazine, someone wrote a review where she criticised the traditional use of singular verbs with plural nouns (as in 'this cups is chippit') in spite of the fact that it is recorded throughout the history of Scots up to the present, and was being used by a real Scots-speaking writer. The editor told me not to be too hard on her as she was just a young lassie. In a couple of years, she was an 'expert.' Needless to say, the same writers would have no trouble with recent urban constructions like 'I've gave' or such. A book called the Grammar Broonie said that Shetland 'dee' was an emphatic form of 'du' (as in 'Whit tinks dee?' presumably) and to 'use ae for emphasis' (as in 'I'm no wantin yun ene - I'm wantin da idder ae.') Experts, you see.

 

Thirdly, these writers make it clear that the urban dialects are on an equal level with the more traditional ones. If the traditional dialects are on an equal level with ones which exist to express disreputability, where does that leave them?

 

Fourthly, as I've illustrated, many of these writers actually prefer the urban dialects - Robinson's treatment certainly implies that they are 'easier' and 'further down the road' of simplification, which must imply that traditional Shetland dialect is backward.

 

Fifthly - and this is the most controversial point - the 'anything goes' attitude of these writers, which is basically that anything that differs from standard English is 'Scots', is (ostensibly) implacably opposed to any kind of formalisation of spelling or grammar. The reason this is controversial is, of course, because most Shetlanders would agree with them rather than with me. As I have said before, with only standard English for a reference point, the movement can only be in one direction.

 

However, after they've systematically rubbished anything produced by purists and prescriptionists such as myself, they don't hesitate to produce their own - like the Grammar Broonie above. Robinson also says in her book, ' ‘Much work has been done, and continues to be done, with a view to raising Scots once more to the status of a national language, to rationalise its spelling, to extend its vocabulary into every area of discourse, to have it taught in schools and used by the media.' But when I met her at a UHI meeting, spelling was 'irrelevant' and my own efforts in that direction were made the object of derision in conversation in the bar.

 

The overall effect, then, is to limit efforts in Shetland dialect promotion to what you can do without bringing the derision of the Edinburgh literati down on your head. But these efforts are probably all that Shetland society would tolerate anyway. If there were a real interest in promoting the native tongue in Shetland, the situation would not have arisen in the first place.

[DePooperit]

A poststructural approach to the issues, anyone...?

 

Please expostulate - I mean, expositionate... ...Ach, can du no tell wis whit du's spaekin aboot?

[deardron]

the same can be said about shetland lets forget about the viking culture lets recreate the pictish one. after all they had a longer history.

Are you so sure? We know so little about Picts, who they were and whether all the pre-viking poplation of Shetland should be identified as Picts...

 

2. Although we now think of Norn as having been a 'language' this is largely retrospective mythology. At the time, I seem to remember, it was referred to by at least one observer as 'corrupt Norse'

That's a totally wrong point IMHO. Your colleague must have mislead you a bit. Yes, Norn is a corrupted version of Old Norse as well as Old Norse is a corrupted version of Proto-Germanic or French of Latin and all of them overcorrupted versions of Proto-Indo-European. However, it doesn't mean Norn and Old Norse were the same language. Phonetically they differed quite a bit: Norn lost ON þ,ð in favour of t,d, all diphtongs were eliminated along with various vowel shifts, long ll and nn either became palatal or affricated (dl,dn) and so on. So Norn was no "more" ON than some of today's Norwegian dialects with similar phonetic evolution.

 

There are some non-Scots oddities, such as the formation of the perfect tense with 'be' (I IM been at da shop, he WIS been at da shop, where Scots would be 'I hiv been' an 'he haed been') <...> but it's not obvious that these come from Norn.

I have the same doubt too, although many people do believe in it. The problem is that the perfect tense was at its early stage of development in Old Norse and seems to have mostly been formed with the verb 'to have' (hafa). I suppose the Shetlandic (and Orcadian) use of the verb 'to be' in perfect could have been influenced by German/Dutch (possibly through Danish) where they say ich bin gekommen 'I am come' instead of 'I have come'. Otherwise it could be an independent development within Scots.

[deardron]

I tink its slightly inaccurate ti say dat dirs nae young folk in shetland dat spik in dialect onymare, I wis born in 1990 un i still spik da wy alder folk in whalsa spik, granted its likly a bit watered doon.

Nice to hear it my friend!

It does happen sometimes when people disregard their little local tongue and then some of their grand- and greatgrandchildren wake up and rush into saving or reviving whatever still can be saved. This happened to Cornish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic has been just few steps from that too. Which should make today's grandpa's think, attitudes do change..

 

As there is between Shetland and Norn - if, as you imply, there are at least occasional remnants of grammar and sound system, as well as vocabulary.

Rather than a line of continuity, there was a break.

Not a clean break, if even a few traces remain.

Bearing in mind Norn and Scots co-existed in Shetland for 3-4 centuries they would hardly avoid mutual interference, being both Germanic languages with compatible grammatical and lexical background. Such a symbiosis is called 'linguistic union', when languages of different origin are approaching each other, especially in phonetics, syntax and vocabulary (the most famous example of that being the Balcan union). Scots acquired a lot of words from Norn, its intonation, utterance, local expressions, some pronouns, particles etc. Norn received its share of borrowings, simplified its grammar in tact with Scots or directly picked up some of it. For example, in addition to the Scandinavian suffigated article the late Norn speakers added the one from Scots: de edn-in 'the eagle-the' < ON. Ç«rn-inn, de bjadn-i 'the bairn-the' < barn-it. Or what will you say about the following phrase:

 

Norn (Foula) mader to de bjadni = Eng./Sc. 'food to the bairn' + ON matr til barnsins, Faroese matur til barni(ð)

 

Is it Scots? is it Norn? Well, in fact it's a 50-50 mixture of BOTH!!

It's not to be denied that Norn died out before it merged completely with Scots, because the last speakers of Norn still distinguished it from that. On the other hand the interference between the latest form of Norn and Scots seems to have been so high that the switch from Norn to Scots must have been growing less and less 'grainy' for the last Norn speakers.

 

"quit tinchs doo a yun enn?" commonly used question n terminology + sentence structure which is common place in Delting (amongst Shetland natives) which is Norn sentence structure as opposed to scots. "quaar comes doo fae?" "quitna een is yun?"

Yes, there's some Norn influences, mainly the pronunciation of the words quaar and quitna. Kvar(na) kemer (komer) doo fro, a Norn speaker would have said in the second case. The last sentence has a Scots structure and words except quitna < hvat, kvat. The particle -na is of Norse origin too, which spread out in Norn more than in other Nordic languages (although I don't know, may be it existed in Scots as well?).

 

quit tinchs doo a yun enn? - apart from quit, the ending in tinchs has a Norn background, although its sounding is English. Another thing that is purely English/Scottish is the use of 'een/enn' in the above examples.

 

DePooperit is right, structurally all this still is Scots, although traces of Norn are everywhere to be seen. Hope my short overview above has given you some insight.

 

.........

 

There's so many more posts to look through, but that's for the next time

[DePooperit]

2. Although we now think of Norn as having been a 'language' this is largely retrospective mythology. At the time, I seem to remember, it was referred to by at least one observer as 'corrupt Norse'

That's a totally wrong point IMHO. Your colleague must have mislead you a bit. Yes, Norn is a corrupted version of Old Norse as well as Old Norse is a corrupted version of Proto-Germanic or French of Latin and all of them overcorrupted versions of Proto-Indo-European. However, it doesn't mean Norn and Old Norse were the same language. Phonetically they differed quite a bit: Norn lost ON þ,ð in favour of t,d, all diphtongs were eliminated along with various vowel shifts, long ll and nn either became palatal or affricated (dl,dn) and so on. So Norn was no "more" ON than some of today's Norwegian dialects with similar phonetic evolution.

 

 

I don't really follow here. I don't see how anything I said implied that 'Norn and Old Norse were the same language.' I'm aware that Norn differed from Old Norse. Whether this is interpreted as making Norn a different language or a 'corruption' of Old Norse is really a matter of interpretation and attitude, and not dependent on linguistic details.

 

The point I am making here is that, although we now think of Norn as having been a 'language' in its own right, that doesn't mean that the people who spoke it, and still less the Scots who observed it, regarded it as such. It wasn't a colleague who regarded it as 'corrupt Norse' it was (if my memory serves me correctly) a Scottish incomer at the time. In other words, the instinct of Scottish observers at the time was to emphasise the idea of it being 'corrupt' as compared to something else - a negative view - just as some do today about the Shetland dialects. It's more than probable that Shetlanders came to regard it in the same way, which is part of the reason it died out. So, although in retrospect we regard it as a 'language', with positive connotations, that is not necessarily how it was seen at the time. It's quite likely that the attitudes of Shetlanders towards Norn at that time were much the same as they are now towards the current/recent Shetland tongue - ie, predominantly either negative or apathetic.

 

 

There are some non-Scots oddities, such as the formation of the perfect tense with 'be' (I IM been at da shop, he WIS been at da shop, where Scots would be 'I hiv been' an 'he haed been') <...> but it's not obvious that these come from Norn.

I have the same doubt too, although many people do believe in it. The problem is that the perfect tense was at its early stage of development in Old Norse and seems to have mostly been formed with the verb 'to have' (hafa). I suppose the Shetlandic (and Orcadian) use of the verb 'to be' in perfect could have been influenced by German/Dutch (possibly through Danish) where they say ich bin gekommen 'I am come' instead of 'I have come'. Otherwise it could be an independent development within Scots.

 

Yes, it's one of those oddities that's difficult to pin down to any exact origin. It's particularly odd when you consider that both Norse and Scots used mainly 'have/hafa' - which you would have thought would have reinforced it in the modern Shetland dialects.

 

Another possibility - though of course just a conjecture - is that it might have developed in Norn independently of other forms of Norse. Are there any fragments which include perfect tenses?

[deardron]

I don't really follow here. I don't see how anything I said implied that 'Norn and Old Norse were the same language.' I'm aware that Norn differed from Old Norse. Whether this is interpreted as making Norn a different language or a 'corruption' of Old Norse is really a matter of interpretation and attitude, and not dependent on linguistic details.

 

The point I am making here is that, although we now think of Norn as having been a 'language' in its own right, that doesn't mean that the people who spoke it, and still less the Scots who observed it, regarded it as such.

OK, I probably misunderstood what you wrote in that post, I thought you meant that Norn wasn't a language on its own (in today's terms), but just a "misspelled" version of Old Norse ("Danish", "Gothic", "Norwegian" as they used to call it 300-400 years ago). A form of speech is either a language or a dialect of a language, that's what I meant.

 

Yes, it's one of those oddities that's difficult to pin down to any exact origin. It's particularly odd when you consider that both Norse and Scots used mainly 'have/hafa' - which you would have thought would have reinforced it in the modern Shetland dialects.

 

Another possibility - though of course just a conjecture - is that it might have developed in Norn independently of other forms of Norse. Are there any fragments which include perfect tenses?

Yes, there's many fragments, and I think both hafa and vera ('to be') were used, but hafa was much more common. I'm not an expert on that subject, I only can assure that 'to be' was far from being as largely used as in Shetlandic. But I will check it up when I get a chance.

[DePooperit]

 

"quit tinchs doo a yun enn?" commonly used question n terminology + sentence structure which is common place in Delting (amongst Shetland natives) which is Norn sentence structure as opposed to scots. "quaar comes doo fae?" "quitna een is yun?"

Yes, there's some Norn influences, mainly the pronunciation of the words quaar and quitna. Kvar(na) kemer (komer) doo fro, a Norn speaker would have said in the second case.

 

 

That's right - I missed that. The regional difference between 'wh' and 'qu' in Shetland (where some people would say 'whit wheen' and others 'quit queen') is a Norse characteristic.

 

 

The last sentence has a Scots structure and words except quitna < hvat, kvat. The particle -na is of Norse origin too, which spread out in Norn more than in other Nordic languages (although I don't know, may be it existed in Scots as well?).

 

Can you elaborate about the -na particle?

 

This, however, isn't a -na particle. It is 'whittan a' - that is, the Scots form 'whattan', which may originally have meant 'what kind of' but now often means more or less 'which?', followed by an enclitic indefinite article 'a'. In the plural, only 'whitten' is traditionally used: 'Whitten fock is yun.'

 

 

quit tinchs doo a yun enn? - apart from quit, the ending in tinchs has a Norn background, although its sounding is English. Another thing that is purely English/Scottish is the use of 'een/enn' in the above examples.

 

 

Can you elaborate about why the ending in 'tinks' (eng: thinks) has a Norn background? I would have thought that the Norn ending would have been in -r, as in Faroese?

 

On the other hand, older Scots used the third person of the verb with the 'thou' (pronounced 'thoo') form, where English normally had a form ending in -st. So 'walk furth, pilgrim, while thou has dayis licht' (Dunbar) where English would have had 'hast'; '"Allace' quod he, 'thou sees how it does stand'" (Lyndsay) where English would have had 'seest', etc. This had died out by the time of Burns, where the 'thou' form had probably already passed from common use, and the English forms were used in writing.

 

So I'm afraid I can't see what about the ending of 'tinks' has a Norn background. To me, it reads exactly like older Scots.

[joenorth]

A poststructural approach to the issues, anyone...?

 

Please expostulate - I mean, expositionate... ...Ach, can du no tell wis whit du's spaekin aboot?

 

Just a limp attempt on my part to associate these issues with the traditional disdain for standpoints expressed by some of the thinkers who are labelled "postmodernist/poststructuralist" (but perhaps a slightly more serious attempt to view this discussion through the lens of poststructural approaches in contemporary cultural studies). These have real value, I think, in considering the component phenomena of any culture, including our language. Funny though, I'm often asked what the bl**dy h*ll I'm speaking about! What can this mean...?

[deardron]

Can you elaborate about the -na particle?

 

This, however, isn't a -na particle. It is 'whittan a' - that is, the Scots form 'whattan', which may originally have meant 'what kind of' but now often means more or less 'which?', followed by an enclitic indefinite article 'a'. In the plural, only 'whitten' is traditionally used: 'Whitten fock is yun.'

That's namely what I wanted to hear, whether there was anything similar in Scots.

 

About the Norse -na: in (Old) Icelandic it has a very vague meaning, being often used with hér 'here' and þar 'there': hérna 'right here', þarna 'right there'. When I saw the norn phrase kvarna farna 'where are you going' I considered kvar-na to be of the same structure as ON þar-na, as both words often undergo parallel changes. From kvarna 'where' it cold have gotten into hvatna/quitna 'what'.

However, that Scottish whittan can also be an option, I need to consider it too.

 

Can you elaborate about why the ending in 'tinks' (eng: thinks) has a Norn background? I would have thought that the Norn ending would have been in -r, as in Faroese?

Yes, but I meant that the influence was rather morphological, whereas the ending phonetically stayed as in Scots. In Faroese, as well as in Old Norse there is the same ending for 2. and 3. sg: tú kemur 'you come', hann kemur 'he comes'. As this rule must have existed in Norn, this pattern could well have been borrowed into Shetland Scots, i.e. 2. and 3. sg. would get the same ending.

So I'm afraid I can't see what about the ending of 'tinks' has a Norn background. To me, it reads exactly like older Scots.

But the rest of Scots has lost it, hasn't it? While in Shetland it could have stayed due to the influence of the Norse pattern.

 

Just to show a close example from the real life. There's a typical mistake Danes, Norwegians and Swedes often do when they're speaking English. In their languages past was and were do not differ and are translated as var. So in their English you often encounter we was, you was, they was. They use a correct English form, but do it according to their native pattern ignoring were as if it didn't exist.

[DePooperit]

A poststructural approach to the issues, anyone...?

 

Please expostulate - I mean, expositionate... ...Ach, can du no tell wis whit du's spaekin aboot?

 

Just a limp attempt on my part to associate these issues with the traditional disdain for standpoints expressed by some of the thinkers who are labelled "postmodernist/poststructuralist" (but perhaps a slightly more serious attempt to view this discussion through the lens of poststructural approaches in contemporary cultural studies). These have real value, I think, in considering the component phenomena of any culture, including our language. Funny though, I'm often asked what the bl**dy h*ll I'm speaking about! What can this mean...?

 

Odd - a lot of swear sords cropped up in the quote that aren't in the original post...

 

Well, my first reaction is - go ahead then!

 

Actually, I think postmodernism is on the way out. But aren't we already in a postmodern situation as regards the Shetland tongue? That is, the idea of 'variety' and the opposition to any sort of formalisation?

 

I have this theory that minority language has suffered in all eras:

 

Pre-Modernist - no consideration given to minority language or any other sort of minority rights for that matter - basic idea of 'Devil take the hindmost'.

 

Modernist - Standard English seen as the way to advancement and minority language as a drawback to be eradicated if possible.

 

Postmodernist - everything is equal but some are more equal than others. In other words, lip service is payed to variety, but in practice the dominance of a single variety is not challenged.

 

In general, I would say that the postmodernist attitude in academia severed the link between theory and practicality, with the result that bureaucracy stepped in. Example: postmodern derision of teaching kids to spell. Result: complaints from employers. Consequence: bureaucratic measures such as school league tables and other hoop-jumping measures.