Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2004, Page 56

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Michael Barnes
adjective norrœnn or noun norrœna, and to begin with it seems sim-
ply to have denoted West Scandinavian of any kind. That, at least, is
the strong implication of the first recorded occurrence. Appended to a
Norwegian document dealing with a Shetland matter issued in Bergen
on 8 August 1485 is an apparently contemporary endorsement in
Scots, which begins: “This lettir in Nornn ...” (OSR 33). Some sixty
years later Donald Monro, “High Dean of the Isles”, uses the phrase
in norn leid ‘in Norse language’ in the course of a brief discussion of
the etymology of the island-name Jura (< Dýrey; Munro 1961:50). In
the succeeding centuries we find “Nom” increasingly applied to the
Scandinavian speech of Orkney and Shetland (though it competes
with various other terms). Modern scholars have sought to expand the
sense to include the Scandinavian at one time spoken in the Hebrides
(“Sudroy-nom”, cf. Christiansen 1938) and in north-eastern Caithness
(Thorsen 1954). These efforts notwithstanding, “Norn” is now almost
exclusively used in the Northern-Isles context. Terminological confu-
sion has not been banished, however. To some Nom means any
Scandinavian-language material emanating ffom Orkney or Shetland,
including Viking-Age runic inscriptions and medieval documents; to
others it is the spoken Scandinavian of the Northern Isles after the
local idiom had become recognisably different from the Old Norse
parent language. Most confusingly, “Norn” has also been applied to
modern Shetland dialect (e.g. Sandison 1953). In the following the
term will be used to mean “the distinctive form of Scandinavian
speech that developed in the Northern Isles”.
3. Sources for Orkney and Shetland Scandinavian
With the above in mind we may return to the question of the source
material for Orkney and Shetland Scandinavian. Broadly speaking our
sources can be divided into six categories:
(3) a. runic inscriptions
b. words and forms preserved in scaldic verse
c. documents written in the roman alphabet