Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2008, Qupperneq 102

100
THE BORROWING SCALE AND DANISH IN FAROESE
and Danish nouns, verbs, adjectives and ad-
verbs are found in the speech of two in-
formants in the K8 Corpus.
I have included the figure in order to give
an impression of the Danish influence on
colloquial spoken Faroese. It is only based on
two informants, one woman of the older
generation and one boy from the younger
generation. Future research on the topic will
hopefully provide more solid evidence and
show whether any significant differences
exist between the generations. As for now, it
seems that the older speaker uses a larger
number of Danish loans, though this result
should be taken with caution, as I have men-
tioned above. Note that the copula is not in-
cluded in the table, nor are any modal or
auxiliary verbs.
5. Prepositions and circumpositions
According to Thomason & Kaufman
(1988:74), we should expect to find adposi-
tions at Stage 3. The following prepositions
are borrowed from Danish into Faroese:
bak 'behind' < Dan. bag 'behind', (Far.
ajtanfyri 'behind’ + acc.),/orb/"past’ < Dan.
jorbi 'past' (Far. jramvið 'past' + dat.),
joruttan 'without' < Dan.joruden 'besides'
(Far. umjramt + acc. 'besides'), íblant 'among'
< Dan. iblandt 'among' (Far. ímillum + acc.
'among'), óansceð 'in spite of' < Dan. uanset
'in spite of' (Far. hóast, sjálvt um 'in spite of,
regardless of'), tross 'in spite of' < Dan. trods
'in spite of' (Far. hóast + acc.) and pá 'on' <
Dan. pá 'on’ (Far. á 'on').
Note that joruttan, Dan. joruden 'in spite
of', is an example of congruent lexicalization
in lexical borrowings (Myusken 2000:150).
The head is Faroese -uttan 'without', the pre-
fix is Danish jor- 'for'. Foruttan 'in spite of' is
primarily found in the Ballad Language
(1400-1800), as are the examples with íblant
'among’. A typical example with joruttan is
seen, for example, in the Sjúrðarkvceði in
verse 187,joruttan ekka 'without fear-acc'.
The meaning in Faroese is 'without' and cor-
responds with the Faroese preposition uttan
'without' and not to the meaning of the
Danish preposition joruden 'besides'. I have
been able to find 96 occurrences of joruttan
+ DP in the Heroic Ballads. When compared
with the text corpora, we fmd that joruttan
'without' does not seem to exist in Modern
Faroese except in one example from the in-
ternet in the magazine Kvinna.fo 13/01/06,
accessed on April 4, 2008, in which I found
joruttan + DP. The preposition is listed as be-
longing to the Ballad Language in Føroysk
orðabók (1998), which corresponds with my
findings for colloquial Faroese. The preposi-
tion bak 'behind' is only found in collocates
as in Individið jørdi kollektivið bak Ijósið
www.kjak.fo/forum/viewtopic (accessed
April 4, 2008), in which bak Ijósið corre-
sponds with the Danish collocate bag lyset
Lit.: behind light-the = 'take somebody in’.
Other borrowed collocates are seen in pá
'on' and tross < trods as in Far. pá høgru hond
~ pá højre hánd Lit.: on right hand = 'to the
right' and tross alt 'in spite of all’ ~ Dan. trods
alt 'in spite of all'. As these two prepositions
do not have any free argument selection and
only occur in collocates, they cannot be con-
sidered to be real borrowed prepositions.
This is not the case with jorbí 'past’ < Dan.
jorbi 'past’, as observed in (2a) and (2b). I cite
them as they were written, including spelling
errors in ravuliga instead of rceðuliga (2a) and
gingi instead of plural gingu in (2b).