Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2008, Page 106

104
THE BORROWING SCALE AND DANISH IN FAROESE
duced along with the schools. Faroese re-
placed Danish as the official school language
in 1937.
One of my informants from the K8 Cor-
pus from Kalsoy reported that he knew a
man who could sing the Danish arithmetic
table. This and the general school require-
ment of memorizing the arithmetic table
seem to be the results of the introduction of
the Danish number system into Faroese. I
was only able to find two examples of Dan-
ish numbers in the Ballad Language (1400-
1800). Both are from Fugloyarbók (The book
from Fugloy), which was written by Hans
Hansen (1764-1854). As he uses the numeral
fimm og tjúgu '25' (Karlots kvæði, verse 80)
and the cardinal/ýrs '80' in fýrsinstjúgu '80'
(Hemildskvæði, verse 23,24), it might well be
the case that the Danish counting system
was introduced with the schools in the mid-
1800s. The Danish trade monopoly must
also have played a role.
10. Phonemes
Thomason and Kaufmann (1988) distinguish
between Lexicon and Structure, including
phonological and syntactic borrowings as
structural borrowing. This will be the focus
of the following two sections.
We should expect to find phomemiciza-
tion in Stage 3, i.e. phonemicization in the
native vocabulary of previous allophonic al-
ternation(s).
Faroese does not show any examples of
such phonemicizations, the new vowel
phonemes /a:/ and /y:/ being restricted to
loanwords as in statur /sta:htur/ 'state’ and
typa /ty:pa/ 'type'.
A phonotactic restriction may spread to
a sentence position where it did not occur
originally, as is the case in knowhow. It is the
second part of the compound that is of in-
terest to us.
The string -avn [avn] might be vocalized
to [aun] or [aun] in Faroese, as in the noun
havn 'harbor' to [haun] (or with an approx-
imant [haun], (Werner 1970)). This is the
only environment in which the diphthong
/au:/ is found originally, though it can now
also be used in borrowings such as knowhow
[-hauw]. The phoneme is also in other loan-
words such as aula 'meeting-hall'.
According to Thomason and Kaufman,
stress is preserved in loanwords in Stage 3.
This is confirmed by the Faroese data, where
loanwords exhibit the same stress patterns
as they do in Danish.
11. Syntactic changes
In this section I will briefly discuss some syn-
tactic changes in Faroese. Some are most
likely the result of language contact as in the
examples Impersonal Passive Constructions
(3), Double Object Constructions (4b), Em-
bedded V2 (5e), Ditransitive verbs to PP +
NP (8, 9) and perhaps also in existential sen-
tences in which an agreement exists be-
tween the expletive and the copula instead
ofafollowingplural DP, cf. (11); I will alsodis-
cuss cleft sentences (12a) and benefactive
constructions as seen in (14a). In addition,
we expect language contact to be responsi-
ble for the use of an indefinite pronoun in
Faroese as in (15a).2
There is a tendency in many linguistic
writings to sweepingly regard syntactic
changes as the results only of inner changes.
The main justification for this view is perhaps
that some researchers regard syntax as the