Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2004, Page 58

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Michael Barnes
<mvla> for mola ‘crumb’ could have their origin in local pronunciation
(cf. Marwick 1929:xli), but it is by no means certain. Scaldic verse may
have been govemed in part by its own linguistic norms. These particu-
lar examples were in any case composed too soon after the settlement
period and preserved too far ffom Orkney for there to be a realistic
hope they could throw significant light on the history of Nom.
3.3 Documents in the roman alphabet
Documents in the roman alphabet are only a little more revealing. If
the corpus is limited to those diplomas that either give an Orkney or
Shetland locality as their place of origin or whose Northern-Isles
provenance can be inferred from the contents, we have no more than
four from Orkney and eleven firom Shetland. Possibly the net should
be cast wider and all diplomas with an Orkney or Shetland connection
included, not least because we seldom get an indication of the identi-
ty of the scribe and certainly none of where he learnt to write — irre-
spective of where the actual writing took place. It is in fact likely that
most scribes active in Orkney and Shetland were trained in Norway (or
in some cases Sweden or Denmark); there is no evidence of schools in
Shetland prior to c. 1611 and in Orkney only the Kirkwall Grammar
School appears to go back to the medieval period. Against this uncer-
tain background, however, the most obvious hunting ground for local
linguistic features — if we are to find any at all — would seem to be
in documents written in the Northern Isles.
The four Orkney diplomas span a period of about 100 years, the
eleven from Shetland almost 300. They are as follows (published in
DN unless otherwise stated and identified by their DN number):
(4) a. Orkney diplomas: II 168 (1329), 11 170(1329), 1404 (1369), II
691 (c. 1425)
b. Shetland diplomas: I 89 (1299), I 109 (1307), I 340 (1355), III
284 (1355), III 310 (1360), II 797 (1452), II 859 (1465), VI 651
(1509), Goudie 1904:81-2 (1545), copy of 1431 document
from Kaldbak (c. 1550), OSR 74 (1586)