Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2004, Síða 60

58
Michael Barnes
In the 1586 diploma from Shetland there are also traces of Scots influ-
ence on vocabulary and syntax:
(6) <cont> ‘count, reckoning’
<minister> ‘minister’
<insigle aff theris egitt> ‘seals of their own’
The scribe who wrote the 1369 diploma from Orkney employs forms
suggestive of apocope and metathesis and shows a woeful ignorance
of the Old West Norse inflexional system. (For more detailed exem-
plification and analysis of possible Northern-Isles features in
medieval diplomas, see Barnes 1998:13-15.)
Some of the unusual features these documents reveal can be paral-
leled in contemporary Norwegian writing — or in Swedish and
Danish, both of which influenced Norwegian written tradition in the
late Middle Ages. Some are explicable as orthographical errors: it is
easy to imagine a scribe writing <ustan> for austan or <son> for som.
But these are not isolated occurrences: they find support both in relat-
ed spellings in contemporary Northern-Isles documents and in records
of spoken Norn. The initial presumption must therefore be that they
reflect the spoken vernacular of Orkney and Shetland. However, the
fact that features suggestive of local speech occur so infrequently indi-
cates that those who wrote in Scandinavian in the Northern Isles fol-
lowed the patterns of a well-established written tradition. By and large
it is the changing written idiom of Norway the documents reflect, not
the changing speech of the islanders. Thus the fifteenth- and six-
teenth-century material implies a gradual Danicising of the language
and a complete breakdown of the Old Norse inflexional system. But
that does not square with the records of spoken Norn that have come
down to us — to which we will now turn.
3.4 Records of spoken Norn
For knowledge of the spoken Scandinavian of Orkney and Shetland
we rely chiefly on data collected or published in the eighteenth centu-
ry, by which time the language (or perhaps more properly group of