Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2004, Page 68

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Michael Barnes
development in one of the 1355 Shetland diplomas (DN III 284),
where í hjá is written <i þia>, conceivably an inverse spelling, and a
somewhat firmer indication in Low’s 1774 Foula material, e.g. <ita>
(< *hitta <þettd). The occurrence of several Orkney place-names with
original first element Þór-, late sixteenth-century <Hur->, <Hor->,
now <Hur->, <Hour-> ‘[the god] Þórr’, not only supports the idea that
Foula forms such as <ita> are derived from etymons with initial þ- that
changed to *h-, but implies that the change /0/ > /h/ was common in
Norn and affected much the same words as in Faroese, i.e. certain pro-
nouns and adverbs, and names with Þór- as the first element (on this
change in Faroese see e.g. Barnes 1985; Höskuldur Thráinsson et al.
2004:400 and references cited there).
4. The life and death of Norn
As will be clear from what has already been said, there are today no
speakers of Norn. At some point the language was replaced by Scots
in both Orkney and Shetland. Why this happened, how, and when,
have been and remain matters of lively and sometimes acrimonious
debate (cf. Rendboe 1984; Barnes 1989, 1998:21-8; Smith 1996;
Wiggen 2002).
The dominance Scandinavian attained in the Northem Isles fol-
lowing the Norse settlement persisted until the late Middle Ages when
first Orkney and then Shetland began to come under the control of
speakers of Scots. There was doubtless a variety of reasons for the
increasing Scottish involvement in Northern-Isles affairs in the four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries, including the strengthening of royal
power at the expense of that of local potentates, but the overriding
cause must have been geographical proximity. Who had Scandinavian
as their principal language and who Scots in late medieval and early
Reformation Orkney and Shetland can often be no more than a matter
of conjecture, but the changing relationship between the two speech
communities emerges clearly enough. There is little doubt, for exam-
ple, that Henry Sinclair, who succeeded to the Earldom of Orkney in
1379, was primarily a Scots speaker. Although a grandson of Earl