Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2004, Page 72

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Michael Barnes
“rude Danish”, and much else besides. It is with these reservations,
and the particular context, in mind that the above quotation should
be read. The High Commissioner emphasises knowledge of
“Hollands” to put across a particular point: that the Shetlanders have
great affection for the Dutch and cannot therefore be relied on to
support the King’s forces in any encounter. What he actually says is
that because Shetlanders traded regularly with people from Holland
and North Germany, they all learnt Dutch and Scandinavian from a
very young age — a proposition that makes little sense. The reality
was probably that many Shetlanders had picked up enough Dutch
and Low German to get by, and that they also knew some form of
Scandinavian.
Whether the “Norse” the Shetlanders are credited with was the
native Nom, some form of basic Norwegian or a mixture of both, is
hard to say. It has generally been assumed that references to the
“Norse” or “Norwegian” spoken in the Northern Isles must always be
to the local Scandinavian idiom. But that is not necessarily so. When
dealing with Norwegian traders and seamen, Norn-speaking
Orcadians and Shetlanders would probably at the very least have had
to modify their local dialect; and by the 1600s there were clearly some
who had no Nom at all and must thus have learnt such Norwegian as
they required from their dealings with Norwegians. That is the situa-
tion which seems to be implied by an early eighteenth-century re-
porter on Shetland affairs (Martin 1716:383—4; reference again sup-
plied by Brian Smith). He notes:
They [the inhabitants] generally speak the English Tongue, and many
among them retain the antient Danish language, especially in the more
Northem Isles. There are several who speak English, Norse and Dutch\
the last of which is acquir’d by their converse with the Hollanders, that
fish yearly in those Isles.
It is unlikely that Martin was ever in Shetland, so his information is
very much second-hand. Nevertheless, he seems to be contrasting use
of “antient Danish” with the ability to speak “Norse”. Unfortunately
he omits to tell us how the Norse was acquired — a circumstance that