Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2004, Page 74

72
Michael Barnes
None of them can write their ancient language, and but very few speak it;
the best phrases are all gone, and nothing remains but a few names of
things and two or three remnants of songs which one old man can repeat,
and that but indistinctly.
While this confirms the general impression of a language already
defunct, it nevertheless makes the claim that a few could still speak it.
It is also hard to imagine that Low’s chief informant, William Henry,
could have retained thirty-five stanzas of a Norn ballad without hav-
ing at least some command of the ballad’s language. To be sure, Henry
was apparently only able to offer a paraphrase of the verses he recited
(Low 1879:113), but that need imply nothing more than an inability to
translate. Translation is a different facility from knowledge of lan-
guages.
In the light of the information at our disposal it is not easy to be
positive about the precise reasons for the demise of Nom, or the man-
ner in which it succumbed to Scots. David Crystal in a recent book
stresses the many possible causes of language death, but makes a fun-
damental distinction between “factors which put the people in physi-
cal danger” and “factors which change the people’s culture” (2000:70,
76). Clearly, Norn did not die because its speakers were put to the
sword, ethnically cleansed or catastrophically weakened by famine or
disease. But how far was their culture disturbed and reshaped? The
willingness of scholars to view the language shift in the Northern Isles
as symptomatic of a wider cultural change has depended very much
on the developing understanding of Orkney and Shetland history. In
the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century the prevailing opin-
ion was that a society of free, udal farmers had suffered grievous
oppression by the Scots, one of the tragic consequences of which was
the disappearance of Norn. More thorough and detailed study of the
sources has led to a reinterpretation (cf., e.g., Smith 1996; Thomson
2001:160-314). The catastrophist view has given way to one that sees
Orkney and Shetland as primarily run by locals, people of both Norse
and Scots descent. Some of them behaved tyrannically, others more
fairly, but behaviour was not determined by ethnic origin or language.