Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 364

362
| 375And at wedding feasts it often happens
that men are tipsy — | and some drink rather a lot —, | but the wedding dance
— | people made sure that nobody was allowed to enter the ring if it was obvious
that he had been drinking spirits. | No, it was as decent as being at church. [ 380But
then it was said, | that it was a sin to dance the wedding dance. | Yes, that was
said. | A parson came here; it was about — | about ten or fifteen years ago. [
385I went south to Havn to meet him, | and tried to set him right, — | and then
he was here some time, and | I used to visit him now and then. And once I said,
“Now you think you have | settled down and got things straight, but there is still
one thing | 390left for you to learn”. | And this was shortly before my son was
to be married, | and it is an old custom that the parsons dance the wedding
dance
DISCUSSION
Gösta Holm: (1) Presumably there has never been a develop-
ment þœt>há ‘it’ in the northern Swedish dialects. The process
may have been as follows: unstressed þœt (after a consonant)
> ðteð>á (which is very common in the dialects). There was
a gender triad han~an ‘he’, hon~on ‘she’, and á ‘it’; this
resulted in the form há ‘it’.
(2) It seems very likely that the Faroese variation t~d in
pronouns is old and the same, in principle, as the Icelandic
variation þ~ ð and also, to some extent, the same as the
Swedish dialectal variation t~d (in Uppland and Finland
there are instances of tá ‘dá, then’, tár ‘dár, there’, and so on).
Accordingly, Old Faroese might have had a variation
between stressed þ and unstressed ð, which has now been
replaced by t~d. That there is no evidence of this in the
works of Svabo does not refute the theory.
Ulf Zachariasen: In addition to certain demonstrative pro-
nouns and adverbs, we find the change þ>h in some place-
names with a personal name as first component, e.g. Hórðarenni,
Hórisgota, Hósmd, Hósvík, and in the word hósdagur (beside
tórsdagur) ‘Thursday’. The development þ> (ð>) d, which
historically can be compared with the Icelandic change þ > ð