Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1964, Blaðsíða 27

Dialect Research in Orkney and Shetland after Jakobsen 35
. . It was of special importance to get the rarer words
brought out«. And so on.
The first point, then, which must be urged is that contem*
porary work in Orkney and Shetland aims not at anti*
quarianism or even collection, but at description of an »etat
de langue« deemed to exist sufficiently statically to allow
synchronic observation for its own sake and at a given
point of time. The need for such observation was apparent
in Jakobsen’s time. He spoke, for instance, of »en temmelig
lang overgangstilstand, i hvilken báde det gamle og det nye
var omtrent ligelig repræsenteret, det nye dog . . . især ved
de almindeligste og i daglig tale oftest brugte ord og der*
for givende sproget mere og mere karakteren af en lav«
skotsk dialekt«. Clearly, a collection on the scale of Jakob«
sen’s cannot now be undertaken. It was, to use a phrase
of Andre Martinet’s, one of the historical articulations of
linguistics and is now completed, once for all time. What
contemporary linguists must set out to be is not »anti*
quarians looking for rare survivals [but] . . . interested in
characterising as a whole the form of speech they are faced
with«.* 2) They are faced, at this moment, with a form of
speech in Orkney and Shetland which has suffered much
of the anglicisation predicted for it by Jakobsen as far back
as 1897 in his »Norrøne Sprog«. And outside of the dia«
lects altogether, they are faced with new methods in agri*
culture, in public communication, and widespread standar*
disation in fishing methods and boat types. In these cir=
cumstances modern linguists continue, indeed, to be intere^
sted in survivals, but in a significantly different way. They
are interested chiefly in the way in which these have
entered into the structure of the observed language and
their function in it. Builtdn prejudices nowadays tend to
be intradinguistic rather than extradinguistic.
') »Nordiske Minder, især sproglige, pá Orknøerne« Svenska Landsmil
1911 p. 329.
2) Andre Martinet »Dialect« Romance Linquistics, vol. 8, p. 2.