Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1964, Page 41

Postscript to The Faroese Bird Names
49
and reference to this shows that huplin is the only correct
form, the others being errors made at the printing stage.
The ms. entry is, quite exceptionally, rather different from
the printed version and seems to reproduce more faithfully
the AngloíManx idiom of the anonymous informant. The
relevant passage goes as follows: »The bird they’re calling
‘shag’ at Peel they’re callin ‘huplin’ at the Southside. Hup»
lins is bigger till cormorants, and in the breedin season
they’ve a white spot on their sides under their wings in the
shape of an egg . . .« We may ignore the confusion of the
terms shag and cormorant (the former is commonly used
indiscriminately for both species in the Isle of Man), but
the information on the name ‘huplin' is explicit enough:
the cormorant is meant, the shag does not have the telb
tale white patch.
Thus, from the Isle of Man, is a positive record of
precisely the same name as is found in Faroe and Orkney.
Though not attested until the publication of the Vocabulary,
the Scandinavian name must nevertheless have reached Man
some time during the period of Norse domination which
lasted from the middle of the 9th century to the middle
of the 13th. Before Norse ceased to be spoken on the
island — at what date it became extinct we do not know —
the word must have passed into Manx Gaelic and so the
name continued in living use, though unrecorded. It survi*
ved the demise of Gaelic (moribund since about 1870) and
then found its way into print as a term peculiar to Anglo=
Manx. Its provenance was, to all appearances, unknown to
the compilers of the Vocabulary; it seems to be the only
example of a Norse bird name which survived as such in
Manx.
The presence of this name so far from the Faroe»Orkney
area leaves no doubt that the Faroese and Orkney Norn
forms do, in fact, regularly continue an original Old West
Norse name. Furthermore, the Manx form huplin, with
radical u, points unmistakeably to on *hyplingr, with Mx.