Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1964, Page 42

50
Postscript to The Faroese Bird Names
u representing on y, cf. Mx. burling ‘sort of boat’ (Ir.
buirling) < on byrðingr, Mx. stiur ‘rudder’ (Ir. stiúir) <
on stýri, but e. g. Mx. gill ‘ravine’ (Ir. gil) < on gil. We
can therefore condude that Far. hyplingur, not hiplingur,
is the etymologically correct spelling. We are in a position
to accept Marwick’s interpretation ‘hipped one’, since it is
now evident that Icel. hnuplungur is nothing more than a
popular perversion of Old Icel. *hyplungr, a variant of
*hyplingr, adduced by association with the verb hnupla.
MÁsi
on már ‘gull’ survives to this day locally in Suðuroy
as mávur ‘herring gull’ with a relic of the old genitive in
mósungi, the name for the immature bird. Faroese other«
wise uses mási for this bird, i. e. an =s derivative of the
former word found also in Norwegian (and Swedish) máse.
In Suðuroy the local form mávur is equated semantically
with the more generally used word mási. Apart from this
local survival in Faroese, on már lives on in Icel. máfur
and in Orkney Norn maa (Faroese Bird Names, pp. 42—43).
It has left no record in Shetland Norn, but it was identified
long ago, at least tentatively, in Engl. fulmar lit. ‘foul gull’
(cf. Oxford English Dictionary); this compound has a para»
llel in on (Hallfreðarsaga) fúlmár. It has been shown
(W. B. L., British Birds, XLVII, 1954, pp. 336-9) that
Engl. fulmar was borrowed from Scottish (St Kildan) Gaelic
fulmair, in which dialect the word is a loan from Norse.
It has been further shown that St Kildan mall ‘gull’ repre^
sents on már with local change of r to ll, a change which
did not operate in the case of fulmair owing to the influence
of the original l in the first element fuU (W. B. L., Scottish
Gaelic Studies, x, 1963, pp. 53—55).
Thus we find on már attested in Iceland, Faroe, Orkney
and St Kilda; it has obviously been lost in Shetland Norn.
We can now safely conclude that már was the original
word for ‘gull’ in the old West Norse colonial area. Against