Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1964, Page 161

Norn in Shetland
169
people can read pretty well, and many write”. The anxiety
to read the English Bible in the 18th century must have
hastened the collapse of the Norn, just as the Scottish
Education Act of 1872 is changing both Norn and Scotch
into a localised form of Standard English.
But this English of school, reading and commerce has
not yet ousted the spoken dialect, which differs from any
other form of Scots in construction and idiom, accent and
intonation, vowel sound and vocabulary. When Shetland
was mapped the modified vowels and liquid consonants
defied English spelling, and nothing is more amusing than
to hear an Englishman or Scotsman attempt a Shetland
placeíname. But the wheel is now going full circle, the
older place names are being lost, and Shetlanders in using
the others to strangers adapt their pronunciation to the map.
But Faroese, especially younger Faroese, are probably
more interested in Jakob Jakobsen. Two books, “Greinir
og Ritgerðir”, published in Tórshavn in 1959, and “Old
Shetland Dialect and Place Names of Shetland”, printed
in Lerwick in 1897 and 1926, give the more accessible parts
of that great and remarkable scholar’s lifeíwork. The fuller
works on Shetland, “Etymologisk Ordbok over de Norrøne
Sprog pá Shetland,” published in London in 1928 and
1932 as “An Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Langu=
age in Shetland” and “Shetlandsøernes Stednavne”, app*
earing in 1901 in the Danish “Aarbøger for nordisk Old*
kyndighed og Historie”, published again in London in
1936 as “The Place Names of Shetland” are available for
the most part in big libraries only. I count myself fortunate
in possessing both.
I have often heard the men of my father’s generation
speak of Jakobsen. In 1893, in his thirtieth year, he came
to Shetland and travelled far and wide, collecting all he
could find of the ancient language of the islands. His gifts
of good*fellowship and abundant interest in everything he
saw and heard aroused like feeling in those he met. The
12 — Fróðskaparrit 1964