Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1977, Blaðsíða 7

Some traces of Gaelic in Faroese
15
shift ‘woman’ (Dwelly). At this point we realise that we have
evidence for the semantic stage ‘head’ in the shape of Far.
grúkur, which thus represents a viking-age Old Gael. grúac
‘head’; on the Gaelic spelling, see below.
We can, it would seem, usefully comment further on Old
Gael. grúac. We shall not forget that, at all periods of its
history, Gaelic has had a standard word for ‘head’ in the
widest sense, namely ceann, older cenn, of Common Celtic
age, cf. Welsh pen, etc. Such a consideration indicates that
grúac would only be used in certain circumstances. Now it is
well known that hunters often develop special terms in
connection with their hunting. Of this there are good examples
in Faroese, e. g. the head of a grind-whale is referred to as
kúla, properly ‘hump’. It becomes evident that Old Gael.
grúac was similarly applied to the head of a seal. It is equally
well known that name taboo once played a prominent part
in hunters’ parlance, and in this connection it was nothing
unusual for a foreign word to be borrowed to replace the
native one — French renard ‘fox’ from German Reinhard of
the Beast Epic arose in this way — so that it is highly prob-
able that the Gaelic word was taken over into Norse as a
convenient noa term. Cf. also Fróð., iii, 75 f., and ON *mákr
below.
Only a few words remain to be said: about phonetics and
gender. There is no phonological difficulty in regarding Gael.
gruag as the source of Far. grúkur, in ancient orthography
grúac, grúkr. There is apparently only one other instance of
the representation of Gael. úa — the Gaelic loans in Old
Norse are conveniently listed in De Vries, op. cit., Einleitung
xxi — it is contained in the sobriquet Kváran presupposing
Gael. cúarán ‘shoe’ (see Grímr Kamban above). Here the
exotic diphthong has been modified by an accent shift úa to
uá, in principle not unlike the development seen in Gael.
Niall > ON Njáll, and reminiscent of certain spontaneous
Norse vocalic changes, as PrN Hiugan > ON Ijúga, cf. A.