LL-L: "Language varieties" LOWLANDS-L, 11.JUL.2000 (01) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

 ======================================================================
 L O W L A N D S - L * 11.JUL.2000 (01) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
 Posting Address: <lowlands-l at listserv.linguistlist.org>
 Web Site: <http://www.geocities.com/sassisch/rhahn/lowlands/>
 User's Manual: <http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/1.8c/userindex.html>
 Archive: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/lowlands-l.html>
 =======================================================================
 A=Afrikaans, Ap=Appalachean, D=Dutch, E=English, F=Frisian, L=Limburgish
 LS=Low Saxon (Low German), S=Scots, Sh=Shetlandic
 =======================================================================

From: John M. Tait [jmtait at altavista.net]
Subject: LL-L: "Language varieties" 05.JUL.2000 (01) [E]

Ron wrote:

  I cannot speak for John Tait,
>but I understood him as referring to this when he said,
>
>> 4. Further to 2, the Slavonic languages are very
>> similar to a linguist but
>> the degree of mutual intelligibility seems to be low
>> for native speakers.

I didn't say this - think it was John Feather. There are far too many Johns
around. One group I was involved with recently had four, and I had to refer to
myself  as John Magnus - as I am known in Shetland.

John M. Tait.

----------

From: R. F. Hahn [sassisch at yahoo.com]
Subject: Language varieties

John Tait wrote:

> I didn't say this - think it was John Feather.

Yes, indeed.  It was John Feather.  My apologies to both of you.

> There are far too many Johns around.

Yes, including those spelled with a capital J.  ;)

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

----------

From: John M. Tait [jmtait at altavista.net]
Subject: LL-L: "Language varieties" 03.JUL.2000 (01) [E]

Criostoir wrote:

>When I was refering to Shetlandic I was consciously
>mixing the two varieties pertaining to the name,
>namely the language variety spoken in the islands now,
>and the Norn dialect spoken until recently.
>
>There is no contradiction here so far as I understand
>it. Whilst the language now spoken is basically Scots
>but with peculiarities of syntax and phonology, it
>retains very many features of Norn, so much so that to
>imply that at some point historically Shetlanders
>suddenly ceased to speak Norn and then picked up Scots
>is absurd.

This isn't what I'm saying. Rather, it is likely that they became variably
bilingual in Scots and Norn, and ultimately abandoned Norn in favour of the
then higher prestige Scots. More about this later.

What happened in the case of
>Shetlandic/Norn is that the Norse language began to
>absorb Scottisms at a rate of knots (evidenced in the
>Shetland Norn version of the Paternoster) and that,
>successively, the Norse element became more and more
>disused until it was reduced to little more than
>phonology and minor syntactical influences. However, I
>believe that there is no case to consider that Norn
>'died' and Shetlandic was 'born' - merely a case of a
>superstrate slowly becoming a substrate, and with far
>more evidence than the slow language degradation of
>other tongues.

This view of the transition from Norn to the form of Scots which is modern
Shetlandic - i.e. that it was a process of gradual change - was almost
universally assumed until relatively recently, mainly by Shetlanders who
wished to emphasise the continuity of modern Shetlandic with Norn (though also
by scholars such as Jakobsen). This view has, however, been recently, and to
my mind convincingly, challenged by Michael P. Barnes (Professor of
Scandinavian Studies, University College, London) in _The Norn Language of
Orkney and Shetland_ (The Shetland Times Ltd., Lerwick, 1998). In an earlier
article (In _Shetland's Northern Links, Language and History_, Scottish
Society for Northern Studies, 1996) Shetland Archivist Brian Smith discusses
how the two previous views of the Norn -> Shetlandic transition (The
'absorptionist' one which you are advocating, and the 'persecutionist' one
advocated by Danish scholar Laurits Renboe (the terms in quotation marks are
my own)) owe more to ideological presuppositions than to what is known either
about Shetland history, or about language death and transition in other parts
of the world.

>Surely the evidence that very often commentators have
>had great difficulty in defining what is 'Norse'
>language and what is 'Shetlandic' (i.e.,
>Lallans-influenced) in the islands' history goes to
>show that the transition to modern Shetlandic from a
>Norse original was not a case of language 'death' or
>supersedence, but one of gradual fundamental change.

I would suggest that the difficulty scholars have in identifying Norse and
Scots elements in modern Shetlandic is due to the fact that scholars who have
studied Shetlandic in the past seem to be experts either in Scots or in
Scandinavian languages, but seldom in both. Both Barnes and Swedish scholar
Gunnel Melchers, for example, identify as Norse the Shetlandic  singular
familiar second person pronoun 'du'. It is true that the use of 'd' [d] rather
than 'th' [D] here may be Norse influenced (though it has been remarked that
Shetlanders can pronounce [D] in other positions, and have also adopted
without difficulty the Scots fricative [x], as in 'loch', which had long died
out in Nordic languages by the time that Scots was adopted in Shetland.)
Otherwise, the form 'du' [du(:)], and even more obviously the accusative and
possessive forms 'dee' [di:], 'dy' [dai] and 'dine' [d at in], are regular
formations from Scots 'thoo', 'thy', thine',  [Du:], [Dai], [Dine], as
evidenced in older Scots literature (e.g. The Wyfe of Auchtermuchty). Barnes
and Melchers appear to have failed to recognise this because they are not
familiar with older Scots. Conversely, Barnes considers that the phonology of
modern Shetlandic is Scots, whereas modern Shetlandic exhibits vowel length
distinctions which are quite foreign to the accepted analysis of the phonology
of Scots as spoken on the Mainland, which has no phonological vowel length.

Although there are many elements in modern Shetlandic (e.g. words such as
'man' and 'net') which could equally well be Scots or Norn - and in relation
to which the question is therefore irrelevant - it is not too difficult to
identify which elements are which, provided that you know enough about what is
and what isn't Scots to begin with. For example, it can be shown that the very
many Shetland pronunciations of 'goopen/gjoppen' (double handful) fall into
two groups: those with [u] in the first syllable, and those with [(j)O] or
(rarely) [o:] in the first syllable. The [u] forms are regular formations,
according to Shetland phonology, from Scots 'gowpen', and the [(j)O] forms are
(according to Jakobsen) regular reflexes of ON 'gaupn', the hollow of the
hand.

>However, in mitigation I should add that my knowledge
>of Shetlandic/Norn is far from comprehensive.
>Nonetheless, there is a clear case that
>Shetlandic/Norn developed from an increasing Scottish
>influence that 'hollowed' Shetlandic from the inside
>out. Nevertheless, Shetlandic and Norn may be
>considered as the same language but at extremes of
>development. In this sense Shetlandic as it is now
>represents transition, however imperfectly, between
>the Norwegian-speaking world and the Lallans-speaking
>one. This is no different to the position language in
>the islands has always played; it's just that now the
>Shetlandic variety has become thoroughly Scotticised,
>and retains but little of its Norse background.

As I have said before, I think this view owes more to an ideological desire to
emphasise the Norn nature of Shetlandic, and to differentiate it from Scots,
than to a sober assessment of what is likely to have actually happened. It is
unfortunate from several points of view. For one thing, whereas this ideology
expressed the identity of a former generation of Shetlanders, who did not
regard themselves as Scots, that identity is now less evident. However, rather
than becoming happy with thinking of themselves as Scots, Shetlanders arguably
now don't know what they are. They are embarrassed by the traditional 'I'm not
Scottish' viewpoint, regarding it as a bit silly; but they're not entirely
happy about being Scottish either. In this vacuum of identity, the old
ideology of Shetlandic as Nordic is equally precarious, and there is no
obvious ideology to replace it with.

Moreover, those who embrace this view of modern Shetlandic tend to emphasise
the Norn elements and denigrate the Scots ones. As the Scots elements are by
far the strongest, this leads to a wholesale condemnation of modern Shetlandic
as 'bad English', and to romantic recommendations such as that the Norn
element in this 'bad English' should be spelt the 'Norn' way (e.g. <nisek> -
'porpoise' - rather than the common <neesick>) which usually means according
to Jakobsen's spellings, which were invented to suggest the Shetland
pronunciations to a Danish readership, and do not suggest the Shetland
pronunciations to a modern Shetlander! Thus 'Nornomania' (as Smith calls it)
is detrimental to modern written Shetlandic.

The 'absorptionist' view of the transition from Norn to Shetlandic also led to
the expectation that Shetlandic would slowly be absorbed by standard English
in much the same way. In fact, however, in the town of Lerwick Shetlandic has
been abruptly replaced by standard English in one generation, so quickly that
in some families I believe the older children speak Shetlandic and the younger
ones English, and grandparents complain that their grandchildren cannot
understand them. If this is what happened to modern Shetlandic in relation to
standard English, it is likely that it also happened to Norn in relation to
Scots - and for much the same reasons. Another important point, made both by
Smith and Barnes, is that of why Norn died out. They suggest that it died out
because Scots came to be regarded as the language of prestige, and Norn as a
low status vernacular. As Barnes puts it:

'The reason Norn died, both in Orkney and Shetland, was because the Northern
Isles became more and more orientated towards Scotland. By the seventeenth
century most if not all the inhabitants could speak fluent Scots, and as ties
with Scandinavia, in particular Norway, weakened, the motivation to perpetuate
a low-prestige vernacular with no official status or written form
disappeared.'

(Barnes, p. 26).

This perception of Scots as the ‘high’ and Norn as the ‘low’ language can be
illustrated from both Norn and Scots texts. The first, a fragment of (mostly)
Norn from Unst preserved from the eighteenth century, shows the pride of
Shetland parents that their son has been to Scotland and learnt to speak
Scots:

De vara gue tee
When son min guid to Kadanes:
han can caa rossa mare,
han can caa big bere,
han can caa eld fire,
han can caa klovandi taings.

"It was a good time when my son went to Caithness. He can call ‘rossa’ (O.N.
hross) ‘mare’..." etc.

(The Norn here shows interesting parallels with Faroese, the words gue (good)
and tee (time) having lost the [D] in Old Norse góðr and tíð rather than
changing it to [d] as the modern Scandinavian languages do. Compare Faroese
góður and tíð, in which the <ð> is not pronounced, with Swedish god and tid.)

The second example (from Orkney, 1633) illustrates the official attitude to
Norn as contrasted with ‘right longuag’ (Scots):

‘Scho aundit in bitt, quhilk is ane Nourn terme and to [be] exponit into right
longuag is alse mikill as scho did blaw her breath thairin.’

‘She aundit [blew] into a bitt [bucket], which is a Norn term and to be
expressed in proper language is as much as to say she blew her breath
therein.’

This view of the decline and demise of Norn - which, unlike those of Jakobsen
and Renboe, is based on an increasing body of modern knowledge of language
death - is important both with regard to the traditional perception of Norn in
Shetland, and because of the parallels which it offers to the decline of
modern Shetlandic today. For one thing, it suggests that Norn died ultimately
because most Shetlanders were either opposed or indifferent to it, with the
corollary that, if modern Shetlandic dies out, it will be for the same reason.
Shetlanders will have no one but themselves to blame.

>
>However, it is clear from looking at the history of
>the language that Shetlandic became increasingly
>'Scotticised' rather than 'dying' out and being
>replaced.

This is far from clear. First of all, there is no documented history of the
decline of Norn to offer any such clarity. Secondly, evidence from other parts
of the world, and from more recent events in Shetland, suggest otherwise. The
pattern suggested by Barnes is that:

1. Shetlanders learned to speak functional Scots as well as their native Norn.
2. Their children were truly bilingual in Scots and Norn.
3. Their grandchildren spoke Scots, with only a passive or imperfect knowledge
of Norn.

While it is possible for this to happen in three generations as above, it can
be strung out over more generations, but the effect is the same. To compare
the situation in Shetland today, Lerwegians have long spoken a diluted form of
Shetlandic compared to other Shetlanders, but it was still recognisably
Shetlandic - e.g. with forms such as 'wrang' and 'doon'. The younger
generation have suddenly started to speak standard English, e.g. with forms
such as 'wrong' and 'down'. While it is likely that Norn was influenced by
Scots before it eventually died, just as Lerwick Shetlandic was increasingly
influenced by English before it died, Norn certainly died, and modern
Shetlandic is essentially a form of Scots upon a Norn substratum (consisting
mainly of vocabulary with some aspects of phonology) rather than a scotticised
form of Norn.

 So what, then, is the position of Shetlandic
>with regard to Lallans? Shetlandic has been called
>Lallans' 'most vibrant dialect' although it is plain
>to any visitor or to anyone who hears the language
>that far from being a mere dialect, Shetlandic retains
>much of its Norse character; a character that has
>diminished substantially but never been extinguished.
>
>Certainly I am in complete agreement that modern
>Shetlandic may be considered as transitional between
>old Norn and Lallans, so thoroughly Scotticised has
>the variety become. Nonetheless, peculiarities
>indicate that it would be wrong to consider Shetlandic
>as Lallans proper or Norn proper. Somewhere in between
>is accurate enough in my opinion.

Subjective impressions can be misleading, as they sometimes owe more to
incidentals (such as accent, i.e. phonetic features) than to more important
characteristics such as vocabulary and phonology. Nevertheless, I quite agree
that modern Shetlandic is too different from Mainland Scots to be regarded
simply as a dialect of Scots - as, for example, the dialect of North East
Scotland (where I live) can be regarded. The Norn substratum is too strong and
too important, and - again unlike NE Scots - attempts to write Shetlandic
using the conventions of Mainland Scots simply do not work. This is why I
personally write Shetlandic and Scots as separate languages (by contrast, most
writers from the NE tend to use either Doric or more standard Scots
conventions in their writing, or a mixture of conventions, but not to write
two separate ways.) The only other Shetlander I know of who wrote Scots as
well - W.J. Tait - also used separate conventions.

I find the best way is to regard modern Shetlandic as a form of language in
its own right, without worrying too much about how to characterise it in terms
of Scots or Norn. In this respect the Shetland Dictionary and Grammar and
Usage of the Shetland Dialect - both of which simply describe the Shetlandic
lexicon and grammar without worrying about the etymological factors which some
Shetlanders have been hung up on in the past - are on the right track.
Unfortunately, many of those Shetlanders and Scots enthusiasts who regard
Shetlandic as either a continuation of Norn or simply a dialect of Scots do
not actually write it, and thus never encounter the practical problems
implicit in their ideologies. (Much the same could be said about many of those
who make ideological statements about Scots, but who have no intention of
using it outwith its traditional uses of poetry and dialogue.)
>
>I welcome a more knowledgeable critique of my views
>concerning Shetlandic, as my understanding is limited
>somewhat to basic concepts concerning the language.

Well, I've done my best! I hope you're not regretting ever bringing the
subject up in the first place, Criostoir, as you've given me an excuse to
sound off ad infinitum! Just for good measure (and in order to maintain my
reputation for endlessly repeating myself) I've appended an excerpt from
something I recently wrote on the subject.

John M. Tait.

The Scots Aspect.

Insofar as the grammar of Shetlandic differs from English, the differences can
almost without exception (the use of the verb to be to form the perfect tense
is one) be shown to be characteristic of traditional Scots. Morphologically,
features such as the principle parts of verbs - e.g. fin (find), preterite
fan, past participle fun - are in most cases similar or identical (allowing
for regular phonological and phonetic differences between Shetlandic and
Mainland Scots) to those listed in David Purves’s A Scots Grammar. Although
these are frequently different from the forms found in contemporary Mainland
Scots dialects, which tend to converge preterites and past participles - e.g.
‘I fun(d) it’ rather than ‘I fan(d) it’ - the Shetlandic forms can be found in
writers of more traditional Scots, such as Robert McLellan. In this respect,
the grammar of Shetlandic is more conservative than that of most forms of
Mainland Scots.

Syntactically, Shetlandic exhibits a number of features typical of traditional
Scots, such as the use of singular verb forms with plural nouns but not with
plural pronouns (e.g. ‘Da men wis comin haem’ but ‘Dey wir comin haem’.)
Shetlandic does not use the singular past tense of the verb to be with plural
pronouns as most forms of contemporary Mainland Scots do (e.g. ‘Wis ye gaun
oot the nicht’; ‘Whit wis thay daein thare?’). Again, Shetlandic is more
conservative in this respect.

Phonologically, the question of whether Shetlandic exhibits traditional Scots
characteristics is rather less clear. Shetlandic shares most of the
phonological features which characterise Scots as against standard English -
forms like haem (home); lang (long); oot (out); speerit (spirit); ruif (roof),
are immediately recognisable as Scots. There are, however, certain features of
consonant phonology - such as the lack of a phonological distinction between
initial ‘qu’ as in queen, and ‘wh’ as in wheel - which are almost certainly of
Norse origin. It is generally thought that the tendency of Shetlandic to turn
initial and medial voiced and unvoiced ‘th’ into ‘d’ and ‘t’ respectively is
because of the previous loss of the ‘th’ sounds in Norn - compare the extant
Nordic languages, all of which, with the exception of Icelandic, have lost the
‘th’ sounds. On the other hand, both the unvoiced, and in some dialects the
voiced, ‘th’ sounds are pronounced in other positions - e.g. rooth [ruT]
(rowing-block); braeth [brIT] (breath); boedh [b2:D] (booth - in some
dialects; in others boed [b2:d]); and Shetlanders seem to have learned to
pronounce the unvoiced velar fricative ‘ch’, as in ‘loch’, which non-Scots
speakers of English seem to find difficult.

As far as vowels are concerned, Barnes states that ‘The vowel systems of
modern Orkney and Shetland dialects...are Scots’ and adopts Catford’s
suggestion that Norn speakers, with a rich vowel system but relatively small
number of consonant phonemes, could more readily imitate the vocalic than the
consonant distinctions of Scots. On the other hand, Catford considers that
Norn influence is probably to be seen in one of the most general
characteristics of Shetland speech - the structure of the syllable, which
generally consists of either a short vowel followed by a long consonant, or a
long vowel followed by a short consonant, a characteristic of the Scandinavian
languages. As the structure of the syllable involves vowel as well as
consonant phonology, this raises certain problems for analysing Scots vowel
length purely in the terms generally used for Scots. It is certainly true
that, from a practical point of view, the Scottish Vowel Length Rule cannot be
relied upon to predict the long vowel sounds which occur in words like loumie,
oil-slick; peig, a glimmer of light; and broel, to bellow; and this is an
important consideration when it comes to questions of spelling. Another
consonant feature noted by Catford (p. 72), the palatalisation of certain
consonants in certain circumstances, is related to changes in the preceding
vowel sound. While these changes are not phonological in themselves, in that
they do not affect meaning, they do impinge upon phonology because they are
related to the convergence of phonemes in certain localities - for example,
the pronunciation of ‘hael’ (whole) as ‘hell’ in the Central Mainland and
‘heel’ in the Northern Isles.

Phonetically (that is, with regard to features which characterise the Shetland
accent, rather than features which carry meaning) the pronunciation of
Shetlandic exhibits features such as consonant palatalisation and vowel
diphthongisation which make it strikingly different from most forms of
Mainland Scots.

The Norn Influence.

To characterise Shetlandic as a form of Scots is not to underestimate the
profound influence of Norn upon its vocabulary in particular. The Faroese
scholar Jakob Jakobsen, researching in Shetland in the 1890s, found enough
Norn vocabulary (about 10,000 words) to fill two substantial volumes (in the
English edition of his An Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in
Shetland). Although many of these words were obsolete or obsolescent at the
time, and many more have become obsolete since, the Norn element still forms
an important part of the traditional Shetlandic vocabulary. Derick Herning,
analysing the vocabulary in the glossary to  Jarm an Jeemsie, his translation
of Max und Moritz by Wilhelm Busch, found that about 23% of the words were of
Norn origin, 6% could be either Norn or Scots, and most of the rest were
Scots. While the proportion of non-English cognate words used in a literary
text such as this is much greater than in normal speech, the relative
proportion of Scots and Norn words is perhaps not likely to be much different.
Many everyday words in Shetlandic - such as smuck (slipper) - are of Norse
origin, whereas some words which would now probably be regarded as ‘old’ -
such as antrin (occasional) - are Scots. In other words, under the influence
of standard English, Scots vocabulary is now as likely to become obsolete as
Norn vocabulary.

The influence of Norn may also be seen in less obvious features of Shetlandic
vocabulary, such as the liking for combinations such as come at (perk up,
rehabilitate); aa aboot (alert, intelligent); tak at (be upset) etc. The
following sentence contains just one word which does not have a direct cognate
in English - guid (went) - and yet would not be easily understood by an
English speaker:

He wis dat doon apon it wi dem layin oot for him at I tocht ill aboot him, sae
I guid ower wi dat sam an took in for him

doon apon it - depressed
lay oot for - verbally abuse
tink ill aboot - feel sorry for
wi dat sam - immediately
tak in for - defend; stick up for

Although some such phrases are almost identical to those in contemporary
Scandinavian languages (e.g. wi dat sam) it is not always clear whether such
phrases are of Norn origin or not. Certainly they are of a type which is more
characteristic of Scandinavian than of English or Scots. Unfortunately,
however, Shetlandic is usually studied by experts either in Scandinavian
languages or Scots, rarely in both; and it is possible that there is a
tendency for characteristics to be attributed to Norn which can be equally
well explained as Scots. Barnes, for example, comments that the distinction in
Shetlandic between familiar du and formal you is ‘not apparently found
elsewhere in Scotland, not even in Orkney, but is general in the
Scandinavian-speaking world.’ However, the same distinction is certainly found
in Orkney between thoo and you. Shetland du is, allowing for the regular
change of Scots and English initial voiced ‘th’ to ‘d’, the same word as thou,
pronounced ‘thoo’ in Scots, as found in older English (e.g. the Authorised
Version of the Bible) and Scots (e.g. The Wyfe of Auchtermuchty); and its
parts dee, dy, and dine correspond exactly to older English thee, thy and
thine. It is true that the usage in The Wyfe of Auchtermuchty is rather
different from that in modern Shetlandic - the wyfe addresses the farm hand as
thou and her husband as yow - but the essential distinction between familiar
and formal is the same. Similarly, Gunnel Melchers describes Shetlandic
phrases such as ‘minds du?’ (do you remember?) and ‘kens du’ (do you know?) as
‘obviously Norn’; but it is not clear why these could not be explained in
terms of older English phraseology, such as ‘knowest thou.’

Shetlandic as a linguistic system.

Although the question of the origins of phrases such as the above is
interesting from some points of view, it is peripheral to the practical study
of Shetlandic. Shetlanders use such phrases without agonising over their
etymology, just as English speakers use words such as man, nation and
bungalow, irrespective of whether they come from Anglo Saxon, Latin or Hindi.
The important point is that Shetlandic, whereas it shares many features with
Scots, Norn, standard English and Germanic languages in general, is a
linguistic system in its own right, and is used as such by those who speak it.
Fom this point of view, the foregoing discussion of the question ‘What is
Shetlandic’ - which is approached mainly from a historical view of its
components - could be seen as irrelevant, except insofar as it addresses
certain widely-held misconceptions.

Paul Johnston writes that the dialects of the Northern Isles ‘are not wholly
conservative: they are better described as going their own way relative to the
rest of Scots, adopting sometimes striking but highly localised innovations
including an extensive Clockwise Vowel Shift, far-reaching diphthongisation, a
consonant system recast to match the inventory of the Norn that was spoken
alongside of Scots, and a strongly Norse-influenced vocabulary and syntax
scattered among the archaic features in the linguistic system.’ (11.2.6. p.
477).

http:/welcome.to/shetlandic

==================================END===================================
 You have received this because your account has been subscribed upon
 request. To unsubscribe, please send the command "signoff lowlands-l"
 as message text from the same account to
 <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org> or sign off at
 <http://linguistlist.org/subscribing/sub-lowlands-l.html>.
 =======================================================================
 * Please submit contributions to <lowlands-l at listserv.linguistlist.org>.
 * Contributions will be displayed unedited in digest form.
 * Please display only the relevant parts of quotes in your replies.
 * Commands for automated functions (including "signoff lowlands-l") are
   to be sent to <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org> or at
   <http://linguistlist.org/subscribing/sub-lowlands-l.html>.
 * Please use only Plain Text format, not Rich Text (HTML) or any other
   type of format, in your submissions
 =======================================================================