Page:An Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland Part I.pdf/43

Rh undertake any exhaustive comparison, as no complete work on Norwegian place-names is available. But there is a very comprehensive production covering part of the field, the large work entitled “Norske Gaardnavne”, begun by O. Rygh, and continued by others after his death. A very large number of place-names enter into “gaard-” or farm-names as parts of a compound, and this affords a good opportunity for investigation with a view to comparison.

A closer observation shows, again in this case, that it is the south-westerly and southerly parts of Norway with which Shetland most fully agrees. It is not the names, formed by indifferent combinations of ordinary words, with which one is here concerned, but more peculiar names; partly such uncompounded names containing well-known roots little used in place-names; partly compounds of a rare or special kind; partly, and especially, such ancient names as are formed from words the meanings of which have been lost, even as long ago as the beginning of the historical period, and are not met with in the literature of that time.

The central point for the comparison, then, is again in the south of Norway. On a comparison of words and a comparison of names there appears merely the difference that, while words belonging to the east, and especially to the south-east of Norway, are found in Shetlandic in a not inconsiderable number, the of the east, and especially of the south-east, of Norway are rather more conspicuous in Shetland. A wave of immigrants went, in prehistoric times, from the parts of the country round about and to the north of Viken (Christiania-fjord), across the land in a westerly and north-westerly direction, and a part of it later passed farther west over the North Sea to the islands (in Vesterleden), while a part went afterwards still farther west to the islands lying to the north of Scotland. The Orkney place-names show, in spite of local differences, an origin similar to that of the place-names of Shetland. One must suppose that some of the names from the south-east of Norway that appear in Shetland and the Orkney Isles also hailed, in older times, from the south-west of Norway, which was the connecting link between the south-easterly parts of the country and the islands in the west. Some of the names from the south-east of Norway may have come in a more direct way, through inhabitants of Viken and the surrounding parts of the country having taken part in vikingViking [sic] expeditions to the west, and through some of them having settled in Shetland and the Orkney Isles.

Though Shetland Norn stands nearer to Modern Norwegian than is the case with Færoese and Icelandic, it occupies, nevertheless, an independent position in regard to Norwegian (in the narrower sense). Phonetically, Shetland Norn has gone its own way in several respects, and Scottish-English influence has played its part in altering it from the mother-tongue. And, as far as the vocabulary is concerned, there are a great many Shetland Norn words that in meaning and use from Norwegian (Færoese, Icelandic), both modern and ancient. Most of the significations III*