Ganfer 5

5. Some notes on specific issues raised in the video.

The Census. It’s worth noting that, prior to the census, Michael Hance of the Scots Language Centre wrote an article in the Shetland Times to persuade Shetlanders to answer ‘Scots’ to the census question, aware that the traditional perception of the Shetland tongue was that it wasn’t Scots.

The Gender System. It’s best not to confuse the category based gender system of Shetlandic with the traditional grammatical gender of Indo European languages. As the video points out, it is clearly based on semantic categories, although there are also regional differences. It might almost be better described as a three-part class system, with more in common with Bantu than Indo European languages, although of course it is neither.

Til and Tae. (19:30-ish). I don’t recognise this distinction as described in the video. It is true that ‘til’ is not used as an infinitive marker, and can be used as a preposition corresponding to Engish ‘to.’ But a phrase like ‘til da post office’ is alien to me. I say ‘tæ da pǫst ǫfís’ (I’ve defaulted to my Sjætlan spelling here because of the usefulness of ‘ǫ’ for the open vowel in avoiding the conflict with English spelling in the word ‘pǫst.’) The examples given in ‘Grammar and Usage of the Shetland Dialect’ (Robertson and Graham, 1952) have ‘til’ only before ‘him,’ ‘his’ and finally, with ‘ta’ before ‘da’ and ‘some.’ This - which conforms roughly to my own usage, although ‘til’ would be optional to me in those positions - suggests that, while only ‘ta/tæ’ is used as an infinitive marker, there is a phonetic distinction between prepositional ‘ta/tae’ and ‘til’ depending on the initial sound of the following word, and that the use of ‘til’ is still optional, at least in most regions.

This could be rationalised by defining ‘til’ as the preposition, with ‘ti’ - with final ‘l’ omitted - as a form used before certain initial consonants in following words, rather like ‘a’ and ‘an’ in English. However, ‘til’ as an apparent variant of ‘tae’ is also characteristic of some forms of Scots. It is very much more common in the Scots of Aberdeenshire, where I live, than it is in my native Shetlandic. I have heard Shetlanders from my island (Burra) parody ‘Scottie’ by the use of phrases like ‘We hiv til’ rather than their own ‘We hae tae.’ In ‘We hiv til,’ ‘til’ is being used finally as the marker for an assumed infinitive, even though it wouldn’t occur before the infinitive, again suggesting that the criteria are phonetic rather than grammatical. In some other dialects of Scots, ‘tae’ can be used with the meaning of English ‘till’ or ‘until.’

Knap. In my native speech, this is pronounced ‘nap’ without the K. I suspect that, because of its association with dialect issues, the K pronunciation of this word has become a sort of token, or shibboleth. I recall Gunnel Melchers mentioning somewhere that even speakers who did not normally pronounce the K in KN clusters had no problem pronouncing it in this word. In other words, my non-K pronunciation preserves the natural pronunciation from my area, where the K pronunciations have been lost, while the K pronunciation of the word ‘knap’ has come to be regarded as a token of Shetland pronunciation. I actually pronounce it with a K now too. The problem with such tokens, however, is that they tend to become a surrogate for viable means of language development.

The prominence of the word ‘knap’ with the ‘k’ pronunciation probably hearks back to the short time, before and around the turn of the millenium, when certain Shetland words had a short revival in the public eye - e.g. words such as ‘bonhóga’ (birthplace) and ‘hæmfǽring’ (Homecoming. I’ve defaulted to my Sjætlan spellings again, because I swithered over how to spell ‘hæmfǽring’ in dialect-type spelling). It was probably this short revival - which I think of as the ‘sprickle effect,’ sprikel being the convulsions of a dying fish - which triggered the backlash against ‘Nornomaniacs,’ ‘Dialect fascists’ and such. I remember one Shetland journalist railing against the appearance of ‘Faerdimaet’ on a Lerwick shop. What did this mean? Didn’t it just mean ‘Good to go?’ Things not automatically understood by Americans and Central Belt Scots could not be tolerated on actual public signs by the Anglophonograph hegemony.

I am unable to understand the arrogance of people who can come into an area and take that attitude to the local language, but it taps into and reinforces existing attitudes ingrained in the local population. Ironically, it was in a ‘Spaekalation’ column (the title being another tokenism) in the Shetland Times that a well-known Shaetlan-speaking councillor with a PhD in English literature commented that the Shetland Dialect was unsuitable for writing, that dialect writers irritated because they introduced unnecessary archaisms, that the only person who could write it without irritating him must be doing it by ‘some sort of magic,’ and that English was in any case the language in which we have been trained.

The Perfect Tense with ‘be’. I was never aware of being corrected out of this. When I was young (I was born in 1955) there was a visceral recognition of the fact - by teachers as well - that Shaetlan and English were different. You were taught to speak English at school, but everyone recognised that you spoke Shaetlan normally. Nobody in my area at that time tried to turn you into a monolingual English speaker, or said that speaking Shaetlan was wrong. If it is being replaced by ‘hae’ or ‘hiv’ in speech, this is more likely a result of neglect - the fact that Shetlandic is not recognised as an entity with its own characteristics, but rather as ‘dialect’ - rather than persecution.

It is true, of course, that the English of a former generation was characterised by Shetlandisms such as this, as well as hypercorrections. As my affected character Döweel says, ‘How often am I told you to talk proper to Persevere and I so that we can make you out right.’ (I’ve transliterated this story - Sjelti Pratel - into Sjætlan orthography, but I haven’t recorded it yet.) So they might have been taught that it was wrong to use Shetland grammar in English - but that’s the case for anyone learning another language. The key is to regard them as different languages, rather than ‘proper’ and ‘dialect.’

The Unst Lay. The version shown on the video (which seems to have been taken from a paper by Brian Smith, who predictably regards it as a hoax) has two examples of random use of the AE spelling for words which do not have that phoneme - ‘maet’ and ‘naeked.’ In other versions, these are spelt ‘met’ and ‘naked.’ To use my Sjætlan orthography, ‘met’ (mark, imprint) has an E phoneme and ‘nǽket’ has a long Ǽ phoneme, which is a different phoneme from the short Æ phoneme. ‘Mæt’ with the short Æ phoneme is the word meaning ‘food,’ and also a homophone meaning ‘mate.’ It is ironic that, while my representation of the real phoneme in ‘Shaetlan’ was once perceived as a spelling mistake - because it was different from the official name - the spelling crops up in random words that don’t have that phoneme. (Of course, there may be regional pronunciations that I am not aware of, but I suspect that the spelling ‘met’ which occurs in most versions is the original.)

Convergent Etymology. The etymology of words from cognate languages isn’t quite as indeterminate as the video might perhaps suggest. Often the immediate source of the word can be determined from the phonology, and the phonology in such cases is usually Scots, although the pronunciation is - as Catford remarks - often very different from anything heard on the mainland of Scotland. (Shetlandic has been described as ‘English taught by Lowlanders to Norwegians.’) This is not to say that the Norn background of a cognate word does not determine other factors, such as the semantics, but recognition of the source of the underlying phonemes is necessary for orthographic purposes.

The Ø Phoneme. Although this does occur in words of Norn origin, it is most often a direct reflex of the Scots phoneme often spelt UI, or - in an older spelling style - U-E (guid, gude). This was originally a front rounded vowel ([ø] or [y]) in Scots, but in most dialects of Scots, it has merged with either /i/ ‘ee’ (North East) or /ɪ/ and /e/ (Central Belt, distributed according to the Scottish Vowel Length rule.) In some dialects, such as Angus and the Borders, it survives as a discrete phoneme.

In Shetland, like most Scots phonemes, it has presumably come to be pronounced with an existing Norn accent, and retained its identity as a distinct phoneme. Words like sjøn (shoes), abøn (above) and gød (good) are all phonologically Scots (the cognate of ‘good’ does not, of course, have an /ø/ phoneme in the Nordic languages) but are now phonetically and characteristically Shetlandic.

The [y] pronunciation, apparently represented in the I Hear Dee spelling as ‘ü,’ is not a separate phoneme, but a regional allophone of this phoneme characteristic of the Westside. In the LAS it is recorded as occuring in one region (Walls) in all phonetic environments; in Foula only finally and before dentals; and in Papa Stour, everywhere except finally and before /t/. It is difficult to see how it can be allocated to specific words. The celebrated Westside poet Vagaland (T.A. Robertson) saw no need to spell it differently from <ö>. (In my Sjætlan orthography, since the /ø/ phoneme does not have a soft form, the trema, or soft sign, with double acute for long vowels, could be used to indicate this allophone at need while preserving the identity of the phoneme - e.g. bø̈l, brø̋l.)