Back in 2014 we discussed the Norn language; extinct though it has been for a couple of centuries, there are videos in it, as Craig writes me: “Have you seen this person who makes videos of herself speaking Norn? She claims to have learned it as a child from her godparents.” The YouTube page is called Nornfru, and there are 16 videos; I have no basis for judging how good her Norn is (though I have the gravest doubts about learning it from godparents), so I simply offer the link for what it is worth. Thanks, Craig!
I just watched the one on numbers, allow me to doubt the (pen)ultimate stress on elive; that syllable has been apocopated in the mainland North Germanic languages (ignore the spelling) and seems to be optional in Faroese. (We’re talking about the second syllable of *ainalif (Wikt)/*ainalifa- (Kroonen), i.e., the root syllable of the second morpheme, but we have ellifu in ON with a surviving/epenthetic coda vowel. Compare *twalif > tólf where this vowel is gone early on.
Smells like a pure guess on the part of Nornfru. (Also the suppression of the last vowel).
Now guess the reflex of /if/ in Danish ellevte and tolvte.
Excellent point, and it reinforces my suspicions.
It’s the stress of eleven, of course – but since Norn and Scots coexisted for a while I suppose it could be influence from Scots eleeven with the same stress. It doesn’t seem to be in Jakobsen, I’ve only found numbers up to 5.
How do we feel about gaMAL? (Which Jakobsen spells ‘gammel’.)
Norw. elleve [²elve] is (I think) a Danish form. Dialects preserve forms like [²el:e,ve] and [²el:ev]. Da. gammel is e.g. Norw. dial. [²ga:mal] or [²gam:al]. Does the second tone in Peninsular Scandinavian (and stød in Danish) correspond to a stressed second syllable in Scots?
A good friend of mine did his PhD partly on Norn, although I know less about it now than I did in the days when the thing was actually being written, and never knew all that much. I think we’d have known if it was still hanging about in the 1940s, though.
I don’t *think* I meant to claim Scots influence on Norwegian – I thought Lars was saying that second syllable stress couldn’t have come from within Scandinavian.
No, I didn’t mean that either. I’m trying to establish a regular correspondence drawing on the plentiful evidence of two words.
You have a bright future as a Nostraticist!
(Missing the editing window)
Jen: I think we’d have known if it was still hanging about in the 1940s, though.
Surely. OTOH, there could have been people in the 1940s who weren’t native speakers of Norn but who had a pretty strong claim on being nearly so, even to the point of convincing themselves and a few friends. That could e.g. be speakers of archaic forms of Shetlan (Scots) with a strong Norn lexical substrate (family vocabulary).
Somewhat of a moot point with the OP, given that it would appear the last L1 speaker of Norn died out in the 19th century, so we don’t know whether it would have had Shetland or Scandinavian inflections, but if a community decides to revive an extinct language, can it be said to be a failure if it doesn’t reproduce the vocal patterns of its final speakers? I ask, as in the case of Manx, there were plentiful recordings of Ned Maddrell and other elderly speakers, in part due to the assistance of the Irish government:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-286xpqtC7M&pp=ygUWbmVkIG1hZGRyZWxsIHJlY29yZGluZw%3D%3D
When you listen to modern revivalists, on the other hand, it’s very much evident that their vocal intonations are derived from English, rather than any Celtic influences, just as my own personal pronunciations and phrasing in Irish would immediately give away my “book learner” status to any native speaker:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rUE1bzIx3u8&pp=ygURTmV3IE1hbnggc3BlYWtlcnM%3D
Yeah, that’s bound to be a problem. In theory I approve of revival, and for revival you need revivalists, and most of them are going to just use their native intonations without even thinking about it, but I’m too finicky to enjoy listening to such things.