My wife and I are hopelessly addicted to Shetland; we’re currently gobbling up the ninth season and are glad that a tenth is promised. I have, of course, been following the action on my Ordnance Survey Motoring Atlas of Great Britain, and just as in this 2011 post, which focused on Dorset in the south of England, I am bowled over by the concentration of wondrous place names that strike the eye on what Wikipedia calls the eponymous archipelago off the very northern tip of Scotland. I’ll start at the southern edge of the largest island, quaintly called the Mainland: moving clockwise from Blovid, we find Geo of the Uln, Troswick Ness, Stack of the Brough, Lambhoga Head, Milburn Geo, The Taing, Pool of Virkle, Grutness, Sumburgh, Lady’s Holm, Scat Ness, Toab, Garths Ness, Siggar Ness, Fitful Head, The Nev, Wick of Shunni, Stack o’ da Noup, and Fora Ness. Further north are Mousa, Lamba Taing, Okrequoy, Bay of Fladdabister, and (my very favorite) East Voe of Quarff; westward are Fugla Stack, Ukna Skerry, West Burra, and Biargar (unknown to Google Maps). Further north are Gildarump and Quilva Taing and Papa Stour and North Nestling and Rumble; on the northernmost island Unst are Snerravoe, Spoo Ness, Orknagable, Grunka Hellier, Karne of Flouravoug, Burrafirth, Rumblings, and off the coast the famous Muckle Flugga. I’ve just scratched the surface, and I urge all aficionados of memorable toponyms to do a deep dive into Google Maps (or your preferred alternative).
As for Shetland itself, Wikipedia provides its usual farrago of factoids:
The name Shetland may derive from the Old Norse words hjalt (‘hilt’), and land (‘land’), the popular and traditional claim. Another possibility is that the first syllable is derived from the name of an ancient Celtic tribe. […]
The oldest known version of the modern name Shetland is Hetland; this may represent “Catland”, the Germanic language softening the C- to H- according to Grimm’s law […]. It occurs in a letter written by Harald, earl of Orkney, Shetland and Caithness, in ca. 1190. By 1431, the islands were being referred to as Hetland, after various intermediate transformations. It is possible that the Pictish “cat” sound contributed to this Norse name. In the 16th century, Shetland was referred to as Hjaltland.
Gradually, the Scandinavian Norn language previously spoken by the inhabitants of the islands was replaced by the Shetland dialect of Scots and Hjaltland became Ȝetland. The initial letter is the Middle Scots letter, yogh, the pronunciation of which is almost identical to the original Norn sound, /hj/. When the use of the letter yogh was discontinued, it was often replaced by the similar-looking letter z (which at the time was usually rendered with a curled tail: ⟨ʒ⟩) hence Zetland, the form used in the name of the pre-1975 county council. This is the source of the ZE postcode used for Shetland.
The Shetland dialect has its own article; you hardly hear any of it on the show, but I presume that accurately reflects the current situation, where most people speak a more generalized form of Scots.
Is it “Mainland” or “the Mainland”? The Wikipedia article is inconsistent. If it is anarthrous “Mainland”, then locals could conveniently call the Scottish mainland “the mainland” without ambiguity. As long as nobody mentions Mainland, Orkney.
As far as I can remember, they call the Scottish mainland ‘Scotland’. Mainland with a big M is definitely the big island’s map name, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s generally referred to in conversation as ‘the mainland’ with a small m. I don’t know for sure, though.
We’ve discussed mainlands in general – the difference between a mainland and a continent, or how big an island has to be before it’s not really an island for practical purposes – before…
You’re a reader, so if you like detective stories and Shetland you may like the Shetland Sailing Mystery series by Marsali Taylor. My wife and I spent a month in Shetland a few years ago and really enjoyed the place, so reading the books extends that enjoyment.
However it looks like there’s already 13 books in print so you’ll have a lot of catching up to do. Here’s her website: https://www.marsalitaylor.co.uk/shetland-sailing-mysteries
Thanks!
Historical yogh famously comes out as all sorts of different phonemes in modern English, depending on the history of the particular word, but I can’t think of (another) one where it comes out as /ʃ/. What’s the story there? It’s not like starting with /hj/ (apparently more of a Middle Scots thing than a Middle English thing to spell with yogh?) makes that outcome more obviously likely …
Separately, the coexistence of Stack of the Brough and Stack o’ da Noup suggests the absence of a copy-editor empowered to impose stylebook-governed uniformity.
Maybe they went to different branding consultants.
The Germanic settling of the Isles is way, way too late for Grimm’s Law to have any relevance.
Yes, I left that silly bit in because I was amused by “Catland.”
[hj] > [j], spelled ȝ, but at the same time also [hj] > [ç] > [ɕ], spelled/borrowed as sh?
Makes sense.
Papa Stour reminded me of reading in the Guinness Book of the Westray to Papa Westray flight*, the world’s shortest scheduled flight at 90 seconds. As a child I wondered why Papa Westray was smaller than Westray, unlike, say, Papa Smurf. Now at last WP teaches me about Papar.
*Orkney, not Shetland, but still
Interesting, thanks for that! (I took the liberty of fixing your link, which went to a nonexistent page.)
I left that silly bit in because I was amused by “Catland.”
‘Cat’ is not impossible as a component – it’s still there in the Gaelic name of Sutherland, Cataibh, and the English name of Caithness.
Of possible interest, the genitive in modern Gaelic would be ‘a’ chait’, which gives you the initial [x] which could easily become h (would that have been the closest sound available in Latin?), and the ‘eh’ vowel in the middle. DE will be able to tell you better than me whether that would have been the case in 1190, but Harald was partly of Gaelic background.
An initial [x] also feels like quite a plausible source for DM’s later transformations.
I haven’t watched the show, but of the odd scraps I’ve just listened to, no one is speaking the way I would expect to hear Shetlanders speak. If you can access BBC Sounds (I know there was a fuss about it recently) there are two interviews here that are more what I’d expect.
Thanks! The first interview starts around 21:19 and lasts for eight minutes or so, if anyone’s interested. (I didn’t have the patience to seek out the second.)
The second starts about 1:21:45 – sorry, I didn’t think to elucidate the guest-in-each-half format!
I feel like I know of someone with a stronger accent, but I haven’t come up with it yet…
I may have had occasion to post this here before, but there is the classic “We No Spik Whalsa'”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OB1daT_ENs
Adding to the list of good names on Sheltand, don’t forget the hallowed establishment of the Mid Yell Boat Club. (Or Ye Boat Club Ll, for those who still do that type of puzzle in the newspaper).
Voe is an interesting word, by the way:
john m. tait of Scots Threip (defunct, alas, but archived) is a shetlander, and has some things to say there about shaetlan, from descriptive linguistic efforts to social/political analysis to the opening of the Odyssey in shaetlan translation.
here’s a bit from him (in scots) on the questions that’ve been floating around in the thread so far:
The hale question aboot Shetland an Scots wad need tae be seen in the context o Shetland linguistic an cultural identity as a hale.
Tradietionally, the Shetland tongue wis jist caad ‘Shaetlan.’ It wis contrastit tae ‘Scottie’ that wis whit we caad whit fowk frae the Mainland spak. This reflectit the tradietional identity o Shetlanders – my faither wad hae denied ootricht bein Scottish, an a lot o (likely maistly aulder) Shetlanders still dis. ‘Shaetlan’ wis maistly felt tae be a dialect o English, and/or a corruption o Norn, dependin on yer viewpynt.
(Merk, tae, that whan I sayed ‘whit fowk frae the Mainland spak’, I wis speakin frae a Scottish viewpynt. We wad actually hae sayed ‘Whit fowk frae ‘Scotland’ spak’, cause ‘Scotland’ wis spoken aboot as a different place. In Shetland, ‘The Mainland’ means the main island o Shetland. Or did. The idea that ye aften see pitten aboot that ‘Mainland’ wi’oot the definite article is the name o the isle is wrang, tho nae dout it winna be lang or Shetlanders is embarrassed intae believin this, if thay hinna been areddies.)
[…]The identification o the tongue wi Shetland identity as a hale – expressed in the wird ‘Shaetlan’ – haes gien wey, no tae ‘Scots’ – cause that wadna be a rinner in Shetland – but jist tae ‘dialect’ – a nonentity wi’oot a identity. That’s whit it maun be frae a mainstream viewpynt, whaur the posietion o journalists an ither important personages ‘trained’ in standard English maunna be thraetened.
Thanks rozele!
So the article just gets omitted from maps, and outsiders misinterpret the maps…
Mustn’t?
I am rather disappointed to be told that the Scots for “definite article” is apparently “definite article.”
It’s merely a graphic convention. The actual pronunciation is something that the human mind cannot comprehend.
Mustn’t?
Yup:
https://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/maun_v1_n1
“Maun” is or was found as far south as Notthinghamshire, about which I know nothing beyond what’s in “Whether or Not”, by D. H. Lawrence, for which this is a mild spoiler:
The childt maun ta’e its luck, it maun,
An’ she maun ta’e her luck,
You can read the whole long poem at at Gutenberg, except that some versions have another section that rather changes things, such as the much less readable version at the Internet Archive.
For those who can see it at Google Books, here’s a readable and complete version. (I was shocked at the second-last stanza, which was not in my mother’s old textbook where I originally read this poem.)
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/54058/54058-h/54058-h.htm
Bava Metzia 59 tells us that maunna is not from heaven, though i doubt they consulted the wee frees on the question.
Deep doctrinal differences probably mean that they feel that they maunna.
Re maun/mon, I do not think this is only Northern/Scots:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foweles_in_the_frith
It turns up in the imaginary Yokelese of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Comfort_Farm
which is supposedly set in Sussex, though the degree to which Stella Gibbons was even trying for geographical realism is perhaps just a bit open to question.
Here are some mostly-19th-century instances of “maun” both north and south of the Border, although most of the English instances are Northern-ish. (The Gaskell novel is apparently set in Manchester but the character speaking may be a country rustic who has moved to the big city but I don’t know from what shire of origin.)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Citations:maun#English
If you look through the “graphic convention[s]” and swap in Standard English orthography I think “maun” and the use of the -en suffix in a past participle may be the only two lexemes in the lengthy passage rozele quoted that aren’t current-rather-than-archaic Standard English, and the word order and syntax both seem perfectly Standard English. I might render “maunna” as “may not” rather than “mustn’t” but come to think of it maybe that’s because “mustn’t” sounds like something a British speaker would say where I wouldn’t.
What about the “or” in “it winna be lang or”?
There are a few “maun”s and a “mun” from Nottinghamshire in “Whether or Not”, by D. H. Lawrence. According to this, the first version was written in 1911. The above is a GB link, but it’s the only readable one I found of the 1928 version, with Tim’s speech at the end (not that it matters to “maun”). That’s the first version I read, in an old poetry textbook of my mother’s that explicably censored the second-last stanza.
What about the “or” in “it winna be lang or”?
That’s the OED’s “or adverb1, preposition, & conjunction2”
The obligatory Shakespeare citation is
(ere = e’er)
I hedged because of the risk of overlooking a third instance of archaism-in-Standard-English.
@Hat: I misunderstood your “What about”.
No; e’er is ever (which used to mean “always” a lot, like its German yes-really-cognate immer), ere, meaning “before”, is the cognate of German eher which means “earlier” and “rather” in the north, just “rather” in the south; the positive ehe “before” also survives in written German (ere the cock croweth thrice = ehe der Hahn dreimal kräht).
No, JF is right. “Or ere Ile weepe” = “before ever I’ll weep.” The “ere” does indeed represent “e’er/ever.”
Uncontracted “or ever” is also a thing: KJV Ecclesiastes 12:6 goes
Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.
(The first “or” here does not mean the same as the latter three.)
It’s actually this “or” which is cognate to “eher.”
The spelling “or ere”, where it appears in later texts where spelling has been normalised, is in fact due to (a very natural) confusion with “ere” as in “ere I wake.”
Ah.
Possibly some words would have been clearer than an equation.
I believe Steven Robertson, who plays Sandy Wilson, is the only real Shetlander in the cast.
One of the Northlink ferries between Aberdeen and the Northern Isles is called ‘Hjaltland’. I’ve been to both Shetland and Orkney twice. I remember finding it slightly odd, on my first visit, to travel so far and find all the road signs etc. in English only, unlike the bilingual ones in Wales and the Gaelic-speaking Western Isles. The Norn language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norn_language died out too long ago to affect such things.
OK, there’s no real reason for bilingual signs, but I’m a little surprised no one has made them for the interest of tourists.
(Here in northern New Mexico, some thoroughfares have English names, some have Spanish names, and on Indigenous reservations, which are called pueblos, some have Tewa names, but I can’t think of any with more than one name on a sign. Signs in English and Spanish are common in many other situations.)
As of 30 years ago I was told that the nice then-new Gaelic signage in the Hebrides (some of which was monolingual to confuse the Saxons) had been installed via some EU grant money boondoggle. The Norn-enthusiasts should have pursued that funding route before Brexit made it less likely. Although maybe non-EU member Norway could use part of its oil money to fund that sort of thing in its lost outer possessions? (Plus a little irredentist vibe might give the authorities in London/Edinburgh more incentive to pay attention.)
In the clockwise list of place names I was waiting for Eliot Ness to appear.
Eliot Ness is said to be there, but it’s untouchable.
Eliot Ness was of Norwegian ancestry. His family name (not uncommon in Norway) and the English noun ness ‘cape, headland, promontory’ are cognates.
Not uncommon, but often written Næss as a surname. The eponymous farms and parishes are written Nes in modern (20th C.) spelling.
Shetland toponyms are fascinating and frustrating. Some elements are very transparent, others are completely opaque. The frustrating part is that they seem like something you should be able to recognize immediately.
Today, a Shetland word is featured on the OED’s rolling Recently Added list (should be in accessible to everyone for a while):
The DSL online has saxter aithe and twelter aithe in open access.
Interesting, thanks!
In the clockwise list of place names I was waiting for Eliot Ness to appear.
They should have named one of them Loch Ness, just to confuse the geographers.
lýritr
Samlagets Norrøn ordbok has this as the more transparent lýrittr (or lýréttr), glossed (in my translation) as “fully legal right; law of the land”. Most of the usage examples are for the dative lýritti, which generally gives the sense “legally; in accordance with the law”. The meaning “veto, interdict” seems to be extracted from (or perhaps contextually dependent on) constructions like láta koma lýrittr fyrir ~”use the law to stop”.