Megalithic shipping and trade routes

[Boreades]

After a long pause for neurons to bump, mention of Amber reminded me of some curiosities in East Anglia, and places like Great Yarmouth.

Amber beads were common throughout Bronze Age Europe.You can find amber on the beaches of East Anglia UK. The top piece in the photograph above was found at Great Yarmouth on the east coast of England.

http://gwydir.demon.co.uk/jo/minerals/amber.htm

As I'm stuck in the South West, I'll leave this to others like Mick who are further east. They can roll up their trouser legs and start wading along the beach at Great Yarmouth.

Michael Line revisions?

[Boreades]

Norn the language.

Norn, the mysterious 6th Scandinavian language that was spoken in Shetland, Orkney and part of Scotland until the 18-19th centuries, when it was replaced with Scots English.

http://nornlanguage.x10.mx/

More slow neuron-bumping.

One might naively have assumed that Norn is equivalent to Norwegian. But I had forgotten a lesson from my children's Norwegian Godmother. That there is not just one Norwegian language. What most Brits would perceive as "Norwegian" now is the "lowland" Danish-Norwegian, spoken by the majority of Norwegians, a result of c.400 years of Danish rule in Norway. Danish was used in courts of law and the cultured elite. But rural Norwegians, on the West coast and the middle-north (the "highlanders") still speak a different language nowadays known as Nynorsk.

Where she lives, on the west coast north of Bergen, Nynorsk is common. When she goes to work in Oslo, she has to change her language so that she doesn't get taken for a country bumpkin. A bit like when I go to work in London, or me talking to Mike.

So, probably, Norn = Nynorsk

Further north, the native language changes again to Sami languages, more like Finnish.

[Boreades]

Not sure what that does for candidates for a Doggerland language. Any suggestions?

[Mick Harper]

But I had forgotten a lesson from my children's Norwegian Godmother. That there is not just one Norwegian language. What most Brits would perceive as "Norwegian" now is the "lowland" Danish-Norwegian,

Borry, you've fallen for the oldest trick in the book. What we (and the Norwegians) call "Norwegian" is in fact Swedish. But when Norway became independent from Sweden in 1906, they changed its name to Norwegian. In honour of your children, this manoeuvre is henceforth to be known as "Godmother's Footsteps".

[Boreades]

Godmother says she doesn't understand Swedish.

Godmother must be telling me Nynorsk Porkies then?

[Mick Harper]

Oh well, maybe I've been foxed by some ultra-revisionists. It happens. Perhaps you might check with your godmother rather more specifically -- there's a good bit of 'careful denial' in this area.

[TisILeclerc]

Nynorsk, Nynorsk, what a wonderful smogesbord of red and pickled herrings.

I once heard a young lady speaking to a group of trainee interpreters from various countries. She tried to describe, in English, the development of Norwegian. They became very confused.

The confusion seems to be based around nationalist language campaigners trying to develop a 'real Norwegian' to get away from Danish and Swedish. As they were scholars this appears to have had a great influence on literary Norwegian. We have had spelling reformers in English as well. They tried teaching schoolchildren at one time using a different spelling system I believe.

After the personal union with Sweden was dissolved in 1905, both languages were developed further and reached what is now considered their classic forms after a reform in 1917. Riksmål was in 1929 officially renamed Bokmål (literally "Book language"), and Landsmål to Nynorsk (literally "New Norwegian"). A proposition to substitute Danish-Norwegian (dansk-norsk) for Bokmål lost in parliament by a single vote. The name Nynorsk, the linguistic term for Modern Norwegian, was chosen for contrast to Danish and emphasis on the historical connection to Old Norwegian. Today this meaning is often lost, and it is commonly mistaken as a "new" Norwegian in contrast to the "real" Norwegian Bokmål.

Bokmål and Nynorsk were made closer by a reform in 1938. This was a result of a state policy to merge Nynorsk and Bokmål into one language, called "Samnorsk" (Common Norwegian). A 1946 poll showed that this policy was supported by 79% of Norwegians at the time. However, opponents of the official policy still managed to create a massive protest movement against Samnorsk in the 1950s, fighting in particular the use of "radical" forms in Bokmål text books in schools. In the reform in 1959, the 1938 reform was partially reversed in Bokmål, but Nynorsk was changed further towards Bokmål. Since then Bokmål has reverted even further toward traditional Riksmål, while Nynorsk still adheres to the 1959 standard. Therefore, a small minority of Nynorsk enthusiasts uses a more conservative standard called Høgnorsk. The Samnorsk policy had little influence after 1960, and was officially abandoned in 2002.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_language

I imagine the language spoken in the Orkney area would have reflected the illiterate Norse dialects of that period and would have been similar to that spoken in Iceland and the Faroes.

In moving westwards Norse had to come to terms with other languages it encountered as well as the isolation it underwent as it became split from its original homeland. Norwegian at home had the influence of other Nordic languages to affect it. Once across the sea the settlers would have had to come to terms with others in order to understand each other.

In the Hebrides it merged in with the local Gaelic languages. On the east coast it would have arguably been affected with local languages which may well have had a Germanic base to them. In this situation it could have survived as Norn.

[Mick Harper]

Clearly there's a deal of deliberate obfuscation going on here. I think I'll stand pat unless Godmother waves her wand more vigorously. By the way always look out for this

In the Hebrides it merged in with the local Gaelic languages.

This is a common dodge used by linguists trying to ... um ... obfuscate. Since Gaelic and Norse (whichever variety) don't have a single word in common it is hardly possible to merge them. They might exchange a few loan-words but otherwise you either speak one or the other or both but not a merged version of the two. Well, you might when a child of bilingual parents but that's about it. When you grow up you speak one or the other or either depending on who you are talking to. Do they speak Wenglish on the Welsh borders?

What the phrase "merged" means is that one language squeezed out the other but for some reason (see THOBR) linguists don't want to say so.

[TisILeclerc]

There are several words in Gaelic that came from Norse.

The Gaelic language survived and Norse didn't. The settlers became Gaels and took up the Gaelic language. Norse was too much of a minority language to survive intact.

In Shetland and Orkney it survived in whatever form Norn was. I think that could have been because other languages in the area may have been descended from similar languages to Norse.

Back in Norway the language was still influenced by its surrounding languages.

We are told that the Picts in eastern Scotland spoke a 'P' Celtic language. This is because the assumption is that the British Isles were uniformly Celtic speaking.

Cumbric British was spoken from Dunbarton down to Cumbria. We do not know what language Pictish was and nobody has been able to translate the small samples of the language carved into stones. It is assumed that it is somehow related to the British language on no evidence except the assumption that everybody spoke 'Celtic'.

A book was published about twenty years ago claiming that it was a Norwegian language but that was dismissed out of hand by the academics.

We talk about a linguistic boundary in Britain running north south. To the west they speak Welsh and Gaelic. To the east English and Scots. If Britain was uniformly Celtic at one point we must assume that the boundary finished at the east coast.

But what about when Doggerland was still land? Where did the boundary finish then? Did the Celts stick to an imaginary coast line on the east coast? I would think they would have gone further east. At some point they must have come across German speakers.

Or German speakers occupied Doggerland and whatever lands to the east and west they could occupy. When the seas came in those on the British mainland were then isolated from their relatives in the east.

[Mick Harper]

In Shetland and Orkney it survived in whatever form Norn was. I think that could have been because other languages in the area may have been descended from similar languages to Norse.

I don't buy this either. Linguists are always fond of creating language groups (which is fair enough at the academic level) but these groups do not affect actual, real people. You don't adopt French because you already speak Italian. No matter how closely related these languages are, the one cannot speak to the other.

When Italian-speaking Nice was ceded to France, the French just made sure the inhabitants ended up speaking French pretty much by fiat -- which you can do if the population is small enough and the State is determined enough. The principle enshrined in THOBR is that people just go on speaking their unchanging language until and unless they are replaced (by inter-marriage or otherwise) by a different set of language-speakers.

At the other end of the spectrum of course, vide Sweden and Norway, governments may push one language into two and this may be the position in Scotland where |(I am given to understand) Scots Gaelic really is just Irish Gaelic with nobs on.