Faroese musings

Edd (ð)
Ð is a strange letter in Faroese. It is only there because Icelandic has it, but it is never pronounced. That is, sometimes it indicates a weird type of linking sound, and there are allomorphic alternations with d (as in deyður 'dead' - deydlingur 'dead body'), but in general it's just there for its prettiness value. This results in Faroese people having no idea where to spell it and where not to:

• In the centre of Tórshavn, there's a big rectangle painted on a wall where kids play football. In the rectangle it says MÁLÐ (correct: mál 'goal'). Someone has scribbled a question mark there, with an arrow to the Ð, but it's been there for ages, and it's sort of become an iconic symbol of either silly Faroese spelling rules or of Faroese schoolkids not mastering those rules.


• When we were having lunch in one of Tórshavn's fine establishments at Ólavsøka 2004, the menu read MATSKRÁÐ. Again, the correct form is without a ð, matskrá 'menu' (literally 'food list'). We (and with 'we' I mean 'I') scribbled out the Ð but I doubt it had any effect.


• The writing on the van that belongs to the Faroese natural history museum reads Náttúragripasavni. This should have a ð on the end.

Right, so much for the introduction. Misplaced ðs sometimes lead to some confusion or amusement, this much is clear. But the example I spotted this morning takes the cake. In an article on the main (free) Faroese news website about the musical influences for some 80s Faroese rock band that are making a comeback (heaven help us), it said one of them was Uriað Heap. Right.

Syntactic change
Less interesting maybe is an example of syntactic change in progress. I like Faroese because the verb to like doesn't take a subject, it only takes an experiencer and a patient object. (To love on the other hand takes an agent subject and a patient object. Spot the semantic difference.) So usually you would get:

Mær dámar tónleikin
me.dat like.3sg music-acc.def
'I like the music'

But on the same page as the Uriað Heap thing, in the list of current chat topics:

Hví dáma fólk betur pen enn ljót menniskjur?
why like.pl people.ntr.nom.pl better pretty.ntr.acc.pl than ugly.ntr.acc.pl person.ntr.acc.pl?
'Why do people like pretty people better than ugly people?'

Assigning case to these is a bit dodgy, as Faroese has nominative-accusative syncretism in neuter (as, in fact, all Indo-European). But fólk is definitely not the dative it should be (fólkum), and moreover, the verb agrees with a plural subject likely to be fólk rather than being impersonal and in the 3rd person singular.

Hví dámar fólkum betur pen enn ljót menniskjur?

This is not spectacular or anything. It's been going on for a while, and the same thing happened to impersonal verbs in mainland Scandinavian, Dutch and English (me thinks, for example), but it's still cool to see some syntactic change in action.