152 PRINCE— THE FAEROE LANGUAGE. 



by the recent declaration of the independence of Iceland (1918). The 

 Faeroe movement, however, is not a political one, as there are few 

 if any persons in the islands who desire a " national " existence apart 

 from Denmark. The activity should rather be compared with the 

 Welsh language movement in Wales and Monmouthshire. In the 

 Faeroes the tendency is to crystallize the language by taking the most 

 characteristic elements of the two most important dialectic groups — 

 i.e., the northern and the southern — and consolidating them into a 

 " language," which shall form a standard for the whole group. It is 

 perhaps unfortunate for this purpose that the orthography of the 

 older literary Faeroese Norse, whose chief monument was the Fae- 

 reyinga Saga (translated by F. Yorke Powell, London, 1896), is 

 essentially that of Icelandic, while the actual modern Faeroese pro- 

 nunciation differs so widely from that of modern Iceland that Faerings 

 and Icelanders are today mutually unintelligible. In spite of this 

 fact, however, conservative Faering scholars insist upon retaining 

 the earlier impracticable spelling. A new orthography was promul- 

 gated in 1895 by the Foringafelag (Faeroe Society), but this system 

 is far from satisfactory from a phonetic point of view. At the 

 present day, a new school has arisen which is inclined to spell almost 

 entirely in accordance with the actual utterance of the people, but 

 their system is not followed, for example, by the local newspaper 

 TJiingakrossur.* A striking parallel to this state of affairs may be 

 seen in the stereotyped archaic spelling of the modern Gaelic, observed 

 both in Ireland and Scotland, which quite ignores the real modern 

 phonetics of the spoken dialects. 



It is quite apparent that the Faeroese phonetics have suffered much 

 from contact with Danish, which is phonetically very degenerate, even 

 when compared with the Norwegian-Danish pronunciation of the 

 same language. The Norwegians utter almost every consonant 

 clearly and have not marred their idiom with the Danish glottal catch, 



2 See bibliography in this article. 



* A word indicating the cross which in former times was sent from house 

 to house, to summon the men to the Thing (law-making assembly). This 

 paper is rather radical, but very mildly so from the present European point 

 of view. The conservative organ is Dimmalaetthig ' the lifting of the dark- 

 ness.' 



