Faroese language

Russian-Danish dictionary.

Faroese is an insular West Norse language. It is a language spoken by about 48,000 people on the Faroe Islands and about 12,000 in Denmark. It is one of two insular Nordic languages (the other being the Icelandic language). They have their origin in the old Norse that was spoken in the Scandinavian peninsula during the time of the Vikings. Although the written form has many similarities with Icelandic, the pronunciation differs significantly. The speakers of the Faroese language, however, have an easy time understanding and, above all, reading Icelandic.

History

Around 900, the language spoken in the Faroes was Old Norse, which had been brought over by Norse settlers during the time of the settlement or colonization of the Faroes (landnám) beginning in 825. However, many of the settlers were not from the Scandinavian countries, but descendants of the Norse settlers in the Irish Sea. Also, native Scandinavian settlers often married women from Northern Ireland, Orkney, Shetland, before settling in the Faroe Islands or Iceland. As a result, the Irish language influenced both Faroese and Icelandic. There is some debatable evidence of the Irish language in some names in the Faroes: for example, the names of Mykines, Stóra, Dímun and Lítla Dímun have been hypothetically of Celtic root.

Between the 11th century and XV, the Faroese language diverges, although it was likely that it was still mutually intelligible with Old West Norse and remained similar to the Norn language of Orkney and Shetland during the early stages of Norn's evolution.

Until the 15th century, Faroese had a similar spelling to Icelandic and Norwegian. After the Reformation, Danish prevailed, and Faroese was banned from schools, churches, and official documents. The inhabitants of the islands continued to use the language to compose ballads, popular stories and in everyday life. They preserved a rich tradition of oral history, but for 300 years this was not reflected in written texts.

As a written language, modern Faroese has only existed since Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb promoted a standard in 1854. Although this would have been a good opportunity to create an orthography based on the phonetic features of the language, as in Welsh, it produced a spelling which continued the written tradition of Old Norse. The letter ð, for example, was kept for etymological reasons, since it does not correspond to any specific phoneme (it is silent except in a few words where the combination "ðr" is pronounced "gr"). Furthermore, although the letter 'm' corresponds to the nasal bilabial consonant as it occurs in the English language, the dative suffix -inum, corresponds to the alveolar nasal 'n' as a consequence of a process of phonological assimilation.

Hammershaimb's grammar met with considerable opposition, due to its complexity, and Jakob Jakobsen proposed an alternative spelling, which was much closer to the spoken language but was not adopted by the speakers.

In 1937, Faroese became the official language of the Faroe Islands, replacing Danish.

Grammar

As a West Scandinavian language, Faroese is related to Icelandic and several of the West Norwegian dialects and developed from the language spoken by the Norwegians who colonized the islands around the XIX Although there are significant variants in pronunciation from island to island, there are no true dialectal variants. It is notable for its many diphthongs which it developed from the old simple vowels.

The name has strong and weak declensions, with three genders, two numbers, and four cases.

The independent definite article is hin in masculine and feminine and neuter hitt, with plural forms such as hinir, hinar , hini.

Numbering from 1 to 3 is declined: ein, tveir, tríggir; from 4 to 10: fyra, fimm, seks, sjey, átta, níggju, tíggju; 11 ellivu, 12 tólv, 20 tjúgu, 30 tríali, 40 fyrati.

Verbs have active, middle, and passive voices; indicative, subjunctive and imperative moods; There are eight tenses, including perfect, imperfect, pluperfect, future perfect, and past conditional. The present and imperfect tenses are simple; the others, compounds.

Third-person personal pronouns are gender-distinguishing. Singular: 1 eg, 2 you, 3 hann, hon; plural 1 vit, 2 tit, 3 teir, toer, tey. The masculine and feminine demonstrative is tann. The relative pronoun is sum.

Sentence order is subject, verb, and object.