Dr. Hoskuldur Thrainsson

University of Iceland, Reykjavik

Writing in Your Own Language

Linguists are familiar with innumerable instances where some outsider, like a missionary or a linguist or both, has designed a writing system for a language where no writing tradition existed. In most cases we do not really know how the original decisions about spelling were made or  what the considerations were C and they may very well have been unconscious, based on some sort of linguistic intuition (such as it was) of those who set the standard. For (Old) Icelandic and (Modern) Faroese, on the other hand, we know quite a bit about how such decisions were made. In the so-called First Grammatical Treatise a 12th century Icelandic linguist describes in some detail how Old Icelandic should be spelled and why. Some 700 years later there was a considerable discussion among Scandinavian scholars, including some native Faroese, how Faroese should be spelled, since virtually nothing had been written in Faroese before that time, or at least not for some 400 years. In will describe this discussion in my talk and try to analyze the arguments in linguistic terms. I will show that some of the arguments were purely historical or etymological, others were morphophonemic in nature, still others phonetic and a few had to do with educational policy or even politics rather than linguistics. I will compare the Faroese discussion to some extent to the arguments offered in the First Grammatical Treatise and then try to evaluate modern Faroese spelling (which has remained virtually unchanged for some 150 years) in the light of the original discussion: How wise were the conscious decisions made in the 19th century about how the Faroese should write in their own language C or how can one tell?