Lord's Prayer in Orkney Nynorn

[Hnolt]

[Hnolt]

[Kråka]

[Klüver]

Well, Hnolt, while that may be true, it could also just be a trick used by skalds of the time. Kinda like Nightwish did in the song Amaranth:

"cAress the one..." (instead of the proper "carEss the one...")

The Shetlandic example you give screams English influence. "lavErnee" is "totally" how I'd expect an English speaker (or maybe a Scots speaker, since I have virtually no experiences with it) to mispronounce líverni.

[Hnolt]

[Hnolt]

[Klüver]

Well, if stress was moved from short vowels in first syllables, then surely this vowel would first reduce and then disappear. I'm thinking about the Old Norse cognate to German genug: gnógr, which then later became nógr in all the daughter languages. (Unless Icelandic retains an archaic *gnógur).

[Hnolt]