Hi everyone,
I joined this forum because of an old interest in Norn and Scandinavian languages in general. As far as I can remember I acquired an interest in the Faroe Islands already as a child, because my grandfather visited this country.
I must have been around 13 years old when I came across a book, "Shetland - en rejse i fortid og nutid" by Asger Møller. I think it's still the only monographic description of Shetland in Danish. It's actually a terrible book, a mixture of personal experiences, romantic ideas about a glorious viking past, anger about Scottish "oppression", plus a perceived "Danishness" of these islands, and so on.
In spite of the book's obvious flaws it awoke an interest in Shetland in me, next to my main interest in the Faroes. Since I've always been a bit of a language freak, I found the chapter about Norn intriguing, and I've always tried to gain more knowledge about it. Therefore, I was very happy to find this website.
I've been studying both history and general and comparative linguistics, and I'm still not finished. I hope maybe to combine these disciplines in my Master's degree.
My main interest in Norn is about what can be reconstructed of the phonology, grammar and lexicon. Apart from codifying the language in a phonological script I can also see the idea of devising a "proper" orthography, partly in order to codify the preserved texts for philologists, and partly in order to make a unifying orthography covering all dialects.
For philological purposes I might personally prefer a more etymological spelling of Norn, including letters like á, é, ó, hj-, as long as the inference from letters to sound is unambiguous (but not necessarily the other way round since that would be a phonological script). But I'm not here to start a Cornish orthography strife
The next step, constructing a contemporary language by filling in missing conjugations and lexical items by looking at neighbouring languages, is also interesting to me, and although I think that from a scientific point of view it's always good to be conscious about when one undertakes the scientific task of recontructing a language from known sources and when it's rather the creative task of further constructing a language from one's own ideas, these things certainly don't exclude each other.
I also have a blog, [url]ordinord.blogspot.com[/url], where I occasionally write about Scandinavian subjects in Scandinavian. In my opinion, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are three dialects of a single language, and I devised an orthography for each of them, which I use in the blog, in order to eliminate all differences that are only due to different spelling traditions. Since only differences reflecting pronunciation differences remain, I argue that, like Bokmål and Nynorsk, these are forms of the same language.
My own knowledge about Norn is limited, but I will pop in here from time to time, mainly to ask questions. Feel free to ask me questions too. My other sparetime project is to devise a common North Frisian orthography covering all dialects.
My languages: Native: Scandinavian. Speak well: English, German. Speak acceptably: French. Read well: Faroese, North Frisian. Read some: Icelandic, Dutch, Romanian. Theoretical knowledge: Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, Gothic.
Troels Peter Roland