Faroe Islands Linguist Translates Ancient Words Into New

Prof. Johan Hendrik W. Poulsen hasn’t made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but he has made a computer screen out of a sheep’s stomach.

Poulsen is a linguist at the tiny university in these islands midway between Iceland and Scotland. And he’s a leader of efforts to revitalize the Faroese language by developing words to describe things that didn’t exist when Denmark suppressed the language some 500 years ago.

One day, while gazing at his computer, Poulsen was hit with a perfect term for the screen. He thought of skiggi , the sheep’s stomachs that once were stretched across the smoke holes of ancient sod-roofed cabins to keep out the rain and let in light.

As the Faroes are now prosperous with all the modern conveniences, “I felt I did the word no harm by giving it a new meaning,” Poulsen said.

After he presented the word on his popular show on the government radio station, it became widely used.

The easiest route to finding a new word would be to borrow it from another language, but that would rankle the pride of the Faroes’ 47,000 people, who consider their 18 small islands a nation even though they are part of Denmark.

Vikings brought the old Norse language to this rainy archipelago in the 800s. The language absorbed some of the words of the Celts whom the Vikings drove out and it developed other idiosyncrasies. The Danes who gradually gained control of the islands regarded Faroese as a dialect of ignorant peasants and established Danish as the official language in the 1400s.

The suppression is felt even now, nearly 50 years after the Faroes were granted home rule and established their language as the official tongue of government--although Danish is still a mandatory subject in schools.

The Faroese regard their most widely known author, William Heinesen, with discomfort because he wrote in Danish. There are Faroese-English and Faroese-Danish dictionaries, but no book telling the people about their language in their own tongue.

Nevertheless, Faroese has proved to be as hardy as the people who raise sheep on the treeless, volcanic islands and fish the stormy North Atlantic.

Unlike Icelanders with their sagas, the old Faroese wrote nothing--even the Faroes Saga was written in Iceland. Instead, the Faroese passed along their language to subsequent generations orally, most notably in kvaethi , poems that are sung to accompany the islanders’ trancelike chain dancing.

The 70,000 verses of the kvaethi provided the Faroese with a vocabulary adroit at describing sheep, loneliness and legendary heroes, but lacking words for modern developments like compact discs and colleges.

When the Faroes established a college in 1965, the founders reached back 1,000 years to find a word to describe it.

The only word that seemed to fit was the one for knowledge, Poulsen said. So they modified it to “knowledge-seat of the Faroes”--Frothskaparsettur Foroya.

That’s an unwieldy construction, Poulsen concedes, “but the corners of such words are worn off with time.”

This is more than linguistic sleight of hand; to the Faroese, it’s an essential way of reclaiming their identity.

Gesturing in the direction of Britain’s Shetland Islands some 200 miles to the east, Poulsen offers a pitying theory: The Shetlanders, when their islands were given to Britain as part of a royal dowry, abandoned their Norse language and “lost their zest.”

“When the Faroes was 8,000 people, the Shetlands had 30,000. Now they have 20,000 and we have grown, even though the Shetlands has much better land,” he said.

So his search continues for new words.

When compact discs first appeared, Poulsen bet they would soon become ubiquitous--and in need of a Faroese name.

After rejecting several possibilities, he thought of how compressed haystacks are cut into cylindrical sections to make transporting the hay easier. Such a section is called a floge . He added the word hljom , a prefix that can mean harmony or sound, and now an audiophile in the Faroes can fill his home with music from a hljomfloge .

Poulsen is not content to give his countrymen a few words. His goal is 70,000--in a dictionary that he and his colleagues are preparing for publication in 1995.

Not only will it provide the islanders with a long-desired cultural cornerstone, it will be an invaluable guide to those bewildered by Faroese pronunciation.

For instance, skiggi is pronounced SKOO-chi and the town of Eidi is OH-yeh.

But hljomfloge is a breeze--just say it the way it looks.