Re: The country of Brasael, and language of Brasaelig

On Thu, 29 Jul 2004 19:30:00 +0200, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>
wrote:

>Keith Gaughan wrote:
>
>> Seeing as I haven't posted anything non-IB related in quite a while, I
>> thought I'd mention an idea that's been kicking around my head for a
>> while that I started fiddling again with yesterday.
>>
>> I've mentioned on this list and on CONLANG before that I've intended for
>> a while to create a descendant language of a hypothetical Old
>> Gaelic/Norse creole spoken by the descendants of Irish and Viking
>> settlers in what is here the NE US, part of Quebec, and Newfoundland.
>>
>> I never really did anything about it seeing as I had difficulty sourcing
>> enough material on Old Norse at the time (though it recently occurred to
>> me that Icelandic would be close enough),
>
>Hey you are stealing my idea! :)
Nah, it's just a matter of great minds! :-)

>I was placing the thing on Man though, and had problems with the Old
>Irish sources rather than the Norse ones.
Being Irish, having a reasonable comprehension, and a nice shiny copy of
Thurneysen helped with the Irish, but not with the Norse. There's also
piles of text on the UCC CELT site, which helps with the Irish.

> Wad we known we could have co-operated!
Could still be done! There might be two such communities, one on Man, and
the other on NE North America. They both would have faced different
forces, and it might be interesting to see how the two would diverge from a
similar cultural base.

>> Next came surnames, and this is what I wrote:
>>
>> Surnames come in several forms. First is the patronymic. Patronymics
>> follow the pattern of name of the father, followed by either -issen or
>> -ismag for males, and -istodar for females. Use of -issen or -ismag is
>> dependant on community, and what the father used. -issen is more common
>> amongst communities originally founded by norse settlers, whereas -ismag
>> is typically used in Gaelic. -istodar is used universally. Examples:
>>
>>     Padarissen   or  Padarismag   and  Padaristodar
>>     Aenderissen  or  Aenderismag  and  Aenderistodar
>>     Aenrigissen  or  Aenrigismag  and  Aenrigistodar
>
>Is there any reason why the _-son_ becomes weakened?
>It never does in Icelandic, and _-sen_ looks outright Danish!
Error on my part. -sen should be -saen. It's a shift forward I meant, not
a weakening.

>> Another is where a family has adopted the name of a benefactor or
>> leader. In this case, the joining preposition 'gola' (from the Irish
>> 'giolla', meaning 'follower, servant') meaning 'in service of' is used.
>> Example: 'Iaan gola Padarissen' = 'John in-service-of Peter's son'. This
>> form is quite common, and does not imply thralldom.
>
> In Old Norse or Icelandic a patronymic like Pétursson is *never ever*
> used without the accompanying first name.  The reason is that the
> patronymic is not seen as a real name, but merely as a label.
My thought on that is that such a usage came about when Brasaelic Norse
usage started to mirror that of the Brasaelic Gaels, whereby the patronymic
*did* become a real name, typically used by all the members of a clan. The
earlier usage might have been something like "Iaan gola Aerig", becoming
"Iaan gola Aerigissaen" later.

K.