At 2:25:15 AM on Saturday, September 11, 2010,
CalecM@... wrote:

> Sva' sagði Þorkell oss Gellisson.

> It seems really odd to me that the name should be split up
> in this fashion. Is this unusual or common?

I don't offhand recall having seen this particular kind of
discontinuity before, but in general Old Norse noun phrases
are prone to discontinuity, and their elements may be quite
far from one another in the sentence, with other elements
intervening. Here are a couple of examples. In each case
the Old Norse sentence is given first, with the
discontinuous noun phrase capitalized; this is followed by a
word-for-word translation, which is followed by an idiomatic
translation. (In the second word-for-word translation,
'COMP' stands for 'complementizer', referring to the
particle <er>; it's a function word, with the function of
introducing a complement, and it doesn't really have any
intrinsic lexical meaning.)

MAÐR gekk í lyptingina í rauðum krytli MIKILL OK VASKLIGR.

'Man went onto poop-deck-the in red tunic large and manly'

A large and valiant-looking man in a red tunic came up
onto the poop-deck.



Er MENN váru út dregnir FLESTIR, gekk maðr út í dyrrnar.

'COMP men were out dragged most, went man out into doorway'

When most men had been dragged out, a man went out into
the doorway.

So splitting the noun phrase <Þorkell Gellisson> isn't
really all that odd.

Brian