According to genealogical tradition, the ancestors of
the Vikings that settled in the Hebrides and the
Highlands were from More and neighboring provinces of
Norway. These were also the ancestors of the settlers
of Orkney, Shetland and the Normans, In any case this
is where the elite came from. They were supposedly
fleeing Harald Fairhair. I don't know if this
qualifies as N Norwegian or not. Many of the founding
families of Iceland sojourned in Scotland for a
generation or more before moving on to Iceland.
From what you say, unless this is a Uralic trait, I
guess the source was Saami --given that it supposedly
has a strong non Uralic substrate that is said to
account for a fourth of its vocabulary. I've wondered
if there is any substrate lexicon common to both Saami
and Germanic.
Another thing that I believe that Scots Gaelic and
Scandinavian languages have in common is <nn> as /dn/
--- "Brian M. Scott" <
BMScott@...> wrote:
> At 5:35:53 PM on Sunday, July 8, 2007, Rick
> McCallister
> wrote:
>
> > I've read that Scots Gaelic and Icelandic are the
> only
> > languages in Northern or Western Europe to devoice
> > voiced stops and aspirate unvoiced stops. Is this
> > true?
>
> I believe that Icelandic, Scottish Gaelic, Faroese,
> Saami,
> Finland Swedish, and some northern Norwegian (and
> possibly
> Swedish) dialects are the only languages in NW
> Europe with
> normatively preaspirated stops.
>
> The most common view seems to be that preaspiration
> goes
> back to PScand., and that Saami and ScGael. got it
> from
> Scand. However, I've also seen it maintained that
> Saami is
> the source.
>
> Brian
>
>
>
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