Skriða og skryðja og nogle andre jordskredsverber i færøsk

Abstract

This article discusses the Faroese verb skryðja ‘to move or roll down (as in a mountain or landslide)’, a word of interest both orthographically and semantically. In Færøsk Antho­logi (Hammershaimb 1891), the form is spelled skryðja, whereas in Lexicon Færoense (Grundtvig & Bloch 1877–1888) it appears as skriða. The orthographic variation reflects the merger of long y and i into [iː] in Faroese.

The word is also noteworthy because the 1961 edition of the Faroese-Danish Dictionary (Jacobsen & Matras 1961) introduced a new secondary meaning, ‘to boast, brag’, which was later withdrawn after being identified as an error.
The article further notes that the earliest Faroese dictionary (Svabo’s Dictionarium Færoense) records only the landslide-related sense of skryðja, whereas later dictionaries also include the meaning ‘to grind coarsely (on a mill)’ (Poulsen et al. 1998; Hansen & Joensen 2010); this is likely due to a mistake in Svabo’s entry.

In addition to the forms skriða and skryðja, which form the main focus of the dis­cus­sion, three Old Norse verbs with related meanings are examined: ryðja ‘to slide (down), fall’, skríða ‘to stride, glide’ (Hansen & Joensen 2010), and hrynja ‘to collapse, fall, tumble down’ (https://old-norwegian-dictionary.vercel.app/word/hrynja). The last of these, hrynja, is not found in modern Faroese but is attested in the neighbouring languages.

The article concludes by arguing that the proper spelling of the word should be skriða.

The alternation skr- and kr-/r- in words like skryðja and ryðja can be explained as s-mobile, which means that a root with r- in initial position can produce an expressive form with skr-.