The Island in the Stream

“A æ u å æ ø i æ å, æ i å u å æ ø i æ å”

This famous Jutlandish phrase was brought in a recent LanguageHat article comment and to add and thus decipher it more fully, we will - in this quickie - without further a-due proceed:

Literally it is "I am out on an island in a stream, are ye also on an island in a stream?"

Breaking it further apart we get:

A = "I," the first person singular in most if not all of Jutland, deriving ultimately from Old Norse ak, whence Standard Danish jeg through jak derives. Likewise the English "I" and even more ancient "Ic," is cognate to them by way of Proto Germanic which is the ancestral language of both Old Norse and Old English. Norwegian dialects also have "æ", a direct descendant of ak.

Æ represents in this phrase two words, ær (or er, the present indicative of "at være", to be) and the definite article æ, derived from Old Danish þæn, close kindred of English the.

The verb "er" is strictly speaking derived from the third person singular rather than the first person singular since Danish long ago dropped most of its cases based on grammatical number and person and instead boiled it down to "er," whereas Danish used to have up until the middle of the 20th century "ere" the plural present indicative, corresponding to English "are."

The definite article is of much older heritage. Whereas most Germanic languages still have retained the pre-positioned definite article, i.e. German "der/die/das", the Scandinavian languages have the definite ending, based off the post-positioning of the article thæn. In Swedish there is double definite forms versus the "singular" definiteness of Danish.

Taking care of the rest: "Å" represents a preposition, "å" as in "on" or "upon" and "å" means stream or brooklet. "Ø" means "island. "U" is a shortened form of "ud" meaning "out." "I" is the Standard Danish second person plural, hence my choice for translating it as "ye" for the sake of clarity even if it sounds archaic.