Morshus

The name

When we acquired our first Internet connection in 1998, the provider only allowed account names up to 8 characters in length. Panicking, our choice became the nickname of the old bunker from World War 2, that still stood in the garden of our residence. It was called “morshúsið” in Faroese, which translates to “the Morse house” in English.

Pun intended, “morshus” also translates to “mom’s house” in Danish, which was true with Lis’ grandmother being owner of the house. So this old signalling bunker, turned satellite and antenna platform (plus hen house), now also became the symbol of our Internet venture. More for Lis, because of the “mom” issue.

Us

We’re a happy couple, Lis & Rókur, with four beautiful children. We have our own house now, not that far from the old Morse house. Daddy is a computer programmer/consultant, and mom is a school teacher. The kids are too young to care, with the oldest being 10 years old now, and the youngest only 6 months old. We’re not terribly rich, but not poor either. And there are no animals trying to eat us outside. Even the mosquitoes are too small to bite.

Our country

The Faroe Isles is an autonomous region of Denmark, located about halfway between Norway and Iceland in the North Atlantic Ocean. The population is approximately 50.000 people, but we speculate that there at any given moment are about the same number of Faroese residing outside the Faroe Islands, as on the isles. Typically studying in Denmark, sailing on the seven seas, or just choosing to live somewhere else.

Our language

Faroese is a derivative of the old Norse language, more similar to Icelandic than Norwegian. It has with time been influenced by Danish; but there is a better chance that an untrained Icelandic person understands Faroese, than a similar Dane. Next-to all Faroese inhabitants use Faroese as their primary language, while also being fluent in Danish or a Danish/Norwegian/Swedish hybrid called ‘Nordic’, and able to get by in English, German and maybe French too. You need to know languages, if only 50.000 speak your own.

This site

The primary mission of this site is to provide our family members here and abroad an easy access to our photo albums. We have close relatives in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and at sea, not so close in other countries, and the rest spread around our 18 islands.

The secondary mission is to list up the projects that we’re involved with on the Internet. They are mostly translation efforts, where we translate software from English to Faroese, with good help from relatives and friends. But mayb there will be other stuff too, maybe some blog rant, and maybe we’ll post a guide or two, on how to translate.

The third mission is to test WordPress. Daddy loves to play with Content Management Systems, and WordPress is therefore just another system to try out, alongside Joomla and Pligg and Drupal and Blogger and …

All the best

Lis Gøthe & Rókur í Jákupsstovu