Why do Linguists love Icelandic?
01 September 2005
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It's too bad that pop singer Bjork does most of her songs in English rather than her native tongue. Icelandic is a really interesting language with sounds not heard in most of the other major languages of the world.
Icelandic and English are related. They are both Germanic lanuages, but there have been so many changed over time you would have to be a linguist to know it. Speakers of Old English could understand the ancestor of modern Icelandic, but as one of the Icelandic tales puts it, our languages were mutually intelligible until the coming of WIlliam the Bastard.
The Icelanders evidently did not like William, who most of us call William the Conquerer.
Of the two languages, it was English that changed. Old Norse, the Viking language, is not much different now than when the Vikings came to Iceland in the ninth century. Think about that. We need a college course to get us through the Old English poem Beowulf but 1,100 years later, a modern Icelander can still read stories of the Middle Ages with ease and without a dictionary. The pronunciation of the language has changed through the years, but not much else has. Why is that?
Well, one way languages change is that the endings of words can disappear. Think of the -st ending in English words such as though hast. Icelandic did not lose many of its early forms mostly because its speakers lived for centuries in relative isolation, not much influenced by other languages.
It makes it harder to learn if you are not an Icelander because the grammar is rich and complex. But that is one of the reasons linguists love it. It offers a window on the early Germanic past.
The Icelanders love it, too, and want to keep their language just the way it is. There is, of course, pressure to change it for reasons of global communication, but Icelanders resist. Instead of adopting modern terms like telephone or telegraph, as German does -- "das telephone, das telegraf" -- the Icelanders create new vocabulary from native words or parts of words. For example, a telephone is a "talseeme" -- that is, "speech wire". And telegraph is "ritseeme" or "writewire".
They are constantly producing dictionaries to provide Icelandic terms for new words from abroad. The language is also traditional in the way most Icelanders name their children. Kids usually get their names from their father's name, not from the family. So a son named Erikor whose father's name was Harrot would be called Erikor Harroson.
If Hannot's daughter's name were Fergus Harrosdaughter. Harroson and Harrosdaughter. And when you look them up in the phone book you will find Erikor and Fergus listed under their first names.
I love the way Icelandic sounds. Listen.
[Icelandic language clip.]
That comes from one of Iceland's most famous poems, Valuspa, the Song of the Sybil.
Maybe because of long winter nights Icelanders read more books per capita than any other people in the world. Their ancient poetry, the so-called "Eddas", and their ancient prose, the sagas, are where much of the early history of the country is preserved. One of the reasons you might want to read the sagas is that they record the first discoveries of America, which the Vikings called Vinland. Read the saga of Leif Erikkson or the saga of Erik the Red for details.
No, Columbus was not the first to discover America. And honestly the ancient Icelanders may not have been either. But they were the first to write it down. And now they are out in paperback. That's the linguistic thought for the day which comes from Dr. Pardee Lowe Jr. of Falls Church, VA. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston in cooperation of the National Museum of Language. Visit us at www.cofc.edu/linguist. In the meantime keep in mind that wherever you are and whatever you do ... language makes a difference.