From the time I started learning languages other than English, there has been one language that I have wanted to learn more than any other. It is not a language that is spoken anymore, and largely it has been relegated to the realms of academia who specialize in Norse Anthropology and Scandinavian linguistics. However it is a language that has had a massive influence on English, and it was perhaps the dominant foreign language influence on English until the Norman conquest of 1066 when French took over.
That language is Old Norse.
This language, the language of the Vikings, is a major bucket list language for me. Yet I am not currently learning Old Norse because resources for learning the language are relatively few and mostly text books. Instead I have started to learn the language which is closest to Old Norse today, Icelandic.
Icelandic is very similar to Old Norse in many ways. In fact modern Icelandic speakers can read Old Norse pretty easily... Akin to a modern English speaker reading Shakespeare.
I had been learning Norwegian up until recently, but one day I was watching one of Professor Jackson Crawford's excellent videos on Old Norse and how they relate to modern Scandinavian languages. In the video he talked about how close Icelandic and Old Norse are and it made me think "Why don't I just bite the bullet and learn Icelandic?" Rather than my former plan of going Norwegian - Icelandic - Old Norse. It sounds like a good plan to me! I will come back to Norwegian later!
Why not go straight to Old Norse? Good question!
An important aspect of my language learning is speaking with native speakers of my target language. There are no native Old Norse speakers, but there are native Icelandic speakers. So my thought is that it will be much easier to jump from Icelandic to Old Norse than to just try learning a dead language... We will see how that goes.
So, Icelandic! I have been studying for a few weeks now and it is a gorgeous language and fun to learn. Having a bit of Norwegian under my belt has been a huge help; the words are not completely alien to me.
For instance:
Norwegian - Hva heter du?
Icelandic - Hvað heitir þú?
English - What is your name?.
Norwegian - Ser du fuglen?
Icelandic - Sérðu fuglinn?
English - Do you see the bird?
Norwegian - Jeg er fra Island.
Icelandic - Ég er frá Íslandi.
English - I am from Iceland.
You can see pretty clearly that Icelandic and Norwegian are related, and a closer look will show how related the two are with English. One "Ah-ha" moment I had when studying Norwegian that also applies to Icelandic is the way question phrases work. Look at the phrase I wrote above.
Icelandic - Sérðu fuglinn?
Norwegian - Ser du fuglen?
English - Do you see the bird?
Ok so let's break these sentences down and then we will get to my "Ah-ha" moment.
If you compare the sentences to English you can fairly easily connect the words together, but two words seem to be missing in both cases.
Do - you - see - the - bird
*** - du - Ser - en - fugl
*** - ðu - Sér - inn - fugl
So you can see there is no word for "do" and "The" is tagged onto the end of the noun "bird". This article difference is a grammatical construct I first encountered in when I began studying Norwegian. In a lot of ways having the article as a noun suffix us easier for me that having to memorize or feel out whether I needed to be using "Le", "la", or "les" in French. Although it seems strange to not use a separate article like we do in English and most other romance and Germanic languages, it has not do far been a problem for me. It's just something you get used to.
There is also no "do" word in that sentence. At first glance this seems really strange, but this is where my "Ah-ha" moment comes in.
In modern English the verb "to do" is one of the most important and used verbs in our day to day speech.
Do you have time to talk?
Do you want some lunch?
Does your arm hurt?
Did you talk to your brother?
How would we express these kinds of phrases without "to do"?
Well, I'd like to draw your attention to the English of the Middle Ages; the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. In "Ye Olde English" we did not so much use "to do" as we do now. Think of how you might ask the questions above in the English of Shakespeare.
Have you time to converse?
Desireth thou food?
Hast thou injured thine arm?
Hast thou spoken to thine brother? (Though you could also use the past tense of ye olde "to do"... Didst thou injure thine arm? Didst thou speaketh to thine brother?")
See, even in the older forms of English there were exceptions and various ways to say just about every phrase... But then again I think every language is like that... Tangent!
Anyway my point is that the Scandinavian languages form questions like "Ye olde English" and not modern English. Translate those Norwegian and Icelandic phrases literally and you get:
"See you the bird?" Which is just like you would say it in "Ye Olde English"!
Har du en øks? - Ertu með öxi? - Have you an Axe?
Har du en hund? - Áttu Hund? - Have you a hound?
Har du sverdet mitt? - Ertu með mitt sverð? - Have you the sword mine/ mine sword
It's not a perfect trick, but it helps me skip the messy process of going from Modern English forms to Icelandic.
Resources for learning Icelandic have been somewhat harder to come by than with any of the other languages I have studied, even Irish. This is the first language I will be learning without Duolingo, which is a little bit scary for me.
One thing I expect to find challenging about Icelandic is the usage of cases. Icelandic uses the Nominative, Accusative, Dative, and Genitive cases. Cases tell you the relationship between the action and the noun (what is the noun doing to whom... Whom is an old hold out from when English used cases too...) So in English you express the subject's relation to the action via word choice and order, except to express possession (Genitive Case), which is a kind of case ending or with a modified personal pronoun (His, hers). In Icelandic this relationship is expressed by the suffix of the noun, which is a bit daunting for me, not so much when it comes to reading but when listening to spoken Icelandic I am afraid I will miss key information because of the quickness of the endings... Wait did he say he ate the apple or the apple ate him???...
So far my favorite thing is Icelandic are the letters Thorn (þ) and Eth (ð). Both express a dental fricative sound which is the "th" sound in English, but Thorn is a voiceless dental fricative and Eth is a voiced dental fricative... So what this means in plain speech is that for English speakers, Thorn makes the sound of "th" in the word "Worth". Say the word aloud and put your hand over your throat, in the word "Worth" the "th" sound will not make your voice box vibrate. Eth makes the "th" sound in the word "Worthy". Again say the word aloud with your hand over your throat. You should feel your voice activate on the "th" of that word.
I like these letters for a few reasons; first because English used to have them. If you remember in my post entitled "Evolving Languages: Another Keep it Simple Rant", I quoted the first line of Beowulf:
Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
There you see both thorn and eth, though in the Anglo-Saxon language the two letters were kind of interchangeable... which now that I think of it may have led to them being combined.
I also think that having a letter for different sounds makes a lot of sense. I mean one of the most confusing things in English, in my opinion, is that you can have words spelled the same that mean vastly different things.
"I lead this party" is not the same things as "This party is like lead."
"Will you read to me?" is not the same as "I read to her... Yesterday."
"The bat hit me in the face." is a very different picture depending on if the bat in question is a small flying mammal or a piece of athletic equipment.
The letters that used to be a part of English helped with that. Thorn, Eth, whatever you call this one (æ)... They all differentiated sounds that later were combined into one letter or pair of letters which you then had to feel out or memorize when the word is pronounced "Reed" or "Red", "Leed" or "Led", "Bat" or... No that doesn't work... "Small flying mammal" or "Athletic Equipment".
I felt the same way when I studied Irish. I would rather have the old Gaelic script letters with dots over them to indicate sound mutation than to have to teach my brain that "mh" makes "w" and "bh" makes "v".
Maybe I am weird... Anyway, I am excited to be learning Icelandic. It is a gorgeous language from a gorgeous land full of gorgeous people (Too Much???). It also is fitting in nicely with my new obsession besides languages and nerdy stuff, blacksmithing.
Which reminds me, if you are interested in blacksmithing, or trade and craft skills, or seeing someone who has no idea what they are doing wander through a craft that spans eons hitting every object and trip hazard along the way, please check out my New blog about blacksmithing, "Dreams of Fire: A Journey Through the Ancient Craft of Blacksmithing".