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Ask an Icelander | ||
Tags: Icelandic | Rare Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| JonJonsson Triglot Newbie Iceland Joined 3971 days ago 7 posts - 31 votes Speaks: Icelandic*, English, Danish | Message 1 of 21 18 January 2014 at 11:07am | IP Logged | ||
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I've noticed that native Icelandic speakers are few and far between on this forum so I'm
offering my... services... as a native speaker. Ask me anything about Iceland or Icelandic and I'll do my best to help you. Edited by JonJonsson on 18 January 2014 at 3:11pm 17 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sizen Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4339 days ago 165 posts - 347 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Catalan, Spanish, Japanese, Ukrainian, German | Message 2 of 21 18 January 2014 at 1:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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I was just thinking the same thing the other day. Happy to see you've come in at such
an opportune moment! The question I would have is to what degree, would you say, are Icelandic words inter- comprehensible with English vocabulary? Or rather, if you really start analyzing words and comparing them to English ones, is there a large number of words with similar roots/etymologies? I've been looking a bit at some vocabulary lists, and I see that the names of things are more likely to match with English: things related to the body (fingur, blóð, armur, hár...), colours (blár, brúnn...), etc. While checking out Icelandic music, I've also seen other words whose relation to English is fairly clear when I'm given a translation, although I don't really know how to verify if I'm correct in my assumptions. Two examples being "dögg", which isn't hard to relate to "dew", and "myrkur" which isn't too far from "murk". Of course, I don't understand much, if anything at all, when I see Icelandic text, but it would be interesting to know how common this is, especially in more literary vocabulary. I don't know anything at all about Icelandic cases, so hopefully I wrote these words correctly so that you understand what I'm talking about. Hopefully this isn't too much of a doozy! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5320 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 3 of 21 18 January 2014 at 2:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Do you have blog like these guys:
Ask a Korean! ¡Ask a Mexican! If not, get one quickly. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| JonJonsson Triglot Newbie Iceland Joined 3971 days ago 7 posts - 31 votes Speaks: Icelandic*, English, Danish | Message 4 of 21 18 January 2014 at 2:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sizen:
Oh yes, there are many similarities. This is especially true with very basic things; wheat - hveiti, leather - leður, water - vatn, and more literary vocabulary like you said. I remember reading Lord of the Rings and really thinking about this because Tolkien used a lot of old/literary English words. If you really start researching then you will find a lot of related words. Doitsujin: Maybe I should ;) Edited by JonJonsson on 18 January 2014 at 3:01pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5189 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 5 of 21 19 January 2014 at 10:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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Great! I was playing on the European Language Map trying to find a universal word, and the Icelandic word for "idiot" was "hálfviti" (like half-wit I guess). So, is that a common word in Icelandic or is there are more usual expression? :)
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4032 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 6 of 21 20 January 2014 at 9:56am | IP Logged | ||
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How easy is it to predict gender and plurals compared to German, what is the general
distribution of strong, weak, or irregulars compared as well? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4253 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 7 of 21 21 January 2014 at 8:45am | IP Logged | ||
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Þú kom sem gjöf frá himnum!
My question is not so much about the language itself, but I would so desire to know where could I find Icelanders to talk to? I'd like to have someone from Iceland to chat with in Icelandic, be it Skype contact or a forum full of Icelanders. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4521 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 8 of 21 21 January 2014 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | ||
Funny question, because you are ignoring the real issue here: knowing gender, nominative singular and nominative plural isn't enough to know to which of the 30+ declination classes the noun belongs. But in terms of predictability, gender seems to be the easiest task, probably quite a bit easier than German. Weak nouns are no problem if you know the handful of neutra by heart. But even for strong nouns, you can make some educated guesses. If you have some etymological knowledge, the whole system of declinations makes a bit more sense and increases your probabilities of getting it right by guessing, but it's nonetheless a daunting task to learn the morphological attributes of all the words you can't guess. That's my learner's perspective at least. If you think German is hard, don't even get started with Icelandic ;) Edited by daegga on 21 January 2014 at 7:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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