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Requesting infos about Icelandic | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5698 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes  Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 9 of 11 15 June 2010 at 2:39am | IP Logged |
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In regards to Old Norse transparency for Modern Icelandic speakers, I remember my ON
professor saying that the modern orthography was standardized around the same time that ON orthography was standardized and was purposely archaized and to an extent based on the scholars' normalized ON orthography. This was done with the intention of strengthening and highlighting the links between the two stages of the language. So not only does normalized ON orthography unify and push the vagaries of ON into a more uniform and modern form (as I believe Iversen has pointed out), MI orthography pulls the modern language back a bit. Therefore, that ON is so transparent to MI speakers is partly because of this somewhat artificial meeting in the middle. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 10 of 11 18 June 2010 at 11:11am | IP Logged |
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I know that Modern Icelandic orthography deliberately was established in a way that kept the relationship with Old Norse alive. However the result is not a writing system that sacrifices the close relationship between pronunciation and writing to the extent that for instance those of English and French do.
For language learners it may be difficult to remember whether a certain word is spelled with or without an accent, and it is cumbersome to write all those accents, but they make it possible to see directly how a word is pronounced - so no protest from me. Actually the worst thing that can happen to a spelling system is that it takes historical considerations because an academy or a bunch of old scholars otherwise would whine, or because it has been impossible to agree on any change. In this light the true heroes of spelling are those that make logical spelling errors and refuse to correct them. Spelling reforms are almost impossible to impose on a democratic society. So the Icelanders are lucky to have a spelling that actually works well. Edited by Iversen on 18 June 2010 at 11:12am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kaptengröt Tetraglot Groupie Sweden Joined 4340 days ago 92 posts - 163 votes Speaks: English*, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic Studies: Japanese | Message 11 of 11 10 January 2013 at 5:24am | IP Logged |
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I know this is an old thread but I wanted to give my opinion. I have learnt Icelandic quite well in reading and listening and I lived in Iceland, and it all boils down to "most resources are only available to people who live or have lived in Iceland" (many online stores require social security numbers, some only ship in-country, etc.), "it will be really difficult to find truly helpful native speakers who stick with you", and "the best resources are all in Icelandic and even those still suck". I even took courses in Iceland and they left out loads of the more useful things. Also, the Icelandic-Englihs dictionaries extremely suck (not just in missing words or meanings but sometimes entirely WRONG meanings), unfortunately that means you must buy an Icelandic-only dictionary and then puzzle out the meanings of those entries using an Icelandic-English one.
Also it is extremely difficult to find Icelandic text that matches audio, except for songs (most Icelandic DVDs either have subs OR dubs for example, not both, subtitles for shows are only aired on tv and don't make it to DVD releases), and even if you find both an ebook and audiobook, which admittedly the scene has been growing fast in the last year so there's hope yet, most of those haven't been translated to English (possibly not even any other language!). Finally, it is really expensive to get learning materials - it's not just that shipping is expensive, but items are always expensive even before that, for example they love to sell audiobooks that you download, for the same price as a brand-new physical book, which means probably something like thirty US dollars. Ebooks are luckily cheaper though. Finding free text and recipes online in Icelandic is not a problem at all, but it will be difficult to find free, entertaining stories. That said, I translate from Icelandic as my hobby all the time, so if you want some text translated you can ask me, or I can help you find specific types of resources you want. (Or anyone else who reads this in the future too!) 7 persons have voted this message useful |
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