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Icelandic compared with N.Germanic langs | ||
Tags: Germanic Languages | Icelandic | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Mikry Newbie South Africa Joined 4954 days ago 14 posts - 18 votes Studies: German | Message 1 of 7 30 September 2010 at 10:12am | IP Logged | ||
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I was wondering, if you were to decide to learn all the North Germanic languages, would Icelandic be the best place to start?
What I mean by this is that Icelandic is the most archaic language relative to other North Germanic languages due to it's isolation with most of the world. Thus making it the closest of modern North Germanic languages to Old Norse. I was wondering if this has the same benefits as say, learning Latin to make learning Romance languages easier or Learning Old English to make learning West Germanic languages easier? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6485 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 2 of 7 30 September 2010 at 11:04am | IP Logged | ||
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If you were to decide to learn all the North Germanic languages, then Icelandic would be the worst possible choice, except Faroese - unless of course your main goal is to read the sagas in Old Norse.
The Icelandic morphology is approximately at the same level as the German one: four cases, an inflected article (though only the definite one, but to compensate it also appears as an ending) and roughly the same amount of verbal forms including a living subjunctive (Konjunktiv). But this also means that it has far more morphology than English (not to speak of Afrikaans). The vocabulary is almost devoid of new loanwords, but again German is a good comparison - even though English words abound in Modern German there are numerous cases where the Germans have invented their own words instead of just adopting an English term for some gadget. On the other hand there are virtually no dialects to consider for Icelandic, whereas German has some quite large dialectal differences. The real problem is that there are literally TONS of materials in German, including novels, tapes, videos and films, but far less in Icelandic, which is spoken by less than 300.000 persons. And I know that you can speak German in Namibia at your heart's delight, but Icelandic speakers in Southern Africa are probably less numerous than black rhinos. The morphologies of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are more or less at the level of English, but there are more English loanwords, and although the number of speakers is also limited for these languages it is still way above the number of speakers of Icelandic. So even if I really like Icelandic and have done my best to learn it, it wouldn't be the obvious first choice among the Northern Germanic languages. Edited by Iversen on 04 October 2010 at 11:11am 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5349 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 3 of 7 30 September 2010 at 1:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, German isn't a Northern Germanic language. It belongs to the Western branch. Of the Northern Germanic languages, I would say Swedish is probably the best starting point in terms of finding materials to work with.
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| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6485 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 4 of 7 30 September 2010 at 8:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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I didn't imply that German is a Northern Germanic language. I stated that it has more or less the same amount of morphology as Icelandic. So in this respect German is also a surviving Medieval language. Besides Mikry is studying German so that also makes this language a relevant one for comparisons.
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| Nudimmud Groupie United States Joined 4974 days ago 87 posts - 161 votes Studies: Greek, Korean | Message 5 of 7 30 September 2010 at 8:19pm | IP Logged | ||
While this was an advertised feature of Latin, I don't think it's true for most language learners. The easiest way to learn a Romance language, say Italian, is to study Italian, not Latin first and then Italian. Likewise, the easiest way to learn French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian would be to study those languages, possibly in that order, rather than Latin and then those languages. In fact, Romance languages share a large number of features (excluding in some cases Romanian) that are completely absent from the classical language. There are many wonderful things about learning Latin, I'm sure, and it would make learning a romance language slightly easier, but using it as path to learn the language would not be a primary reason to learn it. Likewise, studying an especially archaic Germanic language as a conduit for learning a less archaic one would almost certainly not be an efficient approach for the vast majority of learners. If you want to learn a (Northern) German languages with maximum efficiency, pick first the languages with the most speakers, and correspondingly the best learning materials, and work you way down the list by order of population, probably grouping Norwegian and Swedish together. If, on the other hand, your interest is not efficiency but intellectual curiosity you could try something like the following (using the term mutually intelligibility very loosely) English --> Late Middle English (Mostly mutually intelligible) Late Middle English --> Early Middle English (Somewhat mutually intelligible) Early Middle English --> Old English (Somewhat mutually intelligible) Old English --> Old Frisian (Somewhat mutually intelligible) Old Frisian --> Old High German (Marginally mutually intelligible) Old English --> Old Icelandic (Marginally mutually intelligible) Old High German --> Gothic (Not mutually intelligible but still highly related) Old Icelandic --> Old Danish, Old Swedish (Norwegian) (Marginally mutually intelligible.) Also, from a linguistic perspective, the relationships of the various Germanic languages is quite complex, while it's generally correct to split the languages up between West Germanic and North Germanic (and Eastern Germanic for Gothic). In reality there are a number of language features that overlap between them. Edited by Nudimmud on 30 September 2010 at 8:20pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Mikry Newbie South Africa Joined 4954 days ago 14 posts - 18 votes Studies: German | Message 6 of 7 03 October 2010 at 10:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm not really sure what to say to any of you. I've been completely overwhelmed!
However, I think the lesson learnt is that you should rather jump into a commonly spoken member of a language family and branch out from there. However, there was something from personal experience that I found is quite the opposite. I speak fluent Afrikaans, and could for the most part understand most Dutch(partially because most of my family are actually Dutch nationals), anyway, despite my ability to comprehend it, I found actually speaking it was tricky, as my mind continuously switched to Afrikaans, as they are both so similar. Other relatives of mine who speak a German dialect(though not living in Germany), had a similar dilemma with spoken German. I'm sure that if you live in Germany/the Netherlands this problem should resolve itself. But what what about people who rarely need to use these languages that are so similar do to stop switching over? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6485 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 7 of 7 04 October 2010 at 11:21am | IP Logged | ||
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I know the problem from my dealings with other Nordic languages and from trying to keep my German, Platt, Dutch and Afrikaans from interfering. I have found out that the best method to keep them apart is to relearn each one from the beginning, i.e. ignore that you more or less understand a newcomer to such a related group. Do listen and read extensively as much as possible, but it won't give you the ability to sort out what belongs to each language.
In practical terms I have made simple copies by hand of texts, and I have been listening for specific details of vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation while deliberately ignoring what actually was being said. The temptation is to skip over anything you understand, so you have to fight that temptation. In this case it is all the small concrete details that count, not whether you have understood the meaning. Meaning is bad for you. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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