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How similar to GER and SWE is Icelandi? | ||
Tags: Icelandic | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| fiolmattias Triglot Groupie Sweden geocities.com/fiolmaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6492 days ago 62 posts - 129 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, Arabic (Written) | Message 9 of 14 05 September 2012 at 6:01am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I know that I can understand just about nothing orally, but I just went to Wikipedia, opened Sweden and choose Islandic. And to my suprice I understood a LOT nore than I thought I would. I even understood some complete sentences, but there where of course a LOT I didn't understand as well :) Have you tried it? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4510 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 10 of 14 05 September 2012 at 3:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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From what I know, Iceland resists loanwords. So everything that has a loanword in
Swedish/Danish etc., requires you to figure out the local cognate compound word (or the old Norse word that the Icelanders decided to revive) if it's not a basic word with an old Norse/Germanic base. I do not have a hard time with the basic vocabulary because by and large that is the same in many of the other Germanic languages I know. bara, einn, mjölk, dottir, these are all things I can guess. But that is only a small percentage of the vocabulary, and the rest you have to accumulate gradually (which is why I have left Icelandic alone for now, apart from its complex grammar, which you will need to understand the complex morphology that Icelandic also has - which may obscure a few cognates). I think from basic Dutch you might get 10-20% words for free, and if you know English and German fairly well, that's another 5-10% bonus. Add some Swedish on top of that and 40-50% of the words should "look familiar", although you may stumble upon false friends of course. But it's definitely not enough to read any text nor deal with complex grammar. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| SupremeTheory Newbie United States Joined 4287 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 11 of 14 07 September 2012 at 3:49am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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To my knowledge, all Scandinavian languages are similar, and are Germanic&Dutch
based(Except for Kalaallisut). I'm assuming Icelandic's that one that because it's so isolated, it's not as related to the others, though if you know one of the others, you should be able to learn it easier than if you were to learn it without knowledge of the Scandinavian, Germanic, or Dutch languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6385 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 12 of 14 07 September 2012 at 7:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Genetically, Icelandic and Swedish are more closely related to each other than any of them are to German. Icelandic is pretty much Old Norse with added words for modern concepts. Prof. Arguelles has apparently said something to the effect that "One can hardly be considered to know two languages if one knows Old Norse and Icelandic". Swedish has lost a lot of the complex grammar patterns of Old Norse, which is why German grammar might be more similar to Icelandic grammar. Subjectively, Icelandic looks very familiar to me when I look at it. I did the same experiment as fiolmattias on Wikipedia. The first paragraph looks like this:
I can understand most of this without ever having studied Icelandic. I can find sentences like "Í upphafi 20. aldar mótaðist það flokkakerfi sem að miklu leyti hefur einkennt sænsk stjórnmál síðan" where I understand close to nothing, but a lot I can understand easily and some I can understand if I think about it and analyze the sentence a bit. However, listening to spoken Icelandic is quite different. I listened to a bit of this clip and my comprehension was pretty much 0. But then again I can't understand a word of Danish, either, and Danish and Swedish are supposedly mutually intelligible. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4510 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 13 of 14 07 September 2012 at 1:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
You mean German. Scandinavian and Dutch languages (thanks for the plural and being inclusive with regards to Frisian and the regional languages) are all Germanic languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4575 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 14 of 14 07 September 2012 at 2:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm not sure what you mean by Scandinavian languages here. Most people actually from Scandinavia use that term only for Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. Together with Icelandic and Faroese they make up the North Germanic languages, part of the larger Germanic family which includes English, Dutch, Yiddish and other languages (so they aren't "Germanic&Dutch based", they are Germanic, neither more nor less than the High German language(s)/dialects of Germany, Austria and Switzerland). They are often grouped together with Finnish, the Sami languages and occasionally Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) into "the Nordic languages", a purely geographic term which does not imply relation. So if you were using "Scandinavian" to mean "Nordic", then Greenlandic isn't the only one that should have been excluded.
I also understood most of it with my circa A2 Norwegian. The only phrase that I didn't get at all was "en er þó frekar strjálbýlt", and I also had to guess that "að Eystrasaltinu" meant "of the Baltic sea" from the context (though now that I checked "að" is actually closer to "to"). Edited by vonPeterhof on 07 September 2012 at 2:19pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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