Icelandic

NOTE: There was no option in the Article Subject for Icelandic so I had to chose a different language to be able to publish this article...very annoying.

The subject of this article is therefor ICELANDIC:

Icelandic is the old original Norse language pretty much unchanged from the times of the Vikings. It has developed very little throughout the centuries due to the isolation of Iceland and is considered today one of the most difficult languages to learn in the world.

I remember when I was living in Sweden many years ago and a friend of my father brought a book to the house which he had found in the attic and it turned out to be an 800 year old Swedish book and the reason he brought it over was to see if my father could understand any of it. He himself could only grasp the odd word and he was intrigued. My father opened the book and started reading as if it were yesterdays newspaper.

The oldest preserved texts in Icelandic were written around 1100 AD and much of the texts are based on poetry and laws traditionally preserved orally. The most famous of the texts, which were written in Iceland from the 12th century onward, are the Icelandic Sagas. They comprise the historical works and the eddaic poems.

The language of the sagas is Old Icelandic, a western dialect of Old Norse. The Danish rule of Iceland from 1380 to 1918 had little effect on the evolution of Icelandic, which remained in daily use among the general population.

The modern Icelandic alphabet has developed from a standard established in the 19th century primarily by the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask. It is ultimately based heavily on an orthography laid out in the early 12th century by a mysterious document referred to as The First Grammatical Treatise by an anonymous author who has later been referred to as the First Grammarian. The later Rasmus Rask standard was a re-creation of the old treatise, with some changes to fit concurrent Germanic conventions, such as the exclusive use of k rather than c. Various archaic features, as the letter ð, had not been used much in later centuries. Rask`s standard constituted a major change in practice. Later 20th century changes include the use of é instead of je and the removal of z from the alphabet in 1973.

Learning Icelandic is very challenging with 32 letters in the alphabet but what joy to be able to speak this wonderfully historical language.