Iceland Has a Word for It (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ecenbarger14_mar14,0,5308774.story

COMMENTARY

Iceland Has a Word for It

Usually a very old word.
By William Ecenbarger
William Ecenbarger was a longtime reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

March 14, 2005

I hand the agent my brottfarerspjald, step on board Icelandair Flight
642. Just before takeoff, the flight attendant stands before us
clasping a seat-belt buckle and droning through the oryggisbunadur um
bord. Some five hours later, we begin our descent into Reykjavik. At
the airport, I get my passport stamped at vagabraeftirlit, make a quick
refresher stop in the snyrtingar, exchange dollars for kronurs at the
gjaldeyrir and pick up tourist information at the upplysingapjonustu
fyrir feroafolk.

I have come to this nation of 280,000 inhabitants, who speak to each
other in a language that is incomprehensible to 19,999 of every 20,000
people on Earth, to see how they are holding up against the onslaught
of English. Iceland's linguistic patriots go to incredible lengths to
preserve their language. Foreign words are ruthlessly screened out by a
special agency, which also invents words for new things and ideas.
There's a word for everything in Icelandic — or there will be shortly.

Icelanders have a strong belief in their own national greatness, and
that conviction is rooted unshakably in language and words. Literacy
isn't a problem here; it's a given. Icelanders believe that men and
women should turn a verse as easily as they turn a profit, and both
endeavors are considered important to one's well-being.

Iceland has more bookstores per capita than any other nation in the
world ("better shoeless than bookless" is an unofficial national
motto). Sales of a new novel in Iceland will compare favorably with
sales for a similar book in Britain — while a volume of poetry would do
even better in Iceland — with a population about 1/200th that of
Britain.

The most important tomes are the sagas. Written in the 12th and 13th
centuries, these are the great prose narratives of medieval Iceland,
bloodthirsty tales of Viking derring-do. Icelandic schoolchildren read
their national literature exactly as it was written hundreds of years
ago. Modern Icelanders speak virtually the same language as their
forefathers of the 10th century. Tomorrow morning's Reykjavik
newspapers will be written in the same language as the ancient sagas —
that would be like this newspaper using Chaucerian English.

Language preservation worked nicely for centuries because Icelanders
lived diphthongs apart from the rest of the world, but in recent
decades the cultural floodgates have been opened. English is everywhere
— on televisions, VCRs, the Internet and commercial products.

It's part of a global problem: About 400 million people speak English as
their first language, an additional 700 million or so use it as a second
language and a billion people more are struggling to learn how to speak
it. Meanwhile, other languages are disappearing at the rate of two per
month. There are about 6,800 languages in the world, but the expert
consensus is that 400 of them will soon be extinct.

Why care? "When you lose a language," the late linguistics professor
Kenneth Hale once said, "you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a
work of art. It's like dropping a bomb on a museum."

The front line of Iceland's preservation battle is in Reykjavik, the
home of the Icelandic Language Institute (Islensk Malstod); this
government agency was set up in 1964 to devise new words when existing
language proves inadequate. When AIDS first came to national attention
in Iceland, the main discussion was what to call it rather than how to
prevent it. The institute does not believe that AIDS should be called
AIDS, and thus the disease is officially known as alnaemi, an ancient
Icelandic word meaning "totally vulnerable," which the institute
settled on after some three years of study.

The preservationists often resurrect words from the sagas. A computer is
called tolva, a fusion of the old Icelandic words for number and
prophetess, and a TV screen is a skjar, a sheep's placenta once used by
farmers as window panes. My favorite is friopjofur, the word for pager,
which means "thief of peace."

I left Iceland pessimistic. Everywhere I went, I heard English spoken.
Though a written language can be purged of foreign words and phrases,
policing how people speak is another matter. Many young Icelanders
cannot be bothered with a language that is a minefield of subjunctive,
inflections and gender (the number 2 has three genders).

In one sense, the Icelanders have no one to blame but themselves. Just
as they have earnestly defended their language, they have with equal
enthusiasm made sure that every schoolchild has a computer and learns
English. Thus Microsoft sees no need to translate Windows into
Icelandic. The publishers of popular books are beginning to skip
translation as well. It's what the Icelandic language purists call a
sjalfhelda — a Catch-22. I fear the handwriting is on the wall — and
it's in English.

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