<div dir="ltr"><h1>The future of the Icelandic language may lie in its past</h1>
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<a href="http://www.pri.org/programs/world-words">The World in Words</a> </p>
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<span class="" content="2015-06-01T18:00:00-04:00">June 01, 2015 · 6:00 PM EDT</span> </p>
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By
<a href="http://www.pri.org/people/patrick-cox">Patrick Cox</a><span class="">
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<p>Hulda Hákonardóttir and Guðrún Hannele Henttinen help come up
with new Icelandic words as part of Iceland's knitting language
committee.</p>
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Credit:
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<p>Patrick Cox</p>
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<div class=""><p>If there’s an area of public life where new words are needed, Icelanders have a committee for it. </p></div><div class=""><div class=""><br></div></div></div></div><div class=""><div class=""><p class="">Listen to the Story.</p> </div>
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<p>It may be new medical conditions, or new automotive technology. Words
are needed, fast. Otherwise people will get into the habit of using the
(usually) English word.</p>
<p>I met two women who sit on a committee you might not think of as
cutting edge when it comes to new technology: knitting. But as it turns
out, knitting is full of new designs and methods, only a handful of
which can be described in Icelandic.</p>
<p>Things hit a crisis after the 2008 economic meltdown, which was
particularly severe in Iceland. Icelanders went into a form of
hibernation involving wool.</p>
<p>“It was like a knitting boom.<em>”</em> says Hulda Hákonardóttir,
who does marketing for Icelandic wool products. “A lot of women started
to write books about knitting.<em>”</em></p>
<p>So far so good. But when the books came out, they were full of English words popularized by YouTube instructional videos.</p>
<p>In Icelandic-language books and knitting patterns, the authors haven‘t been able to agree on a standardized lexicon.</p>
<p>“They‘re even making up some words because they think that is the
best word for it, says Hákonardóttir, who also sits on the country‘s
knitting language committee. She says Icelandic writers don‘t understand
that "we have a very good old word for the same thing.”</p>
<p><strong></strong></p><div class=""><strong><img src="http://cdn-113a.kxcdn.com/sites/default/files/styles/original_image/public/sign.jpg?itok=aHtakG0I" alt=""><div class="">
<p>The Icelandic language, like its landscape, can be punishing.</p>
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Credit:
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<p>Patrick Cox</p>
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</strong></div><strong>Official Language Policy</strong>
<p><em>We have a very good old word for the same thing.</em> In a
nutshell, that’s how Icelanders view their mother tongue. More than
that, it’s the official language policy in Iceland. When in doubt, go
back in time.</p>
<p>There’s probably a perfectly good old word that’s maybe fallen out of
use. Combine it with another word, make sure it follows Icelandic
grammar rules.</p>
<p>And then, try to talk the public into using it.</p>
<p>Here’s an example from knitting: The word "ribbing" — which is often used as edging on sweaters.</p>
<p>"We had a lot of words for this, and some confusion about what to call it,<i>" </i>says knitware store owner Guðrún Hannele Henttinen, who’s also on the knitting language committee. “So we found an old word, <em>stuðlar,</em> and we thought maybe that would be good to use that again.<em>”</em></p>
<p>The word, <em>s</em><em>tuðlar, </em>meant the same thing in old Icelandic but no one was using it anymore.</p>
<p>Another set of knitting techniques: <em>casting on</em>.</p>
<p>“In English, you have <em>longtail cast on, knitting cast on, cable cast on</em>,” says Hákonardóttir. “For <em>cable cast on</em> for example, we had to find a new word that really describes the method and we came out with <em>fléttufit</em>.”</p>
<p>That word derives from another old Icelandic term meaning “braid.”</p>
<p><strong></strong></p><div class=""><strong><img src="http://cdn-113a.kxcdn.com/sites/default/files/styles/original_image/public/viking.jpg?itok=sKdv-KBD" alt=""><div class="">
<p>A scene from one of the Icelandic Sagas as depicted in an exhibit at the Settlement Center in Borganes, Iceland</p>
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<p>Patrick Cox</p>
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</strong></div><strong>The Icelandic Sagas</strong>
<p>This dredging up of archaic words makes total sense to Icelanders.
They have a close, tight relationship with the past, that’s bound up in
words.</p>
<p>Every Icelander knows the Sagas, the stories of the Viking settlement
of Iceland, of violent struggles with the old world, and of love. (Just
a little love.) The Sagas began as oral histories that were later
written down in a form of Icelandic that‘s remarkably close to the
language as spoken today. </p>
<p>“It has changed so little that we can read the Sagas like our
newspapers,” says Kjartan Ragnarsson, who runs a museum called The
Settlement Center</p>
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<p>Kjartan Ragnarsson, who runs the Settlement Center, says Icelandic "is like music to us."</p>
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<p>Patrick Cox</p>
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</div>Pronounciation has evolved since the 13th and 14th centuries when
the Sagas were trancribed, but the words and the grammar haven‘t changed
all that much, certainly much less than the other Scandinavian
languages, or Englsih.
<p>“I’m sure that the old literature has so much to do with how strongly
we are linked to the language as our identity,” says Ragnarsson. “It’s
like music for us."</p>
<p>Most Icelanders feel the same way: It’s what makes them Icelandic,
this language of epic struggle and survival. One writer tells me she so
feels so close to characters in the Sagas they are like family.</p>
<p><strong>Language Evolution</strong></p>
<p>But is it true? Has the language really not changed? Yes and no.</p>
<p>“If the people of Iceland create their own myth that this is the same
language that we had in the old times, it’s going to be perhaps borne
out,” University of Iceland linguist Kristján Árnason<em><strong>.</strong></em></p>
<p>If everyone buys into the idea that the language isn’t evolving, then
it won’t evolve. Or at least, you can put the brakes on it.</p>
<p>You can form committees to retrieve words from the past and recycle
them in modern usage. So the language does evolve — but with a guiding
hand.</p>
<p>That’s been tried elsewhere, usually with a heavier hand.
Government-appointed scholars insisting on keeping their language old
school — no modernizations, no bastardizations. But, of course, the
people often ignore them, they speak how they want to speak.</p>
<p>In Iceland, the <em>scholars</em> are more like <em>practitioners,</em> knitware store owners and the like — they are the people. And nearly everyone buys into it.</p>
<p>“The idea of a language which is a treasure, something that we have to preserve has been very strong in Iceland,” says Árnason<em>.</em> “And with this comes purism, trying to keep the language pure.”</p>
<p>Ok, so the word ‘pure’ can be creepy. Flip the conversation from
language to, say, ethnicity — and it can become the rhetoric of racism. </p>
<p>But most Icelanders believe that purity of language should be valued.
The tongue they speak, they believe, has advantages over the likes of
English, which has adopted foreign words, and maybe lost something along
the way.</p>
<p>This policy of linguistic purity amounts to a refusal to lose words —
or rather, the loss is temporary, thanks to the knitters, and all those
other committees that are unearthing all those long-forgotten
expressions.</p>
<p>“I thought it would be so difficult, that it would take us weeks to
find one good word,” says knitware store owner Henttinen. “But when we
started talking about it, good words emerged. So it was surprising to me
how easy it was.”</p>
<p>Not so easy really — but that’s how Icelanders use their language to maintain of an intimate connection with the past. <br></p><p><a href="http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-06-01/future-icelandic-language-may-lie-its-past">http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-06-01/future-icelandic-language-may-lie-its-past</a><br></p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">**************************************<br>N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/" target="_blank">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************</div>
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