LL-L "Language comprehension" 2008.07.13 (07) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 13 July 2008 - Volume 07
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From: Travis Bemann <tabemann at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language comprehension" 2008.07.13 (01) [E]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Language comprehension
>
> Thanks, Sandy! I couldn't have said it better even if I had tried my
> darndest.
>
> I think cases like these ought to remind us that it behooves us to be wary
> of one-line pronouncements of that ilk. They tend to be simplifications
with
> some sorts of agendas, and the questions "Relative to what?" and "Says
who?"
> ought to be asked.
>
> A lot of nonsense has been said about Icelandic, especially about its
> "timelessness" and its "purity." Furthermore, Icelanders grow up with
> exposure to the old sagas, which in itself helps to read them. Even in the
> absence of actual language study, exposure is a learning process. I can
read
> a whole bunch of languages that I never studied, simply because I've been
> exposed to them, they are similar to languages I know, and exposure
> experience teaches you to find the "key" relatively quickly.
>
> And, yes, and Icelandic spelling does not lead to correct pronunciation if
> you approach it "cold."
>
> I have a feeling that people are simply enamored with the "romantic"
notion
> of "an isolated archaic language in today's world" as well as with the
> "purity" thing.
>
> Regards,
> Reinhard/Ron

The thing about Icelandic is that while it has maintained much of the
inflection of Old Icelandic (i.e. Old West Norse), with the distance
syntactically and morphologically between modern Icelandic and Old
Icelandic being akin more to the difference between New English and
Early New English than that between New English and Early Middle
English (considering that the sagas were written down about the same
time that EME was spoken), Icelandic is phonologically no less
innovative than much of the rest of the languages descended from
Proto-Norse. While it does have some notable phonological
conservatisms that make it easy to overlook its phonological
innovativeness, such as the retention of interdentals and voiceless
sonorants, it has other innovative phonological features which more
than match such. For starters, it has lost all historical Germanic
vowel quantity and merged many Old Icelandic vowels, with the use of a
pure vowel quality distinction including significant (and very often
conditional) diphthongization, along with significantly shifting the
vowels it retains relative to those of Old Icelandic. Secondarily, it
has significantly modified the realization of plosives in it,
acquiring a pure aspiration/quantity distinction in plosives more
reminiscient of Upper German dialects, while acquiring the use of
preaspiration in realizing medial long plosives. For languages which
are truly conservative of Old Norse quantity and syllable structure, I
myself would more look to the likes of Ostrobothnian dialects. It just
happens, though, that most of these changes are largely regular in
nature, such that one can still use an orthography for modern
Icelandic relatively close to a regularized orthography representing
the state of Old Icelandic (minus nasal vowels), making it very easy
to ignore the otherwise great degree of sound change that it has
overgone since then.

•

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