Domestic stuff

[Mike Cleven]

janilta wrote:
>
> Mike,
>
> As you said, for political and linguistic reasons, Israel and Iceland
> (both have linguistic authorities) try indeed to keep a quite pure
> written form of their language, even if the spoken variant has much more
> foreign borrowings. The discussion in the Icelandic parliament for
> months about a proper and indigenous term for 'AIDS' was actually an
> interesting example of such efforts...
> Finland is less so, even if the numerous borrowings in Finnish (from
> Swedish, etc, but obviously much less than in English) have been
> modified in such a way that they are not apparent at first.
> The word for computer in Icelandic is 'tolva' (umlaut on the 'o') made
> out of 'tala' (numeral) and 'volva' (she-prophet). I don't know 'sor'.
> Both Icelandic and Hebrew have a convenient derivation system to build
> neologisms... unfortunately not CW...

Yes; you're right; tolva, not sor; I don't know where I got the latter,
although the way my memory works it was probably on the same page in the
Teach-Yourself-Icelandic book I came across the computer-word story in
years ago....