gluggaveður
GLUG-ga-veh-thur
Weather that looks lovely from indoors and is not
Literally window-weather.
An island where you look out often enough to need a word for the discrepancy.
The archive
Icelandic
Old Norse, still running
The most conservative Germanic language alive, which builds new words from old roots rather than importing them.
FamilyProto-Indo-European › Germanic › North Germanic › Icelandic
ScriptLatin
Speakers400k 350k native · 50k second
Weeks to a working level44 Counted from English. It is the Foreign Service Institute's figure for someone starting from English and from nothing.
The first hundred words cover51.7% and the first thousand 76.0%
- Icelanders can read the thirteenth-century sagas with about the effort an English speaker spends on Shakespeare.
- New words are made from native material. A computer is tölva, a number-prophetess. A telephone is sími, an old word for thread.
- Four cases and three genders, all inherited from Old Norse and all still doing work.
- There are no family names. You are your father's or mother's child, so a family of four can have four different last names, and the phone book is alphabetical by first name.
- It has kept the letters þ and ð, which English used to have and dropped.
- Icelanders and Basque whalers once traded in a pidgin of their two languages. Manuscript glossaries of it survive from the seventeenth century, listing phrases neither side could have said at home.
So conservative that schoolchildren read sagas from the year 1200 in the original. New words are built from old parts: the computer is a tala, a number prophetess. Three hundred thousand speakers, a literature per capita record, and volcanoes: learn it and you join the world's most exclusive book club.
Words with no translation
þetta reddast
THET-ta RED-dast
It will work out somehow
The unofficial national motto of a country built on a volcano.
Not optimism exactly. More a refusal to plan for the worst.
Next to its neighbours
Where Icelandic parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.
Icelandic vs Swedish → Icelandic vs Danish → Icelandic vs Norwegian →
Where to practise it
Reading about a language is not speaking it. These are the places I would go to find someone to speak Icelandic with.
The Icelandic Passepartout is not out yet
Five printed pages that carry you through the arrival. Leave your address and you hear about it first, and nothing else.
Leaving takes one click.
Stories in Icelandic
Short stories written inside a measured vocabulary, with the word lists and nothing invented for a textbook.