pezus said:
The heck?! @Danne: Icelandic has barely changed from Old Norse! "However, despite its arguable baggage, the remarkable conservatism of the Icelandic language and its resultant near-isomorphism to Old Norse (which is equivalently termed Old Icelandic by linguists) means that, to their delight, modern Icelanders can easily read the Eddas, sagas, and other classic Old Norse literary works created in the tenth through thirteenth centuries." We read some of the sagas in elementary school lol. Icelandic has "imported" words too, it's mainly the grammar that is extremely hard and much more complicated than Danish and Swedish for example, which makes it hard to learn for Nordic people even though learning Swedish and Danish is pretty easy for Icelanders! Look at my profile if you want to see where I learned lol |
Must be easy for you to read Beowolf then. I tried reading an English translation once. It was so dry I didn't get more than 20 pages in. I hope there is a good translation some day.