Comments by "Luredreier" (@Luredreier) on "9 Extreme Language Facts!" video.

  1. Regarding Icelandic (your number 2 on that list) it's not really that unchanged... Ok, they can probably still read the old sagas, but for me who grew up with an Icelandic background and can for the most part understand written and spoken Icelandic, I can't understand the spoken norse used by the vikings at all unless it's translated to Icelandic or another nordic language (or english). I more or less get it in the written form though. Also, my father who's Faeroese and studied linquistics back in the day keeps telling me that while Icelandic is quite conservative there's still words in all the other nordic languages that's closer to the old norse words spoken by the vikings then their Icelandic counterparts, you'll find such words even in Danish because believe it or not, Icelandic has changed over the years...
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  2. Lucas Mullen True, linguistically Icelanders are very conservative.
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  3. Nebojsa Galic Yeah, well... There was more US soldiers on Iceland at times then adult Icelandic males... That has done a lot for protecting the language in later times. Earlier, isolation helped a lot... Norwegians generally understands Danes and Swedes (and the Swedish speaking minority in Finland), people with some dialects can also sort of understand Icelandic. Faeroese people tend to get Norwegians, Danes and Icelandic people (they have danish classes in school, and between Danish and Faeroese, Norwegian is fairly easy to understand, and Icelandic is closely enough related to be understandable to them). Icelanders kind of understands Faeroese if they put their mind to it, kind of like the situation the rest of us have with Danish, they also learn one other Nordic language in school, it used to be Danish, but these days they can pick freely and Norwegian is also popular (and I guess some pick Swedish too). Old Swedes tend to understand Norwegian well, young ones struggle more and tend to prefer talking in English when talking with Norwegians unless they have experience with Norwegians. People in Southern Sweden find Danish fairly easy to understand, but the rest of them seem to struggle with Danish. Danes... A lot of them seem to struggle with the other nordic languages but they understand one of the two written forms of Norwegian (heavily based on danish) and with exposure to Norwegian they understand the spoken language too. Some of them also kind of understand Faeroese it seems, but not Icelandic... On a ship that used to travel between the countries (except Sweden) run by a Faeroese company the language people used to speak was kind of a mix of the languages. The faeroese crew used something similar to Danish with a faeroese pronunciation landing them close to Norwegian, Norwegians tended to go with Norwegian with a focus towards conservative upper class words close to those used in Denmark. Icelanders used a relaxed form of the eastern nordic language they learned in school, and all in all we all kind of understood eachother... Too bad the ship is no longer visiting Norway, where I live right now...
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  4. Raymond Puentes Yeah, the islands location really does conserve the language. In the old days because it was simply too far away from anything else to be significantly influenced and from the second world war and onwards because the significant presence of non-Icelandic soldiers stationed there prompting a fierce desire to protect the language. They're working hard to keep loan words out of the language.
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  5. Hum, got a source for that? Because as far as I recall it got close but never actually died as a living language regularly used in both spoken and written form. Of course I could just remember wrong...
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  6. Fearofthemonster Yeah, pretty much. If you had been talking about Faeroese I might have been inclined to agree (if I don't remember wrong written faeroese had died even if spoken faeroese hadn't). Anyway, Icelandic really did have quite a few challenges up through the years... For instance there where more American soldiers in Iceland during the cold war then there was grown local men there.
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  7. Henrik Berg There might be norse influence there. But if they're Celtic they're not really all that "similar" to Icelandic... Icelandic (Norse) and the Celtic languages are different language families entirely.
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