Here's a blog from Iceland. Icelandic is another of those languages I always wanted to learn in my ever-shrinking "spare time." (I always thought the word "blog" had a kind of Nordic sound to it, and I like the sound of those languages, which is probably why the word doesn't awaken feelings of loathing in me that it does in other people.)
Posted by Andrea Harris at May 10, 2003 02:38 PMIcelandic is the old language of the Vikings, essentially unchanged from 700-800 years ago. I think their word for airplane is literally "iron bird". It's like the Navaho code-talker coinage for torpedo, which is "iron fish".
Posted by: Dark Avenger at May 10, 2003 at 03:45 PMwell... the word for airplane is basically "flying(flug) machine(vel)" but the spoken language has changed alot but it is possible for the average icelander to read (with a little bit of difficult) the original texts from the "sagas" which are more than a thousand years old.
I personally doesn't like the ,,blog" word ... it sounds bad spoken with an Icelandic accent ;)
I guess the Reader's Digest article statement that a Viking could converse with a contemporary citizen of Iceland sounded too good to be true.
Posted by: Dark Avenger at May 11, 2003 at 01:30 PM