Modern Icelandic speakers speaking English remind me of my American-born Norwegian grandma's brogue. Her people came from north-coastal Norway around 1870. My Oslo-born grandfather said his wife sounded hopelessly old-timey.

Thanks Dr. Crawford. I see that it's snowing in Colorado. It is clear now in Reykjavik. This video is very educative. Greetings from Iceland - Einar K

@Fridrik-

2 ай бұрын

Komdu norður. Nóg af snjó

@einarkristjansson6812

2 ай бұрын

@@Fridrik- Takk fyrir svarið. Ég er 76 og fer ekki á skíðum. Leiður á vetrinum.

This is a dangerous topic to speak on in public. Attracts . . . historical philologists. And then your event is all about them talking sound-changes.

@hipgnosis533

2 ай бұрын

Sounds changes are the best part

@KramRemin

2 ай бұрын

@@hipgnosis533 SEE! SEE! They're coming already! It's like the top-finder app!

Regarding the lengthening of 'e' in "ek" into "ég", this has also happened in all modern Norwegian dialects which didn't transform such words with an initial j- (was it an u-umlaut?), such as affected only the east Norse variants in general (Danish, Swedish, SE Norwegian). My own dialect has "eg" with a long vowel, and other variants are "e", "æg", "æ" and "i", all with a long non-diphthongized vowel. But even some eastern variants have a long vowel though, most notably "je/jæ" in Norway and the Swedish "jag". This doesn't explain _why,_ of course, but if I could have a guess I would say it is because the following consonant is short, and a stressed syllable must either have a long vowel + none/short consonant, or a short vowel + long consonant (a consonant cluster counts as long).

@troelspeterroland6998

2 ай бұрын

Thanks for this information! It also happens in Faroese (although in Modern Faroese it can only be seen in the Suðuroy dialect) and in Shetland Norn. In both places it produces a diphthong similar to Icelandic é which then dissimilates further in Norn, where "I" is */jag/ (similarity with East Norse is coincidental), whereas in Suðuroy it remains /je:/.

@midtskogen

2 ай бұрын

But in Norwegian vowels before simple consonants generally lengthened (unlike "egg"), so that doesn't really explain ég in Icelandic where this lengthening didn't happen elsewhere.

4:38 The spelling ‘Þórr’ (with a nominative ending) also exists in Modern Icelandic.

3:41 It is both ‘nátt’ and ‘nótt’ in Old and Modern Icelandic.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't. Love these videos.

Dear Jackson, avid listener of your channel and Cornish language teacher and lexicographer; I often hear ON spellings such as read as /ˈaptur/, but am aware of the phonological constraints in Icelandic to fricativise a cluster /ps/ and /pt/ to [fs] and [ft] respectively. Is it possible that ON was really pronounced */ˈaftur/ and the spelling is a generalisation of [ft] ignoring the etymology of whether the cluster is derived from an older /pt/ or /ft/?

Very good video.

12:20 ek > eg > ég. The first person pronoun becoming ‘ég’ is an intrusive j, which was written as ‘jeg’. Both ‘eg’ and ‘ég’ exist in Modern Icelandic. For comparison: ‘urt’ and ‘jurt’, ‘lúka’ and ‘ljúka’, ‘kyrr’ and ‘kjur’, ‘spyrja’ and ‘spurja’. There were two things that happened in the last two examples; first was the intrusive j, and the second was the y to i merge in pronunciation, and thus another form came to be ‘-ju-’. One can look at ‘pylsa’ and ‘pulsa’ for further reference.

I once read that modern Icelandic is in some respects structualy more archaic than 200 years ago. Not just bij replacing Danish (based) words but also by re-introducing extinct irregular verb forms which then had become regular. This would be an another interesting topic. Another one would be: 21th century puristic words. (Everybody who read something about Icelandic purism knows older examples like simí (telephone) and taekni (technique). So I'm curious about some recent ones. Now you made videos about Älvdalska and Frisian, I think it’s time for the little sister of Icelandic: Faroese. Turning that in a relatively short time from a just spoken language into the now everyday main writen standard language in the Faro Islands, was a remarkable achievement. This may deserve a video of its own.

When (and if possible 'how' and 'why') did the double-ll in 'fjäll' ('fi-ell) change to 'fi-atl'? Did it change at the same time in both Icelandic and Faeroese, or was there a time difference?

Could the lengthening of the vowel in "ek" be due to an emphatic form having a longer vowel, and that that form spread to the non-emphatic form over time?

Man, I REALLY want to take your Old Norse class... If money wasn't a factor, I would be the first to line up for it. Perhaps you'll hear from me very soon

Is there any good research on the use of the dual for a Paucal meaning in the old Norse corpus that might illuminate how the dual overtook the plural in East Norse. This is the pathway I always assumed the dual took (comparable to what happened with “a couple” in English or “ein paar” in German) but I have never found anyone discuss this in any depth.

Why did the dual take over from the full plural? Like whats the logic behind that?

@marcasdebarun6879

2 ай бұрын

A lot of the time you're generally only talking to one person at a time, so the dual forms would probably come up more often than the plural forms. Over time people just generally associate the dual forms with all plural situations as they're the more salient forms in the speakers’ minds. A general rule of language change is that the less often a form or word or affix or structure or whatever is used, the more likely it is that speakers will forget about it and replace it with something more ‘known’, so to speak.

@carlinberg

2 ай бұрын

I think it's funny to think that it happened because of the black death, because there was not as much reason to talk about more than two people anymore 😂

@jmolofsson

2 ай бұрын

I suspect no-one can answer the question "why?" Personally, I am almost convinced influence from other languages, typically more prestigious languages, is something we tend to underestimate. Which that influential language was, has certainly changed from epoch to epoch: Greek, Gaelic, Latin, Low German, French, High German, English. A historical linguist can surely give more precise answers, but as far as I remember dualis was a feature in early Finnic, Gaelic, Slavic and Baltic, but not in Latin or any of its descendants.

Norwegian Bokmål has those forms. Norwegian Nynorsk has bøker, føter, næter.

Thanks

So there in the sources where Vetrnætr is mentioned /nætr/ is after the change? So it should be nóttr?

@lughlongarm76

2 ай бұрын

Vetrnætr is plural-“Winter Nights.” Nóttr/náttr is singular “night”

Great vidio

so quiet

Could you have any idea where "pre-aspiration" (putting a puff of air before an unvoiced consonant) came from in Icelandic? It seems to occur in some North Germanic languages and in Scottish Gaelic. It could be an areal feature, but it seems to occur in different environments in these languages, namely before a double consonant in Icelandic and before a single unvoiced consonant in Gaelic. Both places generally have stress and occur before an unstressed syllable in both North Germanic and Celtic languages, which lends to the idea that it spread from one of these language families to the other. There is a good argument that pre-aspiration could have started in the Norse languages after the loss of double consonants due to compensatory lengthening. Do you have any thoughts on this?

@lughlongarm76

2 ай бұрын

It doesn’t occur in any Scandinavian language other than Icelandic, as far as I’m aware. With the genetic studies that have shown how much Gaelic ancestry there is in Icelandic DNA which seems to go back to the Viking Age, I know some have argued Scottish influence is responsible for this aspiration feature. It’s really fascinating stuff!

@tjstarr2960

2 ай бұрын

​@@lughlongarm76According to Wikipedia at least (I am no expert on the subject), pre-aspiration occurs in Faroese as well, and some dialects of Norwegian and Swedish. I can't confirm that, but if it is true, it suggests to me that Scottish Gaelic borrowed this areal feature from Norse, and not the other way around. None of the Irish dialects of Gaelic have pre-aspiration, and it appears in rather "random" phonetic environments that don't really bear functional load, like before voiceless consonants at the ends of words. Unlike in Norse languages, where it occurs predictably before double consonants, which would make sense because when double consonants became pronounced the same as single consonants, you needed a way to distinguish a lot of words. But, again, I am no linguist, just an interested amateur.

Only two letters for a snowstorm? I looked up "él" in the English Wiktionary, and the Icelandic entry says it's from Old Norse, but there's no Old Norse entry. The Faroese Wiktionary defines the Icelandic word as "æl" (different sound change in Faroese), but no etymology, and no Faroese entry. Where did the Old Norse word come from?

@logi-a

Ай бұрын

él and snjóstormur are not the same thing. Él/haglél is when a raindrop becomes completely frozen, snjóstormur is a snowstorm but él/haglé means hail/hailstorm Hope this helps :) Also æl means barf in Icelandic lol, so maybe make sure to not tell an Icelander that æl is going to fall from the sky haha

You talk a lot about Old Icelandic in the 1200's since that's when they started to write things down, but how much do we know about the Old Norse during the viking age (800-ish to mid 1000's)? How different would it have been from Old Icelandic?

@Jonassoe

2 ай бұрын

@@treslinguaesacraeThanks

@josiahmedin2216

2 ай бұрын

Old Norse during the Viking age is not proto-Norse

@treslinguaesacrae

2 ай бұрын

@@josiahmedin2216 Yes, you are right. First, I read for some reason only the 800-ish and then misrembered the exact proto-norse time ( I thought it ended around 850 but it was actually around 100 years earlier). I should have looked it up first. Thanks for the coorection. P.S: I have deleted my false post.

@midtskogen

2 ай бұрын

I think the most striking difference if we could travel back in time and listen would be the loss of nasal vowels in 1200's Icelandic which were surely still common in Scandinavia before 1000. But also bear in mind that 1200's Icelandic is mainly based on dialects of western Norway, whereas viking age Old Norse will include more dialectal variation, so it's not a simple comparison.

Haha it's true that you say a very good regular long modern Icelandic o, as in "koma". At least to a non-icelander's ear

@logi-a

Ай бұрын

It’s definitely impressive. One of the best pronunciations I’ve heard from a foreigner

Dr Crawford, about youtube shorts, dont bother, or rather, don't feel compelled to do them,. The closest runestone I know is Björketorpsstenen, DR 360. Would surely like to see an episode on them in person or are you gay?

@hipgnosis533

2 ай бұрын

What even is this comment

@peterlarsson3436

2 ай бұрын

Vad?@@hipgnosis533

@peterlarsson3436

2 ай бұрын

Oh, the gay part? It's about the runes.

@hipgnosis533

2 ай бұрын

@@peterlarsson3436 I must be missing something

I nearly made a video about something I notice in Icelandic Post-modern, I guess. It seems that due to so many refugees and whatnot the language is much less isolated and as a result (and it might be something done to make the language more internet friendly) the r's are less distinct. Has anyone else noticed that? Just notice how one says the town name of Reykjavik... has it been simplified for the world to pronounce? What is going on there?

@MrKorton

2 ай бұрын

Wrong. Not by natives

@benhetland576

2 ай бұрын

What do you mean by "less distinct" r's actually? Are they less rolled than before, or are they dropped or changed to other sounds?

@melissahdawn

2 ай бұрын

@benhetland576 Yes. Sorry, I didn't answer sooner. I spent nearly an entire year trying to learn to roll r's in a way that sounded proper and it was extremely frustrating! Until, someone kindly suggested that I should get over it and just accept that there are certain sounds that I will not be able to reproduce. Then, as I was listening to KZread videos in Icelandic, I noticed that outside of the voice actors who pronounced every word in my lesson, it seemed that it practice it did not seem to matter much if a sound here and there was adapted. And the more I notice it, the more I wondered if we were living through a sort of internet melting pot of languages, Icelandic just being the guinea pig of this theory.

@svolfron6496

2 ай бұрын

This is wrong and Reykjavík is a city, the capital city of Iceland, not a town.

@melissahdawn

2 ай бұрын

@MrKorton I do not understand which question is being answered. I think this response is that the core of Icelandic speakers have not altered their pronunciation at all... my assumption that it has been changing is wrong. What sort of name is Korton? It is interesting. Does it mean something

Mikið means much, not big.

личь пасасал урааа

"Madness rather than a career path" Under capitalism, most career paths are there own kind of madness. I used to have my dream job developing technology for a healthy salary. Then I figured out my skills were being used to make wealthy people wealthier at the expense of already poor people, for example by selling weapons to oppressive governments. Our money-worshiping economy is quite effective at twisting jobs into the worst versions of themselves. Case in point--how much more money would you be making if you sold books and courses telling people the magical nonsense they want to hear about runes instead of the relatively boring truth?

@hipgnosis533

2 ай бұрын

Always good to find a fellow traveller

@bumpty9830

2 ай бұрын

A "спутник" (sputnik) even, @@hipgnosis533, in the linguistic spirit! The root путь means "way, path," the leading "s" is like the "con" prefix in English meaning "with" and the "nik" adds the sense of "one who," giving "someone on the path together." Can be used in the sense of a person, as you have, and has often been translated "fellow traveler." Also the basic word for "satellite" and of course the famous name, in Americans minds, of the first satellite. Solidarity, comrade.

@sazji

2 ай бұрын

I’m glad you managed to escape air-conditioned hell. :-)

@bumpty9830

2 ай бұрын

I haven't escaped, @@sazji. I'm one of the millions of Americans without healthcare, so I'm likely to die an ugly, painful death that could have been prevented by treating healthcare as a human right like much of the rest of the world. Better than being blown up? I guess. Cute smiley face.

@sazji

2 ай бұрын

@@bumpty9830 Sorry. By “air-conditioned hell,” I meant a well-paying job with decent benefits that just also happened to be sucking my soul out and leaving me feeling like I had no other choice. I did, and I took it. Out of curiosity, are you in one of those states that refused the ACA medicaid? In 2014 I suddenly came back to the US from 14 years abroad at 55, with high blood pressure (controlled by extremely affordable medication) wondering how the hell I’d afford that same prescription that cost upwards of $100 to fill here, and doctors’ fees. Obamacare was a godsend, because I was not making a lot to start with and Seattle is not a cheap place to live…

Höggur does not exist in modern icelandic…. Höggr /höggur in old norse is: heggur ( chops/chops down)

@svolfron6496

2 ай бұрын

It does exist. It is archaic.

@MrKorton

2 ай бұрын

​@@svolfron6496but then it's not modern icelandic then is it

@svolfron6496

2 ай бұрын

@@MrKorton It is not ‘modern’, but it is Modern Icelandic. For comparison: aftann, kveld, nátt, eigi, und, kvánga, knega, snöggvan (snöggur in the masculine singular accusative), skóp (skapa in the indicative present first and third person singular). All of those forementioned words are not modern but archaic, yet they all exist in Modern Icelandic.

@gavinrogers5246

Ай бұрын

@@MrKorton let me try to explain more clearly about what @svolfron6496 is attempting to. Modern Icelandic (with a capital M on Modern) refers to the language as it has been spoken since about 1600 (this is similar to Modern English, which is the language spoken since around 1500). Now has the language been sitting still during this time? Of course not, but this is the time that various medieval vowel shifts had ended for the most part. Now if you look in the Oxford English Dictionary, you will see some words labeled as archaic; however, if you will look even more closely at the etymology of that word you will often see that it is descended from an older Middle English or Francien term. This means that, by default, the word in question is technically Modern English even if it hasn't been used regularly since, say, 1850. That is what the word archaic means in this context.

You want some fun, listen to some of the Icelandic YT channels talking about the latest volcanoes in Iceland. That's some Icelandic what don't care about your silly English accent.

2:35 Practically every Icelandic editor prefers ‘œ’ over ‘ǿ’ and writes ‘œ’.