Re: Beauty of Old Norse (was Re New to the list)
| From: | BP Jonsson <bpj@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, June 19, 2000, 19:39 |
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At 10:11 19.6.2000 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
>BP Jonsson wrote:
>
> > My Icelandic teacher claimed that Snorri Sturluson probably would have had
> > an easier time understanding modern Swedish than modern Icelandic, because
> > while mIc. has preserved the grammar it has changed the phonology
> > radically, while Swedish is essentially the other way around.
>
>Sounds like nonsense to me. We adapt very readily (at least here in the
>Anglophone nations of immigration) to very weird phonologies of our native
>tongue, as long as they preserve all or most of the relevant distinctions.
>Scrambled grammar, as in creolized varieties, is much tougher to follow.
True, but to a 13th century Icelander modern Swedish would sound like
familiar words with *no* grammar -- baby-talk, essentially.
/BP
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melroch@mail.com
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