Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
>
> > Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2000 16:51:58 -0400
> > From: Robert Hailman <robert@...>
>
> > Spoken languages are trouble in that regard, yes. I've heard Icelandic
> > cited as an example of this, as it hasn't changed gramatically very much
> > over the last 1000 years or so, and Icelandic schoolchildren can study
> > the Sagas and such in the original language without explanation of words
> > and such (as we have when studying Shakespeare), but if an Icelandic
> > scientist were to invent a time machine and go back to that time, they
> > wouldn't understand a word of the language.
>
> What the Icelanders read when they think they read the Sagas has been
> respelled in modern orthography. The differences are small, but
> they're there. And the modern orthography has some quite strange
> conventions to keep the differences to the old language _visually_
> small.
Ah - it always seemed a tad odd to me that a language could remain
virtually orthographically identical for 800 years all on it's own.
> [Cue BPJ's rant on þ vs ð vs d].
I've heard the rants - althought any language with þ is fine by me.
> The point about lexical continuity is valid, however.
>
> But AFAIR, the pronunciation didn't change _fundamentally_ since the
> twelfth century when the sagas were first written down. Like the
> difference between RP and Ray's Sussex dialects, perhaps --- would
> take a few days or so to get used to.
I see. I had heard that they weren't terribly similar at all, but that
could have been a reference to the time of the Sagas themselves, as
follows:
> On the other hand, taking the time machine back to the ninth century
> when the sagas purport to have happened would be a whole other kettle
> of salt herring.
--
Robert