Re: Droppin' D's Revisi

> 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.

[Cue BPJ's rant on