Re: R: Re: Icelandic umlauts.

>From: Mangiat <mangiat@...>
>Subject: R:      Re: Icelandic umlauts.
>Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2000 15:27:11 +0200
> > Umlauts in noun declension is, IMO, rather uninteresting. There are too
>many
> > irregularities for me to recount here. You can only really count on
>there
> > being u-umlaut after any 'u' and 'um' endings (but not 'ur', for the
>same
> > reasons as above). Generally, the i-umlaut is not particularly active in
> > nouns, except in the masculine strong declension. For example, the
> > declension of "köttur" 'cat', with the stem "katt":
>
>You said that -ur does not affect the stem, but you have katt+ur = köttur.
>How's it possible? AFAIR, the ending in Old Icelandic was directly -r (OI
>dagr > MI dagur), am I right?
The change you refer to is correct. I'm still not sure if it was an actual
phonetic change, though. I often suspect that it may merely have been an
orthographic change.
But well, -ur sometimes affects the stem, sometimes not. As I said, umlaut
is very irregular and "uncooperative" in noun declension. We have "katt +
ur" = "ko"ttur", but also "hatt + ur" = "hattur". Generally, the umlauted
words like "katt" are old and rooted in the language. New words are unlikely
to follow this pattern.

> >      Sing          Plural
> > nom köttur         kettir
> > acc kött           ketti
> > dat ketti          köttum
> > gen kattar         katta
> >
> > Very enjoying for foreign students ;) ([with thick Icelandic accent]
>"How
>do
> > you like Iceland so far...?" ;) ;)
>
>I was thinkning to have a round there, one of these years... obviously to
>learn the language! One of my dreams is to come to live in Iceland, or at
>least in Scandinavia. Finland looks really nice, my teacher of Maths said
>it's the most beautiful place he's ever visited (he's surely a great
>traveller: this summer he'll go to Poland, Cuba and Normandy...)
I once heard Finnish mentioned as the nr. 3
most-difficult-to-learn-language-in-the-world. Is there any truth in that.
In any case, I'm sure you know that Finland is not, in a linguistic sense,
part of "Scandinavia", if you're just interested in Nordic languages.

Iceland vs Scandinavia makes a big difference in language-difficulty;
Scandinavian languages have a simple morphology, pretty much like English
(no personal verb-conjugation at all), while Icelandic, well, you know! And
Scandinavian has hordes of familiar loan-words from French, English, and
Graeco-Latin. What is generally most difficult in Scandinavian languages is
pronunciation, perhaps especially in Danish. But then Icelandic
pronunciation is not exactly easy either, what with unvoiced syllabics and
pre-aspiration all-around! :)

>Thank you very much!
You're welcome, Luca, I really enjoy it :)
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