Re: CHAT: Multi-Lingos

On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, John Cowan wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
>  > I say we should make everyone in the world learn Icelandic and make that the
> > > "official Germanic language of the world" ;-)
> >
> > Any particular reason for Icelandic?
>
> Because *all* the other Germanic languages think of it (if they think of it
> at all) as mediaevaloid gobbledygook.  Icelandic preserves intact in
> lexis, morphology, and syntax (but not phonology) the Old Norse of the
> first millennium.
<G>  Could you read eddas (?) in it, then?

> > I think I remember one of Mario Pei's books stating that Danish was very
> > easy to learn to pronounce for an English speaker, but I won't swear to
> > it...and from hearing a Dane at my HS read the names in the Norse
> > creation myth (while the rest of us mangled 'em), I wouldn't bet on it.
> > Actually, philosophy of religion was quite, quite interesting.  We had a
> > Greek who laughed at us trying to pronounce the Greek gods' names, and....
>
> Yeah, well, they mangle them too.  Which is better, an English mangling of
> a reconstructed ancient pronunciation, or an inherited modern pronunciation
> from a descendant language?
According to my Greek classmate, his pronunciation was *obviously*
superior.  OTOH, he did have a very pro-Greek view of the world.  :-)

YHL