As I mentioned yesterday, this is the first installment of The Little Book of Icelandic, which I will publish, one section per week, until we have got through the whole book. 😌
This installment is open to all, but subsequent ones will be reserved for paid subscribers—though I may occasionally open posts up for everyone.
This will also be the last newsletter/post before Christmas, so if you celebrate, I wish you and yours a wonderful, safe, cozy and tranquil holiday—much like the picture below, only warmer. 💖
And so, without further ado, I present to you (drumroll …) The Little Book of Icelandic.
Click below for the audio.
Introduction
Icelandic is a complicated language. It’s a bloody mess grammatically, a nightmarish mishmash of inflected nouns, verbs, adjectives and pronouns, corresponding to four different cases, three different noun genders, moods, voices and constructions, plus any number of exceptions and rules that seem completely arbitrary, and very often are.
As a matter of fact, the Icelandic language is a lot like the Icelandic people. In my casual study of the Icelanders over the years I have been able to ascertain only one thing: they are impossible to pin down because they are full of paradoxes. The moment you think you know one thing about them (“they are so cosmopolitan!”) the polar opposite will suddenly pop out at you (“oh but they’re so provincial, forever trying to keep up with the Joneses”). The Icelandic language, meanwhile, has at its core a crazy paradox: this impossibly difficult grammar, and an endearingly prosaic, almost naive way of cobbling together vocabulary.
So perhaps the Icelanders love Icelandic so much because it mirrors the essence of their collective souls. And love it they do. Whenever someone conducts one of those “what is it that defines us as a nation” surveys, at the top of the list is usually “our mother tongue”. Note: not “the language” or “Icelandic”, but “our mother tongue”. You see, when the Icelanders start talking about Icelandic they get all highbrow and poetic. Indeed, a popular sobriquet for the language is okkar ástkæra ylhýra, which literally means “our beloved and gentle”. Need I say more?
This book is not about the technicalities of Icelandic. It is not a book that will help you learn the language, or make sense of Icelandic grammar. It is not even a book that will help you order a beer in a pub. (Don’t worry. You can use English for that.) Rather it is an overly ambitious and rather inadequate attempt to present how the very essence of the Icelandic people and their culture is reflected in the language.
That nature is in large part shaped by the fight to survive in adverse circumstances - a harsh climate, a beautiful yet unforgiving landscape, geographical isolation, and intense poverty. One of the greatest revelations to me after I started working on this book is how those things tend to crystallise in the idioms and proverbs of the language. They reveal the things that cut to the heart of the nation and so I have paid special attention to them. I also discovered that Icelandic has such a great many idioms and proverbs that I only managed to cover a fraction. I am now starkly aware of how much the Icelanders like to express themselves in allusions.
(Before I proceed I should warn speakers of American English that punctuation is placed outside of quotation marks throughout this book. This is on purpose, because I decided to go with British English. Hence some words may look misspelled to you, while they probably look correct to those who live across the pond. Conversely, I have sometimes used American terms for things (“sweater” springs to mind) that may look odd to the British speakers but which look perfectly OK to me. Blame it on my Canadian upbringing, if you will.)
Finally, a cursory warning: this book contains profanity in places, so if you’re sensitive about that sort of thing you may want to read it with one eye closed. Consider yourselves warned.
If you are not keen to become a paid subscriber but would like to check out The Little Book of Icelandic nevertheless, it is available in hard cover, paperback (via Amazon) and ebook (via most online ebook retailers) formats. '
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