Letter from Iceland #32
The Little Book of Icelandic—All my kinder
Halló!
I have this notion that it might be fun to precede each of my Little Book of Icelandic chapters with an Icelandic “word of the day” type of section, which will be public. I think this because I love me some Icelandic vocab.
As I have mentioned before, Icelandic is usually delightfully prosaic, with very little embellishment. We say what we mean up here, no fancy packaging. 😁 Also, Icelandic has this cute, almost naive, way of cobbling together vocabulary.
Take, for example, the word manntal—a word I picked totally at random, literally by logging on to an Icelandic website and picking approximately the first word I saw. The English translation of the word manntal is “census”, but in Icelandic it is put together from the words “man” and “count”. Yup, “census” is “man count” in Icelandic. I won’t elaborate on the ongoing debate here in Iceland about whether “women” are actually “men” … though I do address the topic in an upcoming section of my Little Book of Icelandic.
Speaking of: on to our installment. Today’s section has to do with a rather unfortunate (and humorous) misunderstanding when a “false friend” in German is not quite what it seems in Icelandic.
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