Amtssprache von IS
Amtssprache von Island
Amtssprache(n) von IS - Island ist / sind
- Isländisch
Erstellt: 2012-07
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The bulk of High Icelandic vocabulary is identical with that of present-day Icelandic. When word-frequency is taken into account, both languages differ only a 3%. It has exactly the same grammar, pronounciation, and spelling.
The only difference lies in the fact that as much loan-words as possible are replaced by neologisms based upon the Icelandic vocabulary: "gíraffi" ("gnćfingi"), "páskar" ("vorjól"), etc..
Concepts like "málvöndun" are unexistent in High Icelandic. The language is already as clean as possible from the start. The well-known generalization of the dative at the expense of accusative, the so-called "dative-sickness" is also inexistent in High Icelandic. If one doesn’t master the cases, one simply can’t speak High Icelandic. Yet another characteristic is the strong tendency to replace words by metaphoric or kenning-like neologisms: e.g. "meitilskáld" ("myndhöggvari"), "eldblóm" ("skoteldur"), "málferjumađur" ("túlkur"), "stálhákarl" ("kafbátur"), "málmörn" ("orrustuflugvél"), "blökustorkur" ("flugeđla").
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It goes without saying that the achievements by the word-commitees during the last decades spares us from a lot of work. We can fully concentrate on the part of the Icelandic vocabulary that has been left unpurified: geographical names, proper names, names of chemicals, minerals, ect. Languages free of foreignisms don’t exist. From a linguistic point of view, there is no such thing as a ”pure” language. All languages (even High Icelandic) have borrowings. But there is a difference between purity and originality. A word like "sinkbróđir" for "cadmium" contains a loan-word, but the compound as a whole is unique in the world. In a way, this kind of genuineness could be interpreted as a form of purity. Still the High Icelandics aim at reducing as much as possible the foreign words in Icelandic that were borrowed after the first written texts. The exclusion of many words won’t necessarily lead to language impoverishment. In order to avoid that, a large part of obsolete Old Norse vocabulary will be resurrected. The result will be a hyperpure variant of modern Icelandic.
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