Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderLanguage fact

Modern Icelandic has kept so much of Old Norse, the language of the Viking Age, that Icelanders today can read the medieval sagas, usually in editions with modernised spelling.

Linguistics

LanguageHistory

The story behind the card

Norse-speaking settlers reached Iceland from about 870, and the sagas, prose stories about the first settlers, their families and their feuds, were mostly written down in the 13th century. Icelandic changed less than its Scandinavian relatives, partly because the island was remote and partly by choice: instead of borrowing foreign words, Icelanders coin new ones from old roots. The word for computer, tölva, blends tala, 'number', with völva, 'prophetess'. The grammar has stayed close too, with nouns still changing their endings for four cases, as in Old Norse. The point is continuity rather than effortless reading: readers still lean on notes and modern spelling.

Türkçe oku
Bugünkü İzlandaca, Viking Çağı'nın dili Eski İskandinavcaya öyle yakındır ki İzlandalılar ortaçağ sagalarını bugün de okuyabilir. Bunun için genellikle yazımı güncellenmiş baskılar kullanılır.

İskandinav dilini konuşan yerleşimciler İzlanda'ya 870 dolaylarından itibaren geldi. İlk yerleşimcileri, ailelerini ve aralarındaki kan davalarını anlatan düzyazı destanlar, yani sagalar, çoğunlukla 13. yüzyılda yazıya geçirildi. İzlandaca, İskandinav akrabalarından daha az değişti; bunda adanın uzaklığı kadar bilinçli bir tercih de rol oynadı. İzlandalılar yabancı sözcük almak yerine eski köklerden yeni sözcükler türetir. Bilgisayar anlamındaki “tölva”, “sayı” demek olan “tala” ile “kâhin kadın” demek olan “völva” sözcüklerinin birleşimidir. Dil bilgisi de yakın kaldı; adlar Eski İskandinavcada olduğu gibi dört hâle göre ek alır. Yine de mesele zahmetsiz okumak değil, süreklilik; okurlar hâlâ notlardan ve güncel yazımdan yararlanır.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Icelandic language
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderHistory

Greek scholars from Byzantium were teaching in Italy long before the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453. The conquest sped up a movement of teachers, manuscripts and ideas that had begun more than half a century earlier.

In 1396 Coluccio Salutati, the chancellor of Florence, invited the Byzantine diplomat and scholar Manuel Chrysoloras to teach Greek in the city. He arrived in 1397 and taught there until 1400. One of his pupils, the historian Leonardo Bruni, remembered it as a rare chance: no one in northern Italy, he wrote, had studied Greek for seven hundred years. Chrysoloras's Erotemata (Questions) became the first Greek grammar widely used in western Europe. In 1438–1439 the Council of Florence, called to reunite the Catholic and Orthodox churches, brought more Byzantine thinkers west. The philosopher Gemistos Plethon lectured on Plato, and Bessarion of Trebizond, today's Trabzon, stayed on in Italy as a cardinal. In 1468 Bessarion gave his library, with 482 Greek manuscripts, to Venice, where it became the core of the Biblioteca Marciana.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

Latin did not die with the Western Roman Empire in AD 476. Scholars across Europe wrote in it for well over a thousand years, while the everyday Latin of ordinary people slowly turned into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Romanian.

Linguists call the spoken, everyday form “Vulgar Latin”, from vulgus, the common people; Cicero called it “the speech of the masses”. Between the 6th and 9th centuries it drifted apart region by region into the Romance languages, which hundreds of millions of people speak today. Written Latin, meanwhile, stayed Europe's shared language of learning into the early 19th century. Schools taught largely in Latin until around 1700, and Isaac Newton published his laws of motion and gravity in Latin, in the Principia of 1687. Scientific names still follow the Latin system of Carl Linnaeus, which gives every species a two-part name such as Homo sapiens, “wise human”. Latin is also the official language of the Holy See, the central government of the Catholic Church, and law and medicine are full of Latin terms, from habeas corpus, the right of a detained person to be brought before a judge, to vertebra.

Ikigai DailyRead card
StillnessHistory

The phrase ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ was coined by the English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton for his 1839 play Richelieu, where the French cardinal says it. The idea that words beat weapons is far older, but this wording is his, and within a few years it had become a stock saying.

Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy opened at the Covent Garden Theatre in London on 7 March 1839, with the famous actor William Charles Macready as Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII of France. In Act 2 the cardinal says that under the rule of truly great men the pen is mightier than the sword: in a master's hand it can stop emperors in their tracks, and a state can be saved without any sword at all. Others had said something similar long before. A copy of the teachings of the Assyrian sage Ahiqar from about 500 BC says that the word is mightier than the sword, and a line in Shakespeare's Hamlet says that many who wear swords are afraid of goose-quill pens. Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) also gave English ‘the great unwashed’, a sneering name for the masses, and the novel opening ‘It was a dark and stormy night’.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu (1839)Read card
WonderHistory

After William of Normandy won the Battle of Hastings in 1066, French became the language of England's kings and nobles for about three centuries. Thousands of French words entered English, which is why it often has two words for one thing, such as ‘begin’ and ‘commence’ or ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’.

After the Norman Conquest, England used three languages: French at court and among the nobility, Latin in the Church and in official records, and English among ordinary people. Every king after the Conquest spoke French as his first language until Henry IV, who took the throne in 1399 and was the first whose mother tongue was English. French borrowing peaked between 1250 and 1400, and about a third of English vocabulary is now estimated to come from French, including crown, justice, parliament and marriage. The famous story that English peasants kept ‘cows’ and ‘pigs’ while Norman lords ate ‘beef’ and ‘pork’ is largely a myth, popularised by Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe in 1819: for centuries the French words were used for the live animals as well as the meat.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

On 10 December 1948 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 30 articles setting out the rights and freedoms that belong to every person. It has since been translated into more than 500 languages, and Guinness World Records lists it as the most translated document in the world.

The declaration was written just after the Second World War, when the new United Nations wanted a common standard of rights for all peoples and nations. A commission chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of the American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, prepared it. The Canadian legal scholar John Humphrey drew up the first draft, and the French jurist René Cassin, the Chinese diplomat P. C. Chang and the Lebanese philosopher Charles Malik helped shape the final text. The UN General Assembly adopted it at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris: 48 countries voted in favour, Turkey among them, none voted against and eight abstained. It is not a treaty, so it does not bind countries by law, but many later treaties and national constitutions build on it. The UN's collection of translations passed 500 in 2016, and 10 December is marked every year as Human Rights Day.

Ikigai DailyRead card
Next card in the archiveA palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same forwards and backwards, like 'level' or 'never odd or even'.Read next →