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Icelandic (íslenska) is a North Germanic language, the official language of Iceland and the mother tongue of the Icelandic people. Its closest relative is Faroese and can be somewhat understood by a small number of Norwegians as well, depending on their dialect and education. While most Western European languages have reduced greatly the extent of inflection, particularly in noun declension, Icelandic retains an inflectional grammar comparable to that of Latin, Ancient Greek, or more closely, Old Norse and Old English. This retension of inflective words has enhanced Icelandic's reputation as one of the closest major living cousins to the Proto-Germanic language.
History
The Danish occupation of Iceland from 1380 to 1918 has had hardly any effect on the linguistic evolution of Icelandic, which stayed in daily use within the population. The Danish did not use the language for official communications. The same applied during the American occupation of Iceland which began in the 1940s, and was gradually withdrawn during the 1950s. During the 18th century, the Icelandic authorities implemented a tough policy to preserve the purity of the language. As a result of this policy, some writers and terminologists were made in charge of the creation of new vocabulary to adapt the Icelandic language to the evolution of usages and new concepts, and thus avoiding having to resort to awkward neologisms like in other languages, notably Danish and English. Old words that have fallen into misuse are updated to fit in with the modern language, and neologisms are created from old roots of the language. For example, the word rafmagn, literally “amber power” means ‘electricity’, similarly the word sími, an old word meaning ‘wire’ is used today for ‘telephone’. A final example, the word tölva formed from the words tala (‘figure/number’) and völva (‘magician’) means ‘computer’. In 1944, Icelandic was registered in the constitution as the official language of Iceland, and now, it is the only authorised language in official texts and public debates. AlphabetThe Icelandic alphabet is notable for its retention of two old letters which no longer exist in the English alphabet: Þ,þ (þorn, anglicized as "thorn") and Ð,ð (eð, anglicized as "eth" or "edh"), representing the voiceless and voiced "th" sounds as in English thin and this respectively. The complete Icelandic alphabet is:
PhonologyIcelandic has an aspiration contrast between plosives, rather than a voicing contrast, something relatively rare among European languages. Preaspirated voiceless stops are also common. However fricative and sonorant consonant phonemes exhibit regular contrasts in voice, including in nasals (rare in the world's languages). Additionally, length is contrastive for consonants, but not vowels. The chart below is based on Scholten (2000, p. 22); refer to the IPA article for information on the sounds of the following symbols: Consonants
The voiced fricatives [v], [ð], [j] and [ɣ] are not completely constrictive and are often closer to approximants than fricatives. The status of [c] and [cʰ] as phonemes or as allophones of /k/ and /kʰ/ is the topic of some debate. On the one hand, the presence of minimal pairs like gjóla [couːla] "light wind" vs. góla [kouːla] "howl" and kjóla [cʰouːla] "dresses" vs. kóla [kʰouːla] "cola" suggests that the palatal stops are separate phonemes. On the other hand, only the palatal stops, not the velars, may appear before front vowels, and some linguists (e.g. Rögnvaldsson 1993) have held out for an underlying phonemic representation of [couːla] and [cʰouːla] as /kjoula/ and /kʰjoula/ respectively, with a phonological process merging the /k(ʰ)j/ into [c(ʰ)]. Whether this approach, which is consistent with the orthography and historical processes, represents a synchronic reality is disputed.[citation needed] The dental fricatives [θ] and [ð] are allophones of a single phoneme. /θ/ is used word-initially, as in þak [θaːk] "roof", and before a voiceless consonant, as in maðkur [maθkʏr] "worm". [ð] is used intervocalically, as in iða [ɪːða] "vortex" and word-finally, as in bað [paːð] "bath", although it can be devoiced to [θ] before pause. The phoneme /θ/ actually represents a voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative [θ̠] or [ð̠] when voiced. Of the voiceless nasals, only [n̥] occurs in word-initial position, for example in hné [n̥jɛː] "knee". Recently, there has been an increasing tendency, especially among children, to pronounce this as voiced; for example pronouncing hnífur [nivʏr] "knife" rather than standard [n̥ivʏr]. The palatal nasal appears before palatal stops and the velar nasals before velar stops. [ŋ] appears also before [l] and [s] through the deletion of [k] in the consonant clusters [ŋkl] and [ŋks]. The preaspirates [ʰp ʰt ʰc ʰk] (e.g. löpp [lœʰp] "foot") do not occur in initial position. In most analyses, consonant length is seen as phonemic while vowel length is seen as determined entirely by environment. Measurements of segment length reveal a more complex picture. Vowels
Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right of the dot represents a rounded vowel.
Vowel length is predictable in Icelandic (Orešnik and Pétursson 1977). Stressed vowels (both monophthongs and diphthongs) are long:
Before other consonant clusters (including the preaspirated stops [hp ht hk] and geminate consonants), stressed vowels are short. Unstressed vowels are always short.
(Note: in Icelandic, the main stress is always on the first syllable.) GrammarIcelandic is an inflected language with four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Icelandic nouns can have one of three grammatical genders - masculine, feminine or neuter. Nouns, adjectives and pronouns are declined in the four cases, in singular and plural. MorphologyMany German speakers will find Icelandic morphology familiar. Almost every morphological category in one language is represented in the other. Nouns are declined for case, number and gender, adjectives for case, number, gender and comparison, and there are two declensions for adjectives, weak and strong. Icelandic possesses only the definite article, which can stand on its own, or be attached to its modified noun (as in other North Germanic languages). Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood, person, number and voice. There are three voices: active, passive and medial; but it may be debated whether the medial voice is a voice or simply an independent class of verbs of its own. There are only two simple tenses, past and present, but to make up for that there are a number of auxiliary constructions, some of which may be regarded as tenses, others as aspects to varying degrees. NounsIcelandic nouns are much like Old Norse, both in form and inflection. They decline in four cases (nominative, accusative, dative and genitive) and vary in gender (masculine, feminine or neuter) and number (singular and plural). There are two main declension paradigms for each gender: strong and weak nouns, that are furthermore divided in smaller paradigms for declension, according to many criteria (sound-shifts, consonant clusters etc.)
The gender of a noun can often be surmised by looking at the ending of the word:
Whilst rare, some nouns, such as leikfimi (gymnastics) are not declined at all. ArticlesIcelandic does not have an indefinite article (a/an in English), and the definite article (the) is joined onto the end of word in question. The table below shows the different suffix forms for the three genders:
The example below shows three nouns, one for each respective gender, declined in the accusative:
PronounsPersonalThe personal pronouns in Icelandic are as follows:
Icelandic has separate masculine, feminine and neuter words for they, when talking about a group of mixed gender people or items, the neuter form is used. Like English, the pronoun usually comes before the verb, as in the example below:
But, just as easily, the order of the sentence may be inverted. In this case, the pronoun moves to the end of the sentence:
In English, changing of the word order like this would render a phrase nonsensical. This is mainly due to the fact that whilst being a Germanic language, English has lost most of its noun declension. See syntax for more information. PossessiveThe Icelandic possessive pronouns for the respective grammatical persons are as follows:
Where the three columns for each person represent masculine, feminine and neuter genders respectively. DemonstrativeThe Icelandic demonstrative pronouns are as follows:
Where the three columns for each person represent masculine, feminine and neuter genders respectively. NumeralsThe words for one to four are declined for the respective cases and genders:
Other numbers are as follows and not declined:
AdjectivesAdjectives themselves must agree with the gender of the nouns that they describe. For example, the word for ‘Icelandic’ would agree as follows:
In addition, they must agree with the number (i.e. singular/plural) of the noun being described:
VerbsIn the infinitive, most Icelandic verbs end in -a. There are three main groups of verbs in Icelandic: -a, -i, and -ur, referring to the endings that these verbs take when conjugated in the first person singular present. Take the infinitive tala (‘to talk’), for example:
And compare with the verb vera (‘to be’):
Læra (‘to learn’) is an -i verb:
And finally verða (‘to become’), which is an -ur verb:
Note how for each of the verb groups, the conjugations in the singular change, but in the plural, the endings are nearly always predictable (-um, -ið and -a, respectively). As English learners of many foreign languages find, conjugation can be difficult to understand because the majority of English verbs are regular and have only one change in ending (-s for third person singular). However, in the majority of cases in Icelandic, the conjugation patterns can be easily picked up and remain regular across most verbs. However, it should be noted that one can not determine how to conjugate a verb merely from seeing its infinitive, so it is a matter of learning which group each verb belongs to. Some Icelandic infinitives end with the -ja suffix. These verbs can be conjugated like -ur verbs, that is to say that the suffix is lost in the first person singular. When conjugating -ja verbs, the single ‘j’ must also be removed, so syngja (‘to sing’) would become ég syng (‘I sing’) in the first person singular and not ég syngj. AdverbsCompared to other lexical categories, Icelandic adverbs are relatively simple, and are not declined and can be constructed easily from adjectives, nouns and verbs. These derived adverbs often end in -lega (approximately equivalent to the -ly suffix in English):
However, like English, some common adverbs do not stick to this pattern:
Other Word ClassesPrepositionsIn Icelandic, prepositions determine the case of the following noun. Some examples are given below:
SyntaxIcelandic is SVO (subject-verb-object), generally speaking, with the subject and verb inverted in questions and when a sentence begins with an adverb. However, the inflectional system allows for considerable freedom in word order. QuestionsIn Icelandic, questions can be easily formed by rearranging the order of the sentence from subject-verb-object to verb-subject-object. For example:
can be made into a question as follows:
This simple rule still applies when interrogatives are involved, which are simply added to the front of the sentence. The interrogatives in Icelandic are:
However, interrogative pronouns (hvað/hver) must decline with the verb that they modify, so the case of the pronoun will change depending on the verb. Icelandic sign language
Icelandic sign language was originally based on Danish Sign Language. Until 1910, deaf Icelandic people were sent to school in Denmark. Today, Icelandic sign language has evolved apart from its Danish roots. The language is regulated by a national committee. Examples of Icelandic
See alsoReferences
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