Re: About icelandic

António Marques (in sci.lang):

Brian M. Scott wrote:
On Tue, 18 Nov 2008 22:00:29 +0000, António Marques
<m.ap@xxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:gfvdub$k5r$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> in sci.lang:

[...]

I don't know, but... with just a little training I think a
german or french or portuguese speaker could read texts
written in those languages a thousand years ago.

Definitely more than just a little training in the case of
German, and I think in the case of French as well; I've no
opinion about Portuguese.

The earliest portuguese texts are ~ 13th century, so there's no way to
tell. But by just a bit more latitude that the Oaths of Strasburg are
french, there are a lot of pseudo-latin texts beginning about the 9th
century in which the last of the 'classical' sound laws can be seen
taking place. That settled, the grammar was pretty much in place
(whereas french, for instance, still had to lose the nominative/oblique
thing, granted).

My impression of german came from MHG; I supposed that modern speakers
who are moreover used to know their dialect besides the standard
language wouldn't have too hard a time understanding it. But I admit it
probably requires more than a little training; though I'm still not
convinced Icelandic is so exceptional as advertised. Of course,
insulation may help escape that part of language change which is due to
external influences (not only that, but people in an island have no one
to talk to except themselves so homogenisation and reinforcement of
tradition may be easier; or not).

I have the feeling that modern Greek is closer to classical Greek than
modern German is to Old High German, even though the time distance in the
Greek case is thousand years longer. Maybe this is a misconception because
the modern Greek orthography didn't follow all the sound mergers.

Joachim
.

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