Can modern Icelanders really read/understand 1000-year old texts? This seems to be common opinion, but I wonder if it is true. Yes, Iceland is a relatively isolated island, with a small population. However, 1000 years is a long time-and even isolated as it is, Icelanders would have had contact with Norwegians, Danes, English people, and so new words would have entered their language. As a speaker of Modern English (the American dialect), I cannot understand an Old English text from AD 1000. Is Icelandic so frozen in time, those words and expressions haven’t changed in that time span?
I have only heard the story about Icelandic being fairly conservative as a language, but the story is not so odd. Most modern-day Greeks regularly read parts of a 1900-year-old text, the New Testament, when they go to Orthodox church services.
As I understand it, there are very few loanwords in Icelandic due to a deliberate policy of keeping them out. Unlike the French, the Icelanders have been largely successful in this. Words for new inventions (like “computer”) are devised by combining Icelandic word elements.
Another thing to consider is that lots of languages are conservative in this way, Icelandic is more conserative than many, but not outlandishly so. But a better way to say it is that English has fairly recently undergone dramatic shifts in pronounciation only 500 years ago. You look at all the weird silent letters in English, and you find that 500 years ago those letters were actually pronounced.
So Icelandic really is conservative, but English is unusually unconservative.
Written Icelandic is very conservative, even if the spoken language may have change more.
As for English, the comparison isn’t valid. One reason English changed so much was the heavy influence of Old Norse during the Viking age, and the even more heavy influence of Norman French after 1066. Iceland didn’t undergo anything like that.
I’d second that this is not so odd. Speakers of modern Arabic are able to read the Qur’an in its original text (i.e., the version compiled after Muhammad’s death). The language may have changed, but it’s still intelligible.
Hebrew is another example of a language allowing modern speakers to understand ancient texts, but AFAIK Hebrew was dead, as a spoken language, for many centuries and preserved only in writing. It wasn’t until the 19th century that Hebrew was revived as a livig language actually spoken by people.
In the case of German, my impression is that modern speakers have a good chance of at least getting a clue of what a text in Old or Middle High German is about. They might not get every word, since the changes are significant, but get the general idea.
I’m learning Icelandic, as Nashiitashii, my fiancee’ and her mother is from there. Pretty much any Icelander can muddle through the old texts with little problem. There are some words and phrases that give them trouble, but it is the allegorical tone used rather than the words. Spoken Icelandic is a little different and modern speech patterns have influenced the sound and flow of the language. The words themselves, however remain pretty close to the old versions, and most have not changed much at all.
What you DO see a LOT of is words that have many alternative spellings and meanings. For example, this morning we were making pickles, and I wanted to label them in Icelandic to help us learn. Any of the following is acceptable, and understandable as “pickles” : pikkles, pækill, súrkrás, setja í pækil, pækla, súrsa. So you see that besides the Anglo versions, you also have several Norse versions all of the same word. This is the most frustrating aspect of Icelandic, because they will use any of those terms interchangeably with no particular reason to do so.
The situation with Arabic is very different. The dialects of Arabic spoken in everyday life have diverged from classical Arabic as much as modern Romance languages have changed from Latin. The language situation in the Arab world is diglossia: It’s as if all literature in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal were still being written in Latin and imagine if even though everyone spoke Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc., no one wrote them down and everyone learned Latin as the literary language in school. That’s how Arabs are able to read the Qur’an–they learn it as practically a second language. Knowledge of modern colloquial Arabic wouldn’t get you very far in reading classical Arabic literature (and vice versa).