Icelandic Dopers, is your grammar "hard" for you?

Factual Questions
1

We’ve had numerous discussions here on the relative complexity of languages and the difficulty or ease with which they can be learned by non-native speakers. And the consensus has usually been all languages carry the same degree of inherent complexity, and that the difficulty of learning for non-native speakers depends almost entirely on the degree of similarity between the language to be learned and the learner’s native tongue.

But today there was a commentary in the L.A. Times about the intrusion of English language media into Iceland. In this it was suggested that younger Icelanders prefer English to their own language, which it characterized as a “minefield” of declensions, subjunctives, and conjugations. But that simply doesn’t sound right. If you grew up speaking that language, how can it be difficult? Or has the grammar of the everyday spoken language diverged from what I might call “book grammar”? Is the spoken language undergoing a process of simplification with regard to inflections, and becoming more reliant on word order?

2

Bumped to allow for difference of time zones, and because there’ve been lots of views. Someone else besides me must also be interested in this.

3

Dang it! I knew my Icelandicness would help here at some point but, in accordance with Murphy’s Law, I duly missed this when you posted it…

I wouldn’t go as far as calling the American media onslaught here an intrusion (if you’d seen Icelandic T.V. you’d understand) but most of our media is indeed in English and we don’t do voice-overs except for children. This has given the Icelandic population a fairly good overall understanding of the English language–especially the colloquial variety–but it really doesn’t affect the Icelandic language IMHO. Danish was more of a risk to Icelandic in the 19th century, when we were still under Danish rule, than English is now. At any rate, we’re still using the language we did a thousand years ago so I doubt we’ll let the inferior English language wreck that for us; I’m on a personal crusade for Better Icelandic and I’m far from being alone so I have no worries at all. Following is an updated old post of mine about Icelandic; thought you might enjoy it:

In Icelandic there are just two tenses: The past and present tense.

It does, however, have six moods: The Indicative is the most common one and is mainly used in statements:

– Hann talar mikið - “he talks much”
– þið lesið bókina - “you read the book”

The Subjunctive is used to express hope, wish or something unreal:

– Þú læsir bókina er þú gætir - “you would read the book if you could”
– Ef ég væri sterkari lemdi ég hann - “if I was stronger I would hit him”

Subjunctive is also used with some conjunctions and in indirect speech:

– Þó hún sofi mikið er hún alltaf þreytt - “though she sleeps much she is always tired”
– Hann sagði að skipið færi á morgun - “he said that the ship would leave tomorrow”

The Imperative is used for commands and normally it is formed by the suffixes -du, -ðu or -tu, but they are derived from the personal pronoun þú “you”:

– Lestu bókina! - “read the book!”
– Komdu strax! - “come immediately!”
– Farðu! - “go!”.

The imperative plural has the same form as indicative and subjunctive:
– Lesið bókina! - “read the book!”

The present participle is formed by the suffix -andi and is uninflected:
– Þú kemur gangandi - “you come walking”

– Sýnið gangandi vegfarendum tillitssemi - “pay attention to walking passers-by”. The past participle is formed with auxiliaries like hafa “have” and geta “can”:

– Ég hef lesið bókina - “I have read the book”
– Ég get lesið bókina - “I can read the book”

In the passive voice the past participle agrees with the nominative subject in gender, number and case:

– Þeir (m. pl. nom) voru handteknir (m. pl. nom.) - “they were arrested”
– Þær (f. pl. nom.) voru handteknar (f. pl. nom.) - “they were arrested”

The Infinitive is formed by the suffix -a:

– Lesa - “to read”, koma - “to come”, skrifa - “to write”.

To make things interesting, nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals are declined for four cases; nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Words are normally in the nominative unless they are governed by some other word or constituent in the sentence. Prepositions and verbs can assign accusative, dative and genitive and nouns can assign genitive. For example, the word “horse” in Icelandic would be hestur, hest, hesti, hests, hesturinn, hestinn, hestinum or hestsins; depending on the sentence. If we throw the plural in too, we add hestar, hesta, hestum, hestarnir, hestana, hestunum and hestanna (note the two n’s in this last one; ‘n or nn’ is one of the tougher rules).

One of my favourite things about Icelandic is the ju->y, o->y, ö->y and more Y-transformations. The thing is, I and Y make the same sound in Icelandic and the Y is mostly used to show you the base of the word; for example that the verb byggja (to build) is derived from bjuggum (ju->y). In a few cases, the Y is just there for no apparent reason. There is a plethora of rules like these attached to the Icelandic language and for each rule, there are more than a few exceptions that you just have to know to speak good Icelandic (or, in cases such as mine, exquisite Icelandic) so I suppose you can call it a linguistic minefield but I call it the language of Kings. It has so many more options of projecting what you need than English (admittedly in my somewhat limited experience of your fair language)
…this has been “Icelandic and you”, tune in again tomorrow for more obscure grammar lessons you didn’t ask for, when we cover the delightfully ludicrous Finno-Ugrian language family.

4

Oh, and to answer your question: No, I find it very easy and fairly straightforward. A lot of people just can’t speak it correctly, though, and I have never, ever heard a foreigner speak perfect Icelandic. We’ll see how the self-proclaimed “general genius” and current Icelander Bobby Fischer does, though.

5

No future tense? How do you say “tomorrow I will do…” ?
All those declinations remind me of Latin–which is a difficult language,but can be learned to “native level” fluency, (even though all the natives are dead.)

But now I’m really curious–how can any language not have a future tense?

6

Japanese doesn’t. Hungarian does (sort of), but it’s not used anywhere near as commonly as in English. For that matter, English technically doesn’t have a future tense (in the linguistic sense of a term, as a stand-alone verbal inflection).

Context tells you whether an action is taking place now or in the future.

Hell, if that’s weird for you, in Hindi the word “kal” means both “tomorrow” and “yesterday.”

7

I’ve never studied Icelandic, but perhaps the future tense is formed with the verb to go, as in the English construction “I’m going to buy a car next week”. The French do it too: “je vais acheter etc”.

8

I picked up French and some German pretty easily, but Icelandic never stuck. I tried so hard, too.

9

Theoretically, you could get by with no tenses at all and just use adverbs.

10

Define “younger Icelanders”? With the media being English language dominated, all but young children will be fluent in English. Thus by the time someone is a teenager, they’ll know both languages very well. Little surprise that at least some teenagers would prefer English.

11

Doesn’t German form the future tense in much the same way English does? I would presume that Icelandic (being a Germanic language) does so similarly.

12

Really? I wouldn’t have thought this was true, or at least not obviously enough that it would be the concensus. There are plenty of native English speakers who don’t grasp all the grammatical subtleties of English. I have no trouble imagining that languages could be inherently easier or harder to master. Certainly when it comes to spelling, English isn’t as easy, even for a native speaker, as, say, Spanish.

13

Grammar and spelling are two different things, as are written and spoken languages.

14

English doesn’t. We manage.

English just has past and nonpast. Of course, these are technical linguistic definitions. I’m not really conversant enough in English grammar to tell you what “I will go” actually is, but it’s not a future tense. :slight_smile:

Spanish has one, but it’s hardly used in colloquial speech. Instead, a periphrastic construction is used (“Voy a tomar un café”: I’m going to drink a cup of coffee) very much like English’s “going to”. Often, however, the present is used, again parallel to English usage: “El domingo yo voy a la playa”: Sunday I’m going to the beach. In casual usage, then, the true future tense is mostly confined, paradoxically, to its other function: expressing probability regarding the present.

Chinese doesn’t have any verb tenses whatsoever. Fancy that!

It’s certainly true. It’s not, however, the consensus. That’s because people have a depressing confusion about linguistics - most people don’t have even the faintest understanding, frankly, of how language works or what the word “grammar” means.

Any native speaker of a language has a grasp of its grammatical subtleties - it’s just hard to illustrate that grasp because the grammatical subtleties are indeed subtle. So subtle, in fact, that native speakers have no conscious awareness of them, unless they’re educated in linguistics. Of course, according to linguists, people who speak African American Vernacular English (i.e. Black English or “Ebonics”), or those who speak other non-prestige varieties (say, ones including “ain’t” or permitting double negatives) are speaking perfectly good English. It’s just not the same dialect as the prestigious standard dialect.

Spelling is another matter entirely. While people have built-in wiring for language, we don’t have the same natural capacity for writing. It’s no surprise that some writing systems are tougher than others. Still, English speakers have it easy. I’m studying Chinese, so I have no sympathy for those with trouble spelling things in English! :slight_smile: But that’s true that some folks are bad spellers; that’s a separate issue from actual grammar, or linguistic competence.

15

An interesting sidelight:

Technically speaking, English doesn’t have a future tense, that is, a verb form that is used for the future tense. Each verb has only three forms: past (take), non-past (took), and participle (taken). The English future is a construction formed with the auxiliary “will” which, incidentally, like other verbs can be put in the past: “would” (he didn’t run that day but he would run the day after). “Will” (or “shall”) is constructed just like the other modal verbs such as “can” or “may.”

Of course, we refer to this in common parlance as the future tense, since our usual concept of tenses (as with other aspects of formalized grammar) was originally based on Latin models that don’t quite work for English.

Romance languages such as French or Spanish, by contrast, do have real future tenses, i.e. different verb forms for the future: je prendrai, yo tomaré. Both of those languages (as well as the various other Romance languages with which I’m familiar) also have periphrastic future forms: je vais prendre, voy a tomar (literally, “I’m going to take.”)

16

OK first of all, no-one in Iceland ‘prefers’ english to Icelandic. No one. When two Icelanders speak, they speak Icelandic.

Our future tense is similar to your english one, formed with ‘mun’ which corresponds to your ‘will’:

Ég fer = I go
Ég mun fara = I will go
and also: Ég mun hafa farið = I will have gone

(we didn’t take ‘hafa’ from ‘have’ as our language predates yours by about a millenium; you get words like Geyser and Window from Icelandic, albeit by proxy in the case of Window, I believe)

Go (Fara) is conjugated as shown here , if you’re interested.

It’s a little difficult for me to explain the language much further as I have to look up all your fancy words like ‘conjunctive’ and such and my job is interfering with my real, on-line life.

GingerOfTheNorth, I understand that reading Icelandic children’s books works wonders but Icelandic is by any standard a ridiculously difficult language to master. Coudos (or should that be props?) for trying to learn the language of the forefathers but it’s pretty much impossible if you can’t practice and even then you’ll never get the grammar and pronounciation right (trust me).

At any rate, I have found the other languages I speak quite easy to learn. I am completely lacking in the education department so I wouldn’t say I speak any foreign language perfectly but I think my English is OK, I more than get by in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian (meaning, basically, ‘Scandinavian’) and my German is good enough for me to give German tourists directions and such, although I won’t debate Brecht with any of them in German (nor would I in any other language, come to think of it). My Latin could use some work since I haven’t met the Pope quite as often as I had presumed and, ergo (see?), don’t get much of a chance to practice. Next up are Spanish and French, since they seem prettty straightforward and I already understand a little French. I’m seriously considering learning Finnish too, mostly because a language with 14 noun cases and no declensions has to be worth learning, but also because it sounds delightfully odd. Thanks to the Icelandic background, the only problem I’ve ever had with a language was Latin’s damned Ablativus, since it has no Icelandic counterpart.

Oh, and if it helps, I would probably be considered a Young Icelander, like those you speak of, being 25 years of age. I have no education save for the compulsory, which stops at 16 here, and have never lived abroad.

If any of you are Finnish and can point out a good site or book for me to check out, it’d be much appreciated. If any of you want to learn Icelandic to prepare for our inevitable world domination (just ask the english), please don’t hesitate to contact me. Death will come quick and painlessly to those who make an effort. I wish I could say the same about the rest.