Miss World 2005 was crowned December 10th. The winner was miss Iceland, Unnur Birna Vilhjalmsdottir, once again confirming Icelanders’ aesthetic superiority. Unfortunately, this does not coincide with Icelanders having the World’s Strongest Man this time around, seeing as the two strongest men in the world, Magnus Ver Magnusson (seen here walking his camper) and Hjalti Ursus Arnason (seen here courting Bill Kazmaier way back when) are in their 40’s or 50’s, meaning their hearts are due to explode any minute. 22-year-old Benedikt Magnusson (pictured here during World’s Cuddliest Strongman) should be ready in a couple of years, though, so, thanks to careful selective breeding, we should rule all international beauty pageants and strongmen competitions again before too long. This will not be very good for the intrenational community, as the Icelandic nation suffers from an epic national minority complex due its size, or lack thereof, and grossly overcompensates with delusions of grandeur. If you know any Icelanders (pretty unlikely, I know), beware; we’re gonna be getting a whole lot more annoying than we are now.
Incidentally, Bibliophage was putting the Iceland patronym record straight here about a year ago (here); the reason I bring that up is that he was talking about Unnur Steinsson, a former Miss Iceland and the Mother of Unnur Birna Vilhjalmsdottir, the current Miss World. Yes, Bibliophage, Unnur sure is a girl’s name.
OK-so no pic on that link, for us all to decide if she truly qualifies, ie, exemplifies the title of Miss World…
I’ll take your word for it. Congrats(?) Iceland!
Thanks… there are pictures of Unnur Jr. (does the “Jr.” thing work with girls?) here; not quite as blonde as you may have thought, but there it is. I don’t think we were really expecting her to win–I was genuinely surprised, for one–but, then again, we are a terribly beautiful people so we probably should have seen it coming. Did I mention our strongmen? We also have the most grand chess champions and nobel laureates per capita in the world…
Well, I wouldn’t kick her out for eating crackers in bed. I would, however, kick her out for eating that Icelandic dish where they bury a shark in the ground for 6 months and then eat its decaying flesh, in bed. Or, ever. Or even talking about that dish. (shudder).
[QUOTE=UselessGit This will not be very good for the intrenational community, as the Icelandic nation suffers from an epic national minority complex due its size, or lack thereof, .[/QUOTE]
But you have a hell of a cool language. It saddens me to realize that, according to what you once said here, the electronic media in your country don’t even use the language, except for children’s programming. What language is used instead? English, or other Scandinavian languages?
And to think that a thousand years ago English looked like that, but due to centuries of errors, ignorance, Norman French invaders, vowel shifts, creative Dutch printers, prescriptivists who thought that Latin was the be-all and end-all of language, and l33tsp34k, we lost all that, even down to some of the letters (thorn and eth).
Now we have to limp along with a hideously-agglomerated wreck of a spelling system. At least we lost most of our inflections and declensions and have mostly a pure-positional grammar. (I’m waiting for the plural to go bye-bye, like in Chinese: one dog, two dog, three dog.)
Sure you would, because Icelanders don’t actually have family names; instead they use patronymics. Her name means Vilhjalm’s Daughter. Her brothers, if any, would use Vilhjalmsson for their surname.
Hmm, wasn’t there an episode of Travel Sick where the guy went to Iceland and one of his tasks was to “snog a beauty queen”? He made mention of the fact that for such a small country, the beauty queen population density was rather high. The girl he ended up smooching was quite a looker.
There’s a guy from Iceland in some of my classes. He is rather attractive, come to think of it.
This piques my curiosity. Icelandic is heavily inflected, far more than, say, even German. What’s more, the inflections are mostly postfixed, which means that the last syllable of a word is likely to be the inflection rather than the meaningful root of the word. So when Icelanders learn English, I wonder if this results in a tendency to confuse words that are similar in this way–the two words you mentioned are different by only a couple letters in the last syllable.
You’re good… Icelandic is indeed monstrously inflected (not as much as Finnish, though) but I don’t think that’s why I confused the two words–I think I just took “inherit” and “inherant” as the same word. I mean… if you inherit a trait, it becomes inherant, no?
You may have misunderstood me slightly in the past, as Icelandic is actually very much alive and well. Our official language is the original Icelandic (accept no substitutes) but we do have to learn Danish and English too; a lot of people add German, French and/or Spanish to their repertoire later (I’m taking Spanish, as I detest the French). Children’s programs are, however, the only dubbed media in Iceland, for reasons I can’t explain, which is probably from where the misunderstanding comes. Also, when you were asking about Icelandic grammar back when (here ), I kinda went overboard explaining the delights of the Icelandic language, probably obscuring my point somewhat.
NurseCarmen: Come one, come all; I’ll buy the beer (trust me: you’ll want me to).
Our humble people all perished in the years 1783 to 1785, along with the weaklings and uglies. Natural selection at its finest…
Modesty aparently means “having or showing a moderate estimation of one’s own talents, abilities, and value”. I’ll forgive you for thinking me impudent since you don’t know me personally, nor my talents, abilities nor values. [I tried to resist; I really did]
Oh, and thank you, Spectre of… thank you Spectre, for helping me unleash the awesome power of the word “piqued”. It will come in handy (mouthy?) in the future.
By Odin’s beard, I’m bad at this… the first part of my post was in reply to this:
“according to what you once said here, the electronic media in your country don’t even use the language, except for children’s programming. What language is used instead? English, or other Scandinavian languages?”