Are you sure, DrFidelius? I’m no expert, but it sure looks like authentic Icelandic to me (I can identify several words and understand a few sentences), and Cosmic Relief even says he has a translation, which is impossible as vonlenska is not a language.
Icelandic is easy to identify; it’s one of the few languages that uses the ð, Ð and þ, Þ characters. Vietanmese uses the Ð character, but it also has all those funky accents.
Definitely Icelandic. Funny how, if you read it on paper (on screen), it’s fairly easy to deduce at least some phrases or words, but when I was listening to Icelanders talk among themselves a few weeks ago…not a chance. Even worse than Danish.
As far as I can tell, they do some songs in Icelandic and some in gibberish. All the gibberish songs are listed on the Wikipedia page you linked to. Do we know the name of the song?
Sort of like us English-speakers and Old English, since Icelandic is essentially Old Norse. I can make out many of the words if it’s written down, but damned if I can understand hardly anything at all if someone speaks it.
I think you’re confused about what Old English is. Funnily enough, I’ve been told that old English is actually, essentially, Icelandic. Apparently if you’re fluent in Iclandic, you can read works like Beowulf without too much a hitch.
Can you actually recognize any of these words (the first five lines of Beowulf)?
Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum,
þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorl.
Oft and eorls look vaguely like their modern day forms. Maybe you’re thinking of Chaucerian English? For me, however, that’s a lot easier to understand it spoken aloud than written.
No, I’m not confused. Old English is closer to Icelandic than Modern English is, but it isn’t the same (unless you go back 2000 years or so). In fact, the Scandinavian languages are on a different branch of the Germanic language sub-family than English is (North vs West, respectively). They were, however, all mutual intelligible until about the 6th or 7th Century AD. And English borrowed pretty heavily from Old Norse when the Danes ruled over much of Britain during the 9th and 10th centuries, so that makes the similarity appear to be more than it otherwise would.
Hwæt = What, or just an exclamation
We = we
dagum = day
cyninga = king
hu ða = how the
I still think it’s a pity that Modern English lost the thorn (þ) and eth (ð) characters, which were voiceless and voiced ‘th’ respectively. (Vioced ‘th’ can be more clearly spelt as ‘dh’…)
I þink ðat spelling wiþ þorn and eð would be a lot clearer. But it would make reciting ðe alphabet a little different: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ… ÐÞ?
Spoons once recited a chunk of Middle English to me. Much different, and much much closer to Modern English. The vowels were Italian, it seemed, and there was more of a rhythm to it. The spelling was better too (no silent e’s on the end of words); apparently our spelling froze somewhere slose to Middle English and the language just kept on changing.
