a double vowel combination is a dipthong, right?
is Icelandic inflected or uninflected? is it agglutanated?
Is Icelandic closer to German than English? If so, this would help since my German is Post-Intermediate level now.
Would you be interested in teaching me more of the language? In exchange for some German/Spanish/Italian/Greek/Catalan? you use a k instead of a c as in Greek...Makedonia, Kostos....
>From: Árni Ibsen <
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>Reply-To: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and poetics <
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>To:
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>Subject: Re: poetry
>Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2002 01:05:10 +0000
>
>on 10/28/02 10:49 AM, paul murphy at
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>
>Hi, can you give us a basic guide to Icelandic, the alphabet, some vocab,
>some phrases...it would help to me to get into the pomes more,
>
>
>Hi, Paul,
>
>I heard in St. Petersburg earlier this month that all you needed to get by
>in that country (i.e. Russia) (at least on the Russian speaking metro) was
>to learn the kyryllic alphabet, because a lot of the words were
>'international', as such. This told to me personally by a Finn, a nation you
>never question no matter where in the world.
>
>But no such luck with Icelandic.
>
>I honestly don't know where to begin! The two letters we use regardless of
>what English speaking peoples are aware of are Þ þ and Ð ð. The former
>produces the same sound as the 'th' in an English 'thorough'. The latter
>produces the same sound as 'th' as heard in an English 'this'. And then
>there are Æ æ and Ö ö. Basically your ae, and ö is like the vowe sound in an
>American word such as 'nerd'.
>
>Speaking the language we always stress the first syllable, no matter how
>long the word is. If it's a compound word, which there are a lot of, each
>new addition to the first word in the combination has a slighter stress.
>Thus 'sparisjóður' [savings bank] stresses the 'spa' of the first compound,
>i.e. 'spari', while there's a slighter stress on the 'sjó' in 'sjóður'.
>
>The alphabet has no c . And it ends with: x y z þ æ ö .
>
>'Góðan dag' means literally 'good day', which you would properly translate
>as 'good morning'. And when saying good-bye we say 'bless', which is a short
>form of 'You be blessed'. I'll stop now in the hope that this is of some
>use. Ask me some more, so I can be of further help with this. 'Já' means
>'yes' and 'nei' means 'no'. I'll be happy to elaborate.
>
>Best
>
>Árni
>
>
>--
>Árni Ibsen
>Stekkjarkinn 19,
>220 Hafnarfjördur,
>Iceland
>
>tel.: +354-555-3991
>e-mail:
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>http://www.centrum.is/~aibsen/
>
>
>
>
>
