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by JimmyL
5822 days ago
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Icelandic is, I believe, a Germanic language dating back to the 1200s or so. What I think you're getting at - and one of the cool things about Iceland - is that the language hasn't changed all that much since it was introduced back then. This means that modern Icelanders can read the Sagas (written in the 10th and 11th centuries) with relative ease. The majority of people will read them in the same way we read Shakespeare or Dickens (with modern spelling and some footnotes), but with some effort they can be read by most well-educated Icelanders in their initial forms. While isolation had a great deal to do with this initially, nowadays it's mostly because of the work of the Icelandic Language Institute, which religiously updates the language to add new words for concepts that didn't previously exist. They also work with the Icelandic Naming Committee, to maintain the list of acceptable first names that Icelandic children can be given - if the name you want to give your child isn't on the list of previously-used names, you have to submit it to the Committee to make sure that it is appropriate (i.e. can be spelled in the Icelandic alphabet and fits into Icelandic grammar). |
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Over 500 years ago, the people in Sweden and Denmark spoke East Scandinavian, which was one language, but that had a "dialect continuum" from south to north. But in the 1500s, Sweden gained independence, and both countries adopted protestantism, which meant both countries translated the bible. And with that action the languages actually split with Danish gravitating towards how it was spoken and spelled in Copenhagen, and Swedish gravitating towards how it was spoken and spelled in Stockholm.
So Swedish and Danish are almost the same language, they've only been split for 500 years. But since Denmark is a more densely populated country, it means that Danish has changed faster. Swedish has been going through similar transformations as Danish, except slower.
For example, Danish has gone further in vowelshifting y to ö, compare the word for key: "nyckel" in Swedish, "nøgel" in Danish. In some Swedish dialects people say "nöckel", but it hasn't made it to standard Swedish.
Both languages have done consonant softening of g to j and k to g or ch, but Danish has also softened t to d, v to u, and p to b.
And the sole reason for this is that Denmark has a six times higher population density than Sweden, with roughly the same population.
Although the other theory on Danish language, namely that they've all stuffed their mouths full of potatoes before speaking, is still somewhat plausible. :-)