[Mediterraneo10]

The seemingly archaic quality of modern Icelandic is largely a myth. Over the centuries Icelandic absorbed a huge amount of Danish loanwords. That modern Icelandic has similar vocabulary to the sagas, is because the 19th-century language reformers called for restoring old words. It wasn't because Icelandic had kept them the whole time.

Modern Icelandic pronunciation, too, is vastly different from Old Norse, in spite of the similar orthography.

The one place where Icelandic has a legitimate claim to being archaic, is in the morphology.

[Blikkentrekker]

It should also be noted that Icelandic has underwent spelling reforms to make the spelling more etymological.

It used to be spelled such that it better reflected the modern pronunciation, they at various points actually went back to spell based on older pronunciation, simply to make the language seem more archaic.

“ég” in Icelandic is pronounced “jeg”, and that is how it was spelled in the 1920's; they went back to “ég” simply to make it appear closer to Old Norse.

[pmiller2]

You are right, of course. I didn't want to delve into that sort of complexity, because I didn't want to confuse the issue terribly much. Nonetheless, the main point regarding Icelandic that I wanted to make was about the mutual intelligibility with Old Norse, and the fact that, as languages go, it is extremely conservative (meaning that it resisted change for a long time).

For instance:

> As a testimonial from those times, the author of the thirteenth century Icelandic Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu makes a reference to the spoken English language in the time of Anglo-Saxon King Ethelred (986 – 1016 AD):

> Ein var þá tungu á Englandi sem í Nóregi ok í Danmörku. “One was the tongue in England as in Norway and in Denmark” [0]

Interestingly, this sentence renders identically into Norwegian (Bokmål) as into Danish: Den ene var tungen i England som i Norge og i Danmark. [1, 2]

In Swedish, in case you were wondering, it translates as En var tungan i England som i Norge och i Danmark. [3]

In Icelandic: Ein var tungan í Englandi eins og í Noregi og í Danmörku. Notice how similar these are to the words of a man who's been dead for a millenium.

Google Translate doesn't have nynorsk or Faroese available, but, I expect these would render into something between Swedish and Bokmål; and, something nearly identical to Icelandic; respectively.

I also didn't mention modern English's closest living relative, West Frisian. [4, 5]. Old Frisian [6] and Old English were also mutually intelligible, even moreso than Old English and Old Norse. There is still a subset of modern West Frisian that, although written much differently from its English translation, sounds nearly identical. [7] My experience of it was that it was as if one pronounced Dutch with English vowels.

So, that's a fuller exposition of the family tree of Old English. Things start getting weirder in the Middle English period, when the Normans conquer England in 1066, causing English to start accreting French loan words while, at the same time, dropping the case system and most of its inflections, and acquiring silent letters. [8]

If you want to put this all together into a fuller story of how the sounds of Anglo Saxon were reconstructed, you have to know about vowel shifts [9], and, maybe a bit about consonant shifts [10].

Once you have those tools at hand, plus the rest of a graduate course in comparative linguistics, you can essentially reverse engineer the vowel and consonant shifts to reconstruct a probable phonology for Old English.

But, that would have made a much longer comment, you see. ;)

---

[0]: https://wordwidefx.com/en/blog/post/old-norse-and-old-englis...

[1]: I used Google Translate for this, but, I did study Norwegian for a bit, and, although my norsk is a bit rusty, this looks correct to me.

[2]: This is not a coincidence. Norway was essentially under Danish rule from 1523-1814. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Norway

[3]: Google Translate again. But, based on my limited knowledge of Norwegian and Swedish, this, again looks right.

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Frisian_language

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Frisian_languages

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Frisian

[7]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/113646/why-is-it...

[8]: For instance, in Middle English, the word "knight" was spelled the same as it is today, but pronounced /kniçt/. In Old English, it was spelled variously as cniht, cneoht, cnyht, cneht, cnieht, and maybe even 1 or 2 more variants, but still pronounced the same as in Middle English.

English spelling didn't start to standardize until William Caxton introduced the printing press to England in the late 15th century.

[9]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_shift

[10]: https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Consonant+Shift

[apelapan]

The Swedish version is intelligible (especially given some context) , but not correct/representative. "Tunga" only means the physical tongue that sits in your mouth. The old norse meaning lives on, fuzzily, in some compound words such as "tungomål" and "tungotal".