Learning(?) Icelandic
Sæll!
One interesting thing about the country is definitively the Icelandic language. I like it a lot. (At this moment mainly the way it sounds!) We have started an ambitious project to learn at least a bit of this ancient Scandinavian language during these couple of months here.
Icelanders are very proud of their language, which is believed to have changed very little from the original tongue spoken by the Norse settlers. It has been said that the modern say people could read the the original sagas and Eddas that were written some eight hundred years ago. (Although haven't yet met anyone who would have these kind of books in their bookshelves, so go figure!)
People are also very reluctant to adopting new foreign words to their language. According to the puristic linguistic policy, there is an institute that comes up with new words (or review old words with new meanings) for new concepts. For example the word TV is "sjónvarpið" and telephone is "sími". Some words have some similarities to Swedish, which is a nice help in the beginning to make it a bit easier to understand the rather complicated grammar, for instance.
In the morning I tend to "read" the morning paper (read: look at the pictures and try to understand the articles with the couple of words i know). Hopefully by may I will understand a bit more than just how the weather will be like and what's on TV! :D
Here are some every-day phrases for those of you who got interested in learning this very useful language (some 300,00 people in the world speak it!):
Good Day / Good Morning - Góðan dag
Good Night - Góða nótt
My name is... - Ég heiti...
I am from... - Ég er frá...
Nice to meet you! - Gleður mig að kynnast þér!
(There are a couple of special letters in Icelandic: ð and þ and æ. All the vowels with ´ are also pronounced differently. ..Just to mention a couple of tricky pronounciation rules that have messed up my mind already!)
Well that´s all for now. Keep posting hellos, nice to read those!!!
Kaisa
posted by Minä @ 2:02 PM
1 Comments:
Hi Kaisa,
I have enjoyed gettting caught up on your adventures! Thank you so much for taking the time to keep this journal for those of us who are back home! (I should say, "homes", since you have so many!)
All is well here. Continuing to study my new language--clinical psychology--and am learning so much it is amazing! A bit of it feels very natural, but some old habits I have had, just talking with others, rather than talking therapeutically, sometimes trips me up. I suppose I will get it with practice. Lots and lots of practice.
I am applying for a Fall internship now and may get placed in a school. We will see. I would love to be back with kids, though, because it is a therapeutic school, they will have various mental or emotional disturbances. Then again, I gravitated to those kids in my regular classroom anyway. It will be a really good experience, I think. I truly want to get as good at this as that Swedish Guy. That is my goal. He is pretty amazing with the kids at school, that is for sure.
Everyone here is doing fine. The girls are good. Ellie just turned 21 this week on Valentine's Day, so that was amazing to me. A little sad too. My girls are grown and gone--Buffalo Grove, Seattle, Champaign, Iceland... oy!
I love you. Enjoy. Please take one of those long walks in the quiet for me, ok? Remember when we would do that together?
Love you,
Mom in Westmont
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