A Brief Excursus on Language

Þat gøra hér ungir sveinar, er lítit mark mun at þykkja (Youngsters do this here, which will be considered of little note—What the giant-king tells Thor during a sporting game, but which is equally applicable to the inflection of Icelandic nouns)

As nothing particularly adventurous has happened this past week here, I thought I might take this opportunity to digress about the difficulties of learning the Icelandic language. The sentiments, I should think, could just as easily be applied to any heavily inflected language—probably more so, in fact, in cases like Russian or Greek—but as Icelandic is the example nearest to hand at the moment, Icelandic it is. Besides, I’m putting up more pictures of geese and whatnot, so scrolling down might be worth the effort.

Let’s take a simple, if inelegant, sentence as our starting point: “I bought the two bottles.” In Icelandic: “Ég keypti tvær flöskurnar.” Let’s compare it with any less inflected language, say Spanish: “Compré las dos botellas.” Say you’re learning Spanish as a beginner, and you come across this sentence. You see the word “botellas” and think to yourself, “Well, the s means it’s plural, and the a means it’s feminine. So the word would be “la botella.” Even if you don’t recognize it as a cognate, you look it up in the dictionary and—presto!—you have a shiny new word to put in your pocket, which you can whip out at any convenient moment and use correctly in a sentence.

Now let’s turn to Icelandic. Let’s assume for a moment that we are not confused by any of the other three words in the sentence (that we can figure out, for instance, that “keypti” is the past tense of the verb “kaupa” and “tvær” is some inflection of the number “tveir”). This leaves us with the funny creature “flöskurnar.” We don’t know what it means and we want to look it up in a dictionary. This simple act involves great gymnastic contortions of decipherment which a student may or may not be able to manage without flying to the reassuring aid of a teacher.

First, we have to figure out that “nar” is not part of the root word at all, but is actually the suffixed article meaning “the.” (Don’t even try looking up “-nar” in the dictionary—it would be listed under “-inn,” if at all.) Now we’ve got “flöskur.” Our first thought (because we’re beginning students and the inflection of the article doesn’t immediately set off any grammatical bells in our head) is, “It must be a masculine strong noun, right? It ends in ‘-ur.’” Wrong. This particular deceptive “-ur” marks a feminine plural.

Let’s say we figure that out (no doubt after thumbing through our dictionary in vain looking for the masculine noun “flöskur”). So we chop off the ending and figure we must be able to get something from “flösk,” to which some as-yet-unknown ending will be added. But there’s nary a “flösk” in the dictionary either, because we also have to realize that the u in the ending triggered that snazzy device called u-umlaut, so the o (which looks, with its umlaut hat, more like a surprise-face than anything) is actually an a in disguise.

At last, we’ve got “flask.” Good heavens, that looks like an English word! Hearts pounding, we flip through the dictionary. Yes! There it is! “Flaska”—feminine weak noun, meaning “bottle.”

Triumphant, we scribble down our translation and tell ourselves to remember this lovely new word. However, the next morning, we want to ask, “What is IN the bottle?” And here our trouble begins again.

Do we use the dative or the accusative? What IS the dative of “flaska”? Does it have u-umlaut? Do we need an article attached to the end? What on earth should THAT look like? (Non-native Icelandic speakers get cookies baked for them on my return to the States if they guessed “flöskunni.” What? No takers?)

When we learned the word “botella,” we picked it up and put it in our pocket to use whenever we liked. When we learned the word “flaska,” it came rooted to the very fabric of the language. It requires lengthy grammatical exegesis just to use it in a simple sentence, and we might as well try to put one corner of a fishing net in our pocket and expect to walk away without dragging half a ton of rope, fish, and seaweed in our wake.

It is astounding for a speaker of a language as little inflected as English to realize that people—children!—can learn and speak an inflected language with speed and coherence, much less with ease and grace. I hope this little digression will not be construed as an attack on Icelandic—I find it a truly beautiful language entirely worthy of all the efforts that have gone into protecting and celebrating it.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.