Sounds like fun; I'm going to learn Icelandic first. You see, there are so many things I would like to do but for which have neither the time nor the energy. One such thing is to learn an absolutely useless language, such as Icelandic. I will probably never run into an Icelandic person. There are no scholarly writings in Icelandic (that I know of, who knows?). Oh, but it's such a beautiful language. Just listen to some Sigur Ros and you'll know what I mean.
Next I would probably learn all the languages of Africa. After that, probably all the native American tongues. Then I would move on to the remaining dead languages that NSA couldn't cover.
So there you have it. That's what I would do in my spare time, in those first couple days in heaven.
I concur. :-)
ReplyDeleteRob, I showed this to my brother, who is a linguist, and he appreciated it very much. He said to tell you that Icelandic is one of the oldest surviving languages, and therefore has weird grammatical quirks that pretty much no other living languages do; Latin has some things in common, believe it or not. He also said there are some really cool sagas written in Icelandic, so if you're into Nordic legends, you're really in luck.
ReplyDeleteComing in late here (has to do with me not reading your blog enough or something), but I think you may be selling Icelanders short on the scholarship thing. I bet a sizable chunk of everything ever written about geothermal engineering was first composed in Iceland.
ReplyDeleteOf course that may be more academic than scholarly...
al sends
That's interesting. I hadn't thought of that. But I still don't have a good utilitarian reason for learning Icelandic.
ReplyDelete