this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Icelandic! Beautiful language, learned a bit for my honeymoon, it’s a bit of a time capsule to old Norse too.
Apparently there isn't a lot of language drift in Icelandic, it's one of the few languages that you can read texts from 1000 years ago without any significant loss of meaning. Unlike English where reading anything older than Shakespeare can prove difficult.
Yeah exactly! I think its remoteness helped it survive, only thing now it’s similar to I would say is Faroese.
Re:Shakespeare yeah it’s the same with Scottish folk and Robert Burns, his poems written in auld Scots. Even for native speakers it takes a bit of time to code switch.
I will say, there are a number of words in middle English that we lost that we need to bring back. Aside from silly ones, there are a number of practical ones like "overmorrow" (the day after tomorrow) and "ereyesterday" (the day after yesterday) which convey the same thought without having to type out an entire phrase.
Here's a bunch of them:
https://thoughtcatalog.com/jeremy-london/2018/09/archaic-words/