{"id":429,"date":"2005-03-15T01:04:07","date_gmt":"2005-03-15T08:04:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/?p=429"},"modified":"2005-03-15T01:04:07","modified_gmt":"2005-03-15T08:04:07","slug":"iceland-has-a-word-for-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/2005\/03\/15\/iceland-has-a-word-for-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Iceland Has a Word for It"},"content":{"rendered":"

LA Times Commentary<\/a>:<\/p>\n

It’s part of a global problem: About 400 million people speak English as their first language, an additional 700 million or so use it as a second language and a billion people more are struggling to learn how to speak it. Meanwhile, other languages are disappearing at the rate of two per month. There are about 6,800 languages in the world, but the expert consensus is that 400 of them will soon be extinct.<\/p>\n

Why care? “When you lose a language,” the late linguistics professor Kenneth Hale once said, “you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art. It’s like dropping a bomb on a museum.”<\/p>\n

The front line of Iceland’s preservation battle is in Reykjavik, the home of the Icelandic Language Institute (Islensk Malstod); this government agency was set up in 1964 to devise new words when existing language proves inadequate. When AIDS first came to national attention in Iceland, the main discussion was what to call it rather than how to prevent it. The institute does not believe that AIDS should be called AIDS, and thus the disease is officially known as alnaemi, an ancient Icelandic word meaning “totally vulnerable,” which the institute settled on after some three years of study.<\/p>\n

The preservationists often resurrect words from the sagas. A computer is called tolva, a fusion of the old Icelandic words for number and prophetess, and a TV screen is a skjar, a sheep’s placenta once used by farmers as window panes. My favorite is friopjofur, the word for pager, which means “thief of peace.”<\/p>\n

I left Iceland pessimistic. Everywhere I went, I heard English spoken. Though a written language can be purged of foreign words and phrases, policing how people speak is another matter. Many young Icelanders cannot be bothered with a language that is a minefield of subjunctive, inflections and gender (the number 2 has three genders).<\/p>\n

In one sense, the Icelanders have no one to blame but themselves. Just as they have earnestly defended their language, they have with equal enthusiasm made sure that every schoolchild has a computer and learns English. Thus Microsoft sees no need to translate Windows into Icelandic. The publishers of popular books are beginning to skip translation as well. It’s what the Icelandic language purists call a sjalfhelda \u00d1 a Catch-22. I fear the handwriting is on the wall \u00d1 and it’s in English.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LA Times Commentary: It’s part of a global problem: About 400 million people speak English as their first language, an additional 700 million or so use it as a second language and a billion people more are struggling to learn how to speak it. Meanwhile, other languages are disappearing at the rate of two per month. There are about 6,800 languages in the world, but the expert consensus is that 400 of them will soon be extinct. Why care? “When…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-foreign-affairs","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4uks-6V","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}