Old Icelandic language

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Old Icelandic

Spoken in

Scandinavia
speaker (extinct)
Linguistic
classification
Official status
Official language in (extinct)
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

non (Old Norse language)

ISO 639-3

non (Old Norse language)

Old Icelandic refers to the North Germanic language of the inhabitants of Iceland from the end of the Viking Age (approx. 1050) to the 15th and 16th. Century. In some cases, the transition to New Icelandic is also set earlier.

Old Icelandic is often used synonymously with Old West Norse or Old Norse , as a large part of Scandinavian medieval literature has been handed down in Old Icelandic.

history

Old Icelandic is a daughter language of the Viking Age Old West Norse dialect of the Norwegians who settled Iceland from 870 onwards . There are a few Irish loanwords , as many Irish were brought to Iceland as slaves by the Vikings . After the adoption of Christianity by the Althing in the year 1000 , the Latin alphabet was probably introduced by the unknown author of the so-called First Grammatical Tract (in the later Edda). In the winter of 1117/1118, the legal submissions incumbent on the law speaker were codified in its most important parts for the first time ( Hafliðaskrá ). From the second half of the 12th century , texts in the old Icelandic language have been handed down.

The oldest Old Icelandic, up to around 1200, is practically indistinguishable from the oldest Old Norwegian . Later, this is only possible for individual features, such as the fading of / h / in the initial sound before the consonant in Old Norwegian (e.g. aisl. Hlaupa vs. anorw. Laupa "run").

The period from 1200 to 1250 is known as classic Old Icelandic . While Old Icelandic remains largely conservative in its development, Old Norwegian is moving away from it due to linguistic innovations that it carries out together with Old Danish and Old Swedish (e.g. loss of the inflectional ending -r vs. -or / -ur with Svarabhaktivokal in the oldest Old Icelandic). The reorganization of the old syllable types short, long, excessively long to only long syllables in a stressed position began at this time, as certain manuscripts show.
In the period between 1350 and 1540, with the coincidence of various vowel phonemes and the diphthongization of most long vowels (e.g. / i / [ɪ], / y / [ʏ]> / i / [ɪ]; / œ / [ ø:], / æ / [ɛ:]> / æ / [ɑɪ̯]) finally, fundamental changes in the language system that lead to New Icelandic. This period is therefore sometimes referred to as Central Icelandic, but sometimes it is directly counted as New Icelandic. Often the publication of the Guðbrandsbiblía 1584 is specified for this transition .

Writing system

The grapheme inventory of normalized Old Icelandic consists of the following characters:

  • Short vowels: <aeiouy ø ǫ>
Phonologically, <ø> and <ǫ> soon coincided. They are therefore both often represented as <ö>. The same applies to <æ> and <œ>, which then appear as <æ>.
  • Long vowels: <á é í ó ú ý æ œ>
<œ> is alternatively shown as <ǿ>, <æ> as <ǽ>.
  • Diphthongs: <au ei ey>
  • Consonants: <d ð bfghjlmnprstvxz þ>
<ð> stands for "soft th" as in English. mother
<þ> for "hard th" as in English. thing
<x> reproduces the phoneme sequence / ks /.
<z> can stand for the phoneme sequences / ts /, / ds /, / ðs / and / þs /.

It is a " phonologically flat" writing system.

Phonology

Phonetics and Pronunciation

The phonetics of Old Norse is based on the findings of historical-comparative linguistics and is relatively coarse and uncertain, since one needs living speakers for phonetic research in a language, which, however, do not exist per se in a dead language. It represents a learned construct.
For the reconstructed pronunciation of Old Norse, the normalized Old Norse characters are entered in angle brackets (<,>) and the corresponding developed phonetic value in square brackets ([,]) in the following tables.
In international dealings among Scandinavians , New Icelandic pronunciation conventions are usually applied to Old Norse.

Vowels:

  Front Back
unrounded rounded unrounded rounded
short long short long short long short long
Closed   <í> [i:]   <ý> [y:]       <ú> [u:]
Almost closed <i> [ɪ]   <y> [ʏ]       <u> [ʊ]  
Half closed   <é> [e:]   <œ, ǿ> [ø:]       <ó> [o:]
Half open <e> [ɛ] <æ> [ɛ:] <ø> [œ]       <o> [ɔ]  
Open         <a> [ɑ] <a> [ɑ:] <ǫ> [ɒ] (<ǫ́> [ɒ:] )

Diphthongs :

<au> [ɒʊ̯]
<ei> [ɛɪ̯]
<ey> [œʏ̯]

Consonants:

  Bilabial Labiodentale Dental Alveolar Palatal Velare Laryngals
unvoiced voiced unvoiced voiced unvoiced voiced unvoiced voiced unvoiced voiced unvoiced voiced unvoiced
Plosives <p> [p⁽ʰ⁾] <b> [b] 1     <t> [t⁽ʰ⁾] <d> [d] 1   <k> [k⁽ʰ⁾] <g> [g] 1  
Fricatives   <f> [f] <f> [v] 2 <s> [s]   <þ> [θ] <ð> [ð] 2     <g> [ɣ] 2  
Approximants <hv> [ʍ] <v> [w]       <hj> [ç] <j> [j]   <h> [x] 3 <h> [h]
Nasals   <m> [m]     <h n > [n̥] <n> [n]     <n> [ŋ]  
Lateral       <h l > [l̥] <l> [l]      
Vibrants       <h r > [r̥] <r> [r]      
  • 1 Initially, after a consonant or mined after a vowel.
  • 2 Internally before a vowel.
  • 3 Initially before a consonant.

Phonology

The First Grammatical Treatise , written at the beginning of the 12th century, is particularly interesting for an approach to a phonology of Old Icelandic , which deals with the problems of expanding the Latin writing system to adequately reproduce the Old Icelandic sounds.

grammar

Old Icelandic is a highly inflected language. The sentence structure is therefore largely free. The noun knows three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), four cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative) and two numbers (singular and plural). The article can be prefixed to a noun or suffused .
There are a variety of pronouns , personal pronouns also in the dual . In contrast to the Gothic , which has retained the mediopassive in the verbal area , this was initially lost in the original Nordic and was later possibly secondary formation by affixing the reflexive pronoun sik . Old Icelandic received the reduplication syllable for four verbs and has a number of preteritopresentia .
In addition, Old Icelandic also shows some characteristics that are characteristic of Germanic languages, such as the distinction between so-called strong and weak adjectives, or the use of the Urindo-European ablaze to form the tenses of strong verbs, as well as the Germanic innovation of the dental suffix to form the tenses of weak verbs.

Reading examples

The following reading example is the first stanza of the Völuspá in Old Icelandic; the German text is a copy, not an exact translation. The pronunciation given is a reconstruction and does not correspond to the New Icelandic pronunciation. Here a seer ( Völva ) addresses the "whale father" ( Odin ), who has asked her for advice beforehand.

Codex Regius Hauksbók Normalized pronunciation German
Hliods bið ec allar
kindir
meiri oc miNi
mavgo | heimdallar
vilðo at ec ualfa / þr
uel fyr telia
forn | spioll fíra
þa / he strangers around one. 		Hlioðs bið ek allar
helgar kindir
meiri ok minni
mogu heimdallar
villtu at ek vafodrs
vel | fram telia
forn spioll fira
þau er ek Fremdz vm man. 		Hljóðs bið ek allar
helgar kindir,
meiri ok minni
mögu Heimdallar;
viltu, at ek, Valföðr!
vel framtelja
forn spjöll fíra,
þau he strangers to you. 		LJO: θs bɪð ɛk ɑl: ɑr
hɛlɡɑr kʲʰɪndɪr
mɛɪrɪ ɔkʰ mɪn: ɪ
'mɒɣʊ hɛɪmˌdɑl: ɑr
wɪl̥tʰʊ ɑt ɛkʰ wɑlˌfɒðr̩
wɛl frɑmˌtʰɛljɑ
fɔrn spjɒl: fi: rɑ
θɒʊ ɛr frɛm̥st ʊm mɑn 		I ask all
holy children,
more or less
sons of Heimdall , to hear ;
Do you want me, whale father!
should tell
the old magic spells,
the oldest of the people?

See also

Upper categories for old Icelandic:

Old Norse Culture:

literature

  • Konrad Maurer : About the expressions Old Norse, Old Norwegian and Icelandic languages. In: Treatises of the philological-philosophical class of the royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Vol. 11. Munich 1868. pp. 457-706.

Introductions

  • Katharina Baier, Werner Schäfke: Old Norse. An introduction. Narr, Tübingen 2012, ISBN 3-8233-6768-4 .

Grammars

Dictionaries

  • Walter Baetke : Dictionary of Norse prose literature . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1968 and more often (most recently 2005). ISBN 3-05-004137-4
  • Sveinbjörn Egilsson & Finnur Jónsson: Lexicon Poeticum antiquæ linguæ septentrionalis - Ordbog over det norsk-islandske Skjaldesprog . 2nd edition Copenhagen 1931.
  • Alexander Jóhannesson: Icelandic Etymological Dictionary . Bern 1956.
  • Jan de Vries : Old Norse etymological dictionary . 3rd edition (reprint of the 2nd, improved edition 1962). Leiden, Brill 1977.
  • Jón Thorkelsson: Supplement til islandske Ordbøger . Reprint of the edition from 1876–1899, Reykjavík and Copenhagen, as well as a new edition on CD-ROM and newly recorded as a print version. Saarbrücken, AQ-Verlag 2002 ff.

Language history

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ K. Braunmüller: Grammatical tracts . In: Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde . Volume 12. pp. 573-579, 575.