Icelandic language purism

In Iceland , the language has always been an essential medium of culture: its high esteem makes it the actual symbol of national identity. Therefore, the penetration of words from other languages is seen as a threat to one's own culture, which one has to keep within limits.

In Iceland the main terms of this movement are:

málvernd - language protection or defense
málrækt - language maintenance
málhreinsun - language cleansing , which means language purism in general.

There are several goals to be distinguished: on the one hand the endeavor to keep the language as unmixed as possible with words from other languages, on the other hand to expel existing borrowings, and thirdly to limit any linguistic change in general.

Today's Icelandic

The character of Icelandic as a "pure" language with few foreign words or loanwords is the result of this hreintungustefna (linguistic purity movement ), which has a tradition of over 400 years in Iceland, but which can tie in with the uniform formation and early literary fixation of the Icelandic language.

A prerequisite for the success of the language cleansing movement, which refers to the purity of the Icelandic language according to its own law, is the island's location far from mainland Europe. The great wave of borrowings from Middle Low German due to the Hanse trade reached Iceland only to a small extent and mostly through Danish , which has been used as the language of merchants and officials in the economy and administration dominated by Denmark since the 14th century Icelandic stand. In the course of the country's first cultural and much later political liberation, Danish words were systematically replaced by Icelandic ones. Even so, many tökuorð (loan words) have retained their position in Icelandic, which were borrowed shortly before or during the writing process. The same applies to loanwords that had entered the Germanic languages before one could even speak of Icelandic .

history

First evidence of the Icelanders' preoccupation with and use of their own language are firstly the first grammatical treatise from the mid-12th century , in which the writer assigns a letter to each sound in his mother tongue using the Latin alphabet , and secondly the early one own historiography, which started with Íslendingabók from Aris around 1120 , to Landnámabók , the representation of the settlement, to Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla , which corresponds in time and thematically to the Latin Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus . Above all, however, the prose literature of Islendingasögur and Snorri's Skald Poetics ( Prosa - Edda ) clearly speak of the appreciation of one's own language culture.

16th and 17th centuries

The language nurturing movement began in Iceland at the time of the Reformation with two great figures in Icelandic intellectual history, the Bishop of Hólar Guðbrandur Þorláksson (1542–1627), who published his translation of the Bible , the famous Guðbrandsbiblía and several writings by Icelandic authors, and with Arngrímur Jónsson , the scholar (1568–1648) who is considered to be the founder of Nordic philology in Iceland. Not only as a writer, but above all through their joint work as a publisher, they had a great influence on word usage and spelling. Arngrimur's edification Eintal sólarinnar , a translation from Latin published in 1599, became a prime example of a stylistically and lexically cultivated language use . But even before Arngrímur, an Icelandic author in 1588/1589 described the Icelandic language as one of the main languages of the world, which had already emerged during the Babylonian confusion . Arngrímur believed Icelandic to be a branch of the old Gothic language that was widespread throughout the North Sea region. This assessment of placing Icelandic alongside classical Latin or Greek was influenced by continental humanism. The idea of the originality of the Icelandic language remained unchallenged until the linguist Rasmus Christian Rask at the beginning of the 19th century.

18th century

The poet and naturalist Eggert Ólafsson (1726–1768) is one of the most important figures of the málstefna , the language movement in Iceland in the 18th century . The current spelling of Icelandic goes back to him, which is very much based on old Icelandic. This introduces a continuity which, although largely on the vocabulary side, does not take into account the profound change in the vocal system that has taken place since then. The old Icelandic quantity system with long-short opposition of the vowels became a quality system, the line above the vowels in the spelling no longer means their length, but a different sound.

The Age of Enlightenment was a major challenge for the Icelandic languages. The question was whether the names for new equipment and terms should be borrowed. It was decided to produce new words. The activity of the Icelandic company Hið íslenzka bókmenntafélag , founded in Copenhagen in 1779 , was of great importance in this context. Her yearbook, published from 1779 to 1799, had a wide impact on the Icelandic population. It called for the language to be kept as pure as possible and for new words to be created from material from one's own language. The basic principle was general comprehensibility, which was achieved through a largely descriptive word formation.

19th and 20th centuries

In the 19th century, the language nurturing movement was directly linked to the magazine Fjölnir (published from 1835 to 1839 and 1844 to 1847), which was published in Copenhagen by four young Icelanders (Konráð Gíslason, Jónas Hallgrímsson , Bryjólfur Péturson, Tómas Sæmundsson). Iceland's great national-romantic poet Jónas Hallgrímsson, who mainly translated Heine and Ossian , is one of the most outstanding Fjölnir authors . With his translation of a textbook of astronomy (Stjörnufræði) published in 1842 , he provided the model for a translation of scientific literature. Many of its neoplasms have become an integral part of the Icelandic language ( Sími - telephone ; aðdráttarafl - attraction ; hitabelti - tropics ; sjónauki - telescope ; samhliða - parallel). Konráð Gíslason (1808-1891), professor of Old Norse languages at the University of Copenhagen , was the editor of the first Danish-Icelandic dictionary in 1851.

In 1964 the state-sponsored Íslensk málnefnd , the "Icelandic Language Commission", was founded and the new word catalogs were created and distributed. Systematic catalogs of this kind have existed since the beginning of the 20th century, in which new words, especially individual specialist vocabularies, are listed.

literature

Halldór Halldórsson: Icelandic Purism and its History. In: Word. Journal of the International Linguistic Association. Volume 30, 1979, pp. 76-86.
Kendra Willson: Political inflectons. Grammar and the Icelandic surname debate. In: Andrew R. Linn, Nicola McLelland (Eds.): Standardization: Studies from the Germanic languages. (= Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. 235). Benjamin, Amsterdam 2002, pp. 135-152. (PDF; 2.31 MB).

Web links

Edward Smith: Lexical purism, neologisms and language contact in Icelandic and Faroese (English) .

Individual evidence

^ Gunnar Karlsson: Den islandske renæssance. In: Annette Lassen (Red.) Det norrøne og det nationale. Studied in Iceland as a whole litteratur in national contexts in Norway, Sverige, Iceland, Great Britain, Tyskland and Denmark. Stofnun Vigdísar Finnbogadóttur, Reykjavík 2008, ISBN 978-9979-548-07-2 , pp. 29-39, 31.
↑ Website (2013) of the Icelandic Literary Society (Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag)

[1] Gunnar Karlsson: Den islandske renæssance. In: Annette Lassen (Red.) Det norrøne og det nationale. Studied in Iceland as a whole litteratur in national contexts in Norway, Sverige, Iceland, Great Britain, Tyskland and Denmark. Stofnun Vigdísar Finnbogadóttur, Reykjavík 2008, ISBN 978-9979-548-07-2 , pp. 29-39, 31.

[2] Website (2013) of the Icelandic Literary Society (Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag)