{"id":14727,"date":"2017-11-03T18:27:02","date_gmt":"2017-11-03T17:27:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=14727"},"modified":"2017-11-03T18:27:02","modified_gmt":"2017-11-03T17:27:02","slug":"a-river-of-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=14727","title":{"rendered":"A River of Words"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When Iceland was permanently settled from 874 AD, the settlers from Norway brought with them wives and thralls (<em>\u00fer\u00e6lar<\/em> &#8211; slaves\/serfs) from Ireland. The Norwegians spoke a form of Old Norse, which developed into modern Icelandic, and borrowed a few words from the Irish.<\/p>\n<p>Here are some examples: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>\u00e1<\/strong> = river &#8211; from the Old Irish <em>aub<\/em> (river). The Old Norse word for river was <em>flj\u00f3t<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li><strong>\u00e1in<\/strong> = (act of) driving &#8211; from Old Irish <em>\u00e1in<\/em> = (act of driving (animals etc))<\/li>\n<li><strong>bagall<\/strong> = crozier, from the Old Irish <em>bachall<\/em> (staff, crook, crozier). The Old Norse word for crozier \/ staff was <em>stafr<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li><strong>brek\u00e1n<\/strong> = blanket, quilt, from the Old Irish <em>brecc\u00e1n<\/em> (speckled thing, striped or chequered stuff, plaid)<\/li>\n<li><strong>bjannak<\/strong> = blessing, from the Old Irish <em>bennacht<\/em> (blessing)<\/li>\n<li><strong>tarfur<\/strong> = bull, from the Old Irish <em>tarb<\/em> (bull). The Old Norse word for bull was <em>\u00fej\u00f3rr<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Icelandic has also absorbed words from Latin, Greek, Middle Low German and Danish. Some of these words are no longer used, but new loanwords, mainly from Danish and English, are streaming into the language, especially in the fields of IT and medicine. One example I heard about was <em>m\u00f3ment<\/em> being used instead of <em>augnablik<\/em> (&#8216;eye-blink&#8217;) for moment.<\/p>\n<p><em>Sources: <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/%C3%A1in\">Wiktionary<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/germanic.eu\/Lexical-purism-neologisms-and-language-contact-in-Icelandic-and-Faroese.htm\">Germanic.eu<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dil.ie\">eDil<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When Iceland was permanently settled from 874 AD, the settlers from Norway brought with them wives and thralls (\u00fer\u00e6lar &#8211; slaves\/serfs) from Ireland. The Norwegians spoke a form of Old Norse, which developed into modern Icelandic, and borrowed a few words from the Irish. Here are some examples: \u00e1 = river &#8211; from the Old [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,107,124,127,10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-etymology","category-icelandic","category-irish","category-language","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14727\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}