So onwards with my new year, new language project. I've decided to give both Icelandic
and Spanish a go. What of the Spanish? A friend is beginning to learn Spanish in February, so then would be a good time to start; a study buddy relationship is thus proposed. I'll review Spanish at a later stage, but let's start by looking at what I know already about the Icelandic language and more importantly, what materials I have to begin my linguanautical expedition.
Well, firstly the basics, the stuff that any linguanaut should know. Icelandic is a language spoken by approximately 300,000 people (roughly the same population as the city of Cardiff) on a big island in the middle of the Atlantic called Iceland. It's a Scandinavian language, and is almost the same as the Old Norse which the Vikings used to speak. It's distantly related to English and German, as languages in the Scandinavian family are Germanic languages, as is English. I speak English of course, and I also speak German, so I have a elementary grasp for the 'feel' of a language in this family, such as the
verb second idea thing you get with the Germanic languages, which seems to have been dropped in modern English (rarely
have I come across it, never
would I think about it much; there are thus presented two remnants of this grammatical thing in modern English to exemplify). And when it comes to vocabulary, there are also cognates in other Germanic languages, not just English, which I will employ to aid my learning.
Now, on with a review of the materials immediately available to me, which I have already.
Firstly, I have "Teach Yourself Icelandic" by P.J.T. Glendening, which I bought in 1995, and printed that year in fact. It ws originally published in 1961. I understand the Icelandic title in the Teach Yourself series has been totally rewritten by Hildur Jonsdottir, but have not purchased or read that yet. The rewrites in the TY series generally tend to be much better, so I look forward to acquiring it. I'l review her book when I get it. And what do we know about P.J.T. Glendening? Apart from the fact that he authored a book on Italian and also wrote "Teach Yourself Learning a language" back a long time ago, we can ascertain very little, particularly with regards to his relationship with the Icelandic language. There is no author biography to be found on paper or online.
I must stress that this review refers to the Glendening authored version of the book, and not Hildur Jonsdottir's version, but Glendening's volume is not a particularly good book to learn a language from. The first words you learn is
hér er hestur,
here is a horse, which is hardly useful in the arrivals hall of Keflavík airport. ("Do you have anything to declare?" "
Hér er hestur.") As
with my attempt at Swahili, the book is written as a grammatical primer, and does not seem to have the learner in mind. Allow me to quote
a review from the Amazon.co.uk website on the Glendening book, which in my opinion is an accurate description:
It says on the back of this book that it's "invaluable both to the absolute beginner and the student of Icelandic literature and its culture."But a quick read of the first couple of pages of lesson one will tell you that this simply is NOT TRUE. I'm an absolute beginner and this book baffles me.
Lesson one, page two: "Within this declension we note these variations, which may be looked up in the section called Appendixes: SM 1d; SM 2b..." How is this helping us learn a language? Right from the start, you are drowned in an impenetrable soup of grammatical terms and it never lets up until you get to the idiom section where you will be thrilled to commit to memory such useful phrases as, "To steer between Scylla and Charybdis." You won't be able to ask for a cup of coffee yet, but at least you'll be able to impress the locals with your classical education while you gesture at the menu.
Indeed. I can't disagree with that review. Incidentally, the Icelandic for coffee is
kaffi, a masculine noun. This blog is far more helpful for the thirsty traveller in 101 Reykjavík than Glendening!
There are also a number of mistakes in the book, such as on page 10, where it says
í staö for
instead of. Just from the orthographic and phonological 'feel' alone, I would guess this is wrong, and (I am guessing) should be
í stað, and a look in my dictionary (by Taylor, review of thi dictionary further down the page) confirms it should actually be
í staðinn fyrir in the place of.
Back in 1995, when I was but a budding linguanaut, it's no wonder I gave up on page four of the book. Having gone away and learned other languages, I can now approach the book once more with less discomfort with a better understanding of grammar and linguistic structure, but it is essentially of little use for the beginner apart from as a reference book for grammar, and then only for someone experienced with linguanautics. It is still useful, but better aimed at the intermediate or advanced learner of Icelandic and certainly not the beginner.
Onwards, to the next book, the Hippocrene Concise Dictionary "Icelandic-English English-Icelandic Dictionary" by Arnold R. Taylor, published in New York in 1990, second edition 1993. I received this as a gift from my cousin in the USA, as at the time the only Icelandic dictionary I could track down in the UK was way beyond my budget and was for Old Icelandic anyway. The book is in two sections, as you might expect of a bilingual dictionary. The text, however, is blocky and chunky, and unlike most dictionaries is in a single column and limited to just 5,000 words each way. It reminds me of a cheap vocabulary book that lists vocabulary, with no little hints of usage, and very little in the way of appendices, which is a particular issue which I will come onto presently.
I quote
from an Amazon.co.uk review:
This is really just a list of words, printed ratther [sic] horribly on cheap paper. It looks like somebody typed the list out and they went straight to print. It's not at all like other small dictionaries in the quality of its production though the cover is nice.
More worryingly, I've already noticed a couple of pretty basic words that are simply missing, so as a list of words, it isn't exactly complete, and probably wasn't researched like a Collins. I also noticed that some words still have the letter 'z' which was of course abolished some time ago in Icelandic, so it's not even up to date.
The saving grace is that it's small, pocketable, and you don't have much choice if you want a reasonably priced English-Icelandic/Icelandic-English dictionary. Yet.
It is important to note the problem of the letter Z. Glendening's book and the Taylor dictionary both render the word for the Icelandic language in Icelandic as
íslenzka, but
Z has not been in use in Icelandic since 1974, so both books date badly. The current spelling of the word is
íslenska.
Let me turn to the appendices in particular. In the front half, English to Icelandic, we have a bilingual list of the days of the week, months of the year, and some countries (only 14 of them). Spain is not included, for example (of particular interest as I plan to begin learning Spanish in February), so I decided to try and find the simple place-name
Spain in the main English to Icelandic section. Unfortunately it's not there, but I do find only
Spanish (language) spænska f.; adj spánskur. Returning to the appendices, there is a list of English cardinal and ordinal numbers (no Icelandic text in the numbers section), and a list of a few English irregular verbs.
Near the beginning of the second part there is a helpful pronunciation guide, but the preceding preface to the second part, Icelandic to English, advises that "a few general hints on the inflection of the nouns and the conjugation of the more common strong verbs are given in an appendix, where, for convenience sake, the days of the week, the months of the year, and the numerals are also listed." Despite promises, this appendix does not appear in the book; the bilingual lists months and days of the week have admittedly been covered in the previous section, but the numbers in that section are English only, and there is no help with Icelandic numbers, nouns or verbs as promised. I have checked there are no pages missing, as it lists
örtölvukubbur m. microchip as the final word, then as we turn the page, on the other side of the leaf it advertises other dictionaries published by them, so all present and correct, apart from them forgetting to put the appendix in.
Onwards, to my final book that I own on Icelandic, "Langenscheidts Universal-Wörterbuch: Isländisch (Isländisch-Deutsch Deutsch-Isländisch)", a bilingual Icelandic-German German Icelandic dictionary by Rita Duppler M.A. and Dr. Astrid von Nahl, which I bought on a whim in 1999. It's the smallest book on Icelandic that I own, but also the best.
It's a little thing in tiny print, perhaps no good for me with my poor eyesight these days, but the size aside, it's a wonderful dictionary, with 30,000 headwords (three times as many as Taylor's book). The dictionary sections themselves are very good and detailed, with examples of usage (which Taylor's book lacks) and more detailed useful grammatical information, with each noun for example to help you work out the declension, and a comprehensive section at the front of the book explains pronunciation of Icelandic. There is a highly detailed section at the rear on numbers, cardinal, ordinal, fractions, and a page on time too. And the Z issue mentioned above? This dictionary is more up to date than the English books, as it calls the language
íslenska, with an S, not a Z.
All in all, the Langenscheidt dictionary is the best, but it has the obvious drawback that you have to speak German for it to be of any use.
As I acquire further books on Icelandic, I'll endeavour to review them.