Ég er bálreiður!!!!!
hafronska
The reason that so little Icelanders visit this newsgroup is because
of something (and I hate to tell this) is because the majority of
Icelanders as a population (especially the youth)suffer from a
disease: They don't like culture.
The great curse of Icelandic society is called: runtur and landi.
Most of the Icelandic youth hasn't enough money to pay for the
entrance in Icelandic discotheques so they have enjoy their weekends
in another way. They take a plastic cola bottle and brew their own
alcohol in it. Then they ride one after the other very slowly around
reykjavik while consuming this impure language. Landi contains
methanol and it's only because ethanol is an antidote for methanol
that most icelanders still have visual capabilities.
But the greatest curse of LANDI is its psychological effect: It makes
people hate linguistic purism and maniacly love LOAN-WORDS!!!!!!!!!!!!
Studies made by the Icelandic psychologist Anna Lind Pétursdóttir
prooved that people exposed to LANDI got anxiety reacytions when they
had to pronounce 'vindlingur' or 'flatbaka'. On the other hand, the
serotonine and dopamine levels peaked when pronouncing sentences like:
Spagettaétarar habiterar Ítaliensk hálfinsulu.
Where is the time that Icelanders were such loan-word-haters. From
1830 to 1880 it was the golden age for purists. If that age would
have lasted until now, the Icelandic language had only 5% instead of
11% loan-words.
But that's alright. I gave up my social life to construct High
Icelandic (Háfrónska). At this time the amount of loan-words (That
are known for sure to be loan-words) in my model has went below 0.1 %,
whithout severely inpoverishing the language.
Many Icelanders say that really no one wof the 280000 Icelanders will
learn the language. I beg to differ. Think of Klingon, the startrek
language is proportionally the fastest growing artificial tongue in
the world. I think there will be a community of 100 speakers well
before 2010. Hundreds of endagered tongues have less speakers.
Let's all cherish the birth of High Icelandic.
Jef Braekmans