The New International Encyclopædia/Icelandic Language

ICELANDIC LANGUAGE. With the Norwegian popular dialects and Faroese, Icelandic forms the West Norse subdivision of the Scandi- navian languages, as opposed to the East Norse, made up of Swedish and Danish. The history of Icelandic begins with the settlement of Iceland by Norwegians, principally from Western Norway, at the end of the ninth century. After this time there was gradually developed in Iceland a particular West Norwegian dialect, which, however, at the outset differed but slightly from the parent Norwegian. Only after the introduction of Christianity, about the year 1000, is it possible to speak of languages instead of dialects in the whole Scandinavian north, and at this time Icelandic, too. ranged itself by the side of Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish as a separate language, with characteristic differences in sounds, inflection, and vocabulary.

In the history of Icelandic it is customary to distinguish two main periods—Old Icelandic, from the settlement of the island, in the ninth century, to the Reformation, at the middle of the sixteenth century, and New Icelandic, down to the present day. Old Icelandic is further subdivided into three periods, the first of which extends from 874 until about 1200; the second, the so-called classical period, during which the principal literary works were produced, from 1200 to about 1350; and the third, or transitional period, from 1350 to 1540. The language of the first period, at the beginning identical with that of Norway, at the end is distinguishable from it by but comparatively few differences. One of the most plainly discernible and characteristic distinctions between the two is the retention in Icelandic of initial hl, hm, hr, whose h early disappears in Norwegian, as it does in Swedish and Danish, but which has remained in Icelandic, alone of all the Germanic languages, to this very day. The language of the second period, on the other hand, exhibits many important changes along broad lines, in phonetic conditions and in inflectional forms, that from this time on sharply differentiate Icelandic and Norwegian. This forms an intermediary period which witnesses the gradual growth of those changes in the language whose consummation marks the beginning of the new period of Icelandic. During this whole time the language remained practically homogeneous throughout the island, and no sharply defined dialectic differences were developed. Manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries from the west of Iceland show, it is true, characteristic phonetic conditions in certain instances, and it is likely that others existed as between the north, west, and southeast, but none of them are important. From 983 to about 1400 Icelandic was also spoken in the settlements of Greenland, but to what extent this language deviated from that of Iceland cannot be determined from the few runic inscriptions which have come down to us.

Old Icelandic, both from the standpoint of the language itself and of the literature written in it, is by far the most important of the ancient Scandinavian languages. The sources of our knowledge of it are an almost unparalleled literature in prose and verse, written after the early part of the twelfth century, but often of far more ancient ultimate origin. The alphabet used is the usual Latin script of the end of the Middle Ages, introduced by way of England and modified to fit the special conditions of the language. The few runic inscriptions that exist in Iceland are unimportant from a linguistic point of view, in that they are all more recent than the oldest manuscripts written in Latin letters. The oldest conditions, however, are in many cases not to be found in the oldest manuscripts, but in poems contained in manuscripts of the thirteenth century, which, as a consequence of their metrical construction, have kept forms as old, in some instances, as the ninth century, from which early time they had been transmitted orally from generation to generation. The oldest manuscript that has been preserved is an inventory of the church at Reykjaholt, in Iceland, the most ancient part of which was probably written between 1178 and 1193. The principal manuscript of the Elder Edda, the so-called Codex Regius, dates from the end of the thirteenth century; the principal manuscript of the Snorri Edda, the so-called Codex Upsaliensis, is of the same period. The best manuscripts are all written before the middle of the fourteenth century. Icelandic manuscripts are both parchment and paper. The former medium was used from the beginning of writing, at the end of the twelfth century, down into the sixteenth century; the latter from the fifteenth century almost to the present day. Old Icelandic manuscripts are preserved principally in four large collections—viz. the Arnamagnæan collection, so called from the Icelander Arni Magnusson. who collected and gave it to the University Library in Copenhagen; the collection in the Royal Library in Copenhagen; the so-called Delagardic collection, in the University Library in Upsala. Sweden; and the collection in the Royal Library in Stockholm. Besides these, there are a few manuscripts in the University Library in Christiania, Norway; in the British Museum, in London; the Bodleian Library, in Oxford; the Advocates' Library, in Edinburgh; in Germany, in Wolfenbüttel, in Tubingen; in Utrecht. Holland; in Vienna and Paris. No manuscripts of importance whatever have been left in Iceland, with the exception of the Reykjaholt inventory, which is a single quarto leaf of parchment preserved in the public archives in Reykjavik.

The most predominant characteristics of Old Icelandic as a Scandinavian language are, in the main, the following: To an extent unknown to the other members of the Germanic group, Icelandic exhibits a consistent and widely developed process of assimilation in consonants and vowels; under this head falls the extraordinary extension of umlaut, which is here not merely a process of palatalization, as elsewhere in the Germanic languages, but of labialization as well. There is besides this a characteristic preference for suffixes, as exhibited in the use of the suffixed definite article with substantives, masc. -nn, fern, -n, neut. -t; the formation of an entirely new medio-passive conjugation by the suffixal use of the reflexive pronoun: and the expression of negation by an added -gi, -a, or -at. Other important characteristics are the universal shortening of the vowels of inflection and of derivation; the disappearance of final n in the so-called weak inflection of substantives and adjectives, and in the infinitive of verbs, whose accompanying preposition, furthermore, is at, instead of du (zu) as in the other Germanic languages, and the use of the consonantal ease ending -r, elsewhere retained only in Gothic as -s, in masculine and feminine substantives. There are, in addition, many other minor peculiarities in sounds, inflections, and syntax. Contrasted with Old Swedish and Old Danish, whose earliest documentary remains dale from 1281 and 1329 respectively, Old Icelandic possesses, as a whole, as is to he expected, a much more ancient character in sounds and in inflectional forms. It is, however, by no means invariably the most conservative. The far greater extension of the process of umlaut, for instance, in Old Icelandic, results in a large number of forms that are more recent than the corresponding ones in the other Scandinavian languages in their oldest period. The notably wide vocabulary of Old Icelandic shows some admixture of foreign elements. These are Latin words, introduced mainly through the Church after the Christianization of Iceland in the year 1000; Celtic words, introduced in considerable number as a result of the contact of Celtic-speaking people in the British Islands with the Norwegian settlers of Iceland, many of whom came by the way of Scotland, Ireland, the Orkneys, the Hebrides, and the Shetlands, where they had previously lived for longer or shorter periods; Anglo-Saxon words, which came in as a consequence of the close contact of Icelanders in England with the people, their language, and their culture; and finally, a few French and German words, due to the use in literature of foreign material, derived either directly or remotely from these sources.

The history of New Icelandic, or the present period of the language, begins with the Reformation, although the conditions that characterize it can already be observed in process of development in the transitional period at the end of Old Icelandic. The earliest literary monument of New Icelandic is the first Icelandic printed book, the New Testament, translated by Odd Gottskalksson, and printed at Roeskilde, in Denmark, in 1540. In general, Icelandic has still retained, to the present time, along broad lines, in inflections and vocabulary, its archaic characteristics, so that to-day it is on the whole the most ancient in appearance of the Germanic tongues. Since the beginning of the period the language has, however, in reality undergone a continual internal development. This is particularly true of the sounds, which have been very materially changed in pronunciation, although frequently the conservative retention of the old orthography gives no clue to it. What has helped Icelandic to retain its early conditions is, more than anything else, its relative isolation and the consequent minimum contact with other languages, on the one side, and the fact of its unbroken use in literature on the other. The production of literature in Iceland, although it dwindles in value and amount after the classical period until it is awakened to new life by the Reformation, has never wholly ceased since its very beginning. All this, with the continuous culture of the old literature, which has in some form or other never been forgotten, has tended to keep the language phenomenally pure and homogeneous throughout the island. After 1380, when Iceland, which since the end of the Republic in 1262 had belonged to Norway, fell with that country under the sovereignty of Denmark, a Danish influence was exerted upon the language which has continued, with varying effect, down to the present time. This influence was particularly active in the two centuries immediately following the Reformation, when, as a consequence of the reawakened literary activity, which brought with it many translations of foreign, and especially of Danish books, it made itself felt in vocabulary and orthography to such an extent that the language seemed on the way to lose forever its characteristic purity. It was an appeal to the old literature which furnished the missing norm, and not only checked the further introduction of Danicisms, but set on foot a reactionary tendency toward the forms and orthography of the classical period of the language. This puristic movement began toward the end of the eighteenth century, but was particularly furthered by the formation of the Icelandic Literary Society by the Danish philologist Rask in 1816. Since that time an influence has been carefully and intelligently exerted, both to eliminate foreign elements from the vocabulary, and either lo rehabilitate old forms or to set in their place new forms made out of the old elements of the language, and to reform the orthography from the standpoint of etymology. A printed page of Icelandic at the present day has as a consequence a much more primitive character than the facts of its pronunciation actually warrant. In comparison with the other Germanic languages, changes have, nevertheless, been relatively few. and Icelandic, not only apparently, but in reality, as it is in use to-day, is inherently the best preserved of this entire group.

The present territory of Icelandic, aside from small settlements in the United States and in British America, is the island of Iceland, where it is the spoken and written language of the 70,000 inhabitants. The literary language of the present time is to all intents and purposes the spoken speech, not of any particular region or of any separate class, but of the people of the whole country, with the reservation that in the capital and the trading places along the coast much Danish is in use, and the spoken language is no longer as pure as elsewhere. As in the old period, there are no dialects in modern Icelandic, although there are still, as then, minor differences that give the language of certain parts of the country a local color.

Bibliography. The standard grammar in German is Noreen's Altisländische und altnorwegische Grammatik (2d ed., Halle, 1892). A briefer treatment of Icelandic alone was published by the same author in 1896. Kahle's Altisländisches Elementarbuch (Heidelberg, 1896), and Holthausen's Lehrbuch der altisländischen Sprache (Weimar, 1895). are both excellent. The best treatment of the inflections in Danish is Wimmer's Oldnordisk Formlære (5th ed., Copenhagen, 1897). The earliest grammar in English is Dasent's translation of Rask's work (London, 1845). The most convenient grammar in English is Sweet's An Icelandic Primer (Oxford, 1886). Reference may also be made to Vigfusson and Powell's An Icelandic Prose Reader (Oxford, 1879). The whole subject of Old Northern grammar is treated scientifically by Noreen in Paul's Grundriss der germanischen Philologie. vol. i. (Strassburg, 1901). A very careful treatment of modern Icelandic pronunciation will be found in Sweet's A Handbook of Phonetics (Oxford. 1877). The modern language is discussed in Carpenter's Grundriss der neuisländischen Grammatik (Halle, 1881). The only lexicon with English renderings is Vigfusson's An Icelandic-English Dictionary, etc. (Oxford, 1874), valuable for its references, but marred by careless etymologies. I'ur the poetical language the standard work is still Sveinbjörn Egilsson's Lexicon Poeticum Antiquæ Linguæ Septentrionalis (Copenhagen, 1860). The best recent dictionary is Fritzner's Ordbog over det gamle norske Sprog (2d ed., Christiania, 1883–96), with renderings in Danish. Larsson's Ordförrudet i de älsla islanska handskrifterna (Lund, 1891) contains an exact reference to each occurrence of every word in the oldest Icelandic manuscripts. Gering's Glossar zu den Liedern der Edda (2d ed., Paderborn, 1896), and Möbius's Altnordisches Glossar (Leipzig, 1866) are valuable special dictionaries. Thorkelsson's Supplement til islandske Ordböger (Reykjavik, 1876–85) contains words not found in [irevious dictionaries, including Icelandic through the seventeenth century.