Monday, September 19, 2005

Icelandic

There is a site for Icelandic called www.Hafronska.org that I've added a link to on the Learn Icelandic page (eventually I'll have an Icelandic Resource page). This site is trying to promote coining new Icelandic words rather than borrowing foreign words for new terms or objects. I find this to be a problem in many languages. English has a unique flexibility which allows it to create new words easily. Most other languages don't have this ability and usually borrow the word from English or create a new one from the same source as English - usually Latin or Greek. For a language like Icelandic, this clearly dilutes the purity of the language. I'm not surprised that there is a backlash against this, and I am surprised there isn't a movement in many other languages like this one.

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