Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 10.djvu/494

ICELANDIC LANGUAGE 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.

. 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 