Hi,

Just like Brian, I know no exact translation but perhaps “rugl” or “ruglan”, both meaning confusion, disturbance could help. Then you can just tung them into adverbs by adding ligr at the end, and so “rugligr” would mean confusedly, dissorderly and can be close to chaos.

Brian: Ginnungagap sounds like a cool attempt. But wouldn’t a big-gap or big-nothingness be the exact opposite of chaos?  I mean, i think that the term for the primordial state tells us a lot about Norse cosmology which doesn’t equate ours. Gor us it was a Big band, hence lots of chaos But a big nothing does not equate a big ban. So the categorical terms can’t, i think be paired.  Though perhaps the chaos consisted on the fact that “the sun did not know where its place was”, nor the moon, day or night. But that happens just after the ginnungagap.

Cheerio

Fernando Guerrero

On 03/06/2009 20:54, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...> wrote:

  

  

At 6:41:41 PM on Tuesday, June 2, 2009, puppetsan wrote:

> My name is Chris Bamlett, i'm 17 years old and currently
> study French and Spanish at college, where I hope I can
> get the gradfes required for a languages degree.

> I have a friend who is also a linguist, and we often talk
> to each other and exchange bits of vocabulary with one
> another. He is one year younger than I and studies French
> and German. Anyway, today he asked me to find the Norse
> word for "Chaos" so I went looking. I have poured through
> several online translators and so far nothing. Norse is
> not a modern language and I think this is why it is
> difficult to find.

I can't help you with a translation of the modern English
word, but <Ginnungagap> corresponds rather well to the
ancient Greek concept of <Chaos> as 'the first state of
existence, the rude, unformed mass; infinite space', later
'any wide, empty space, a gulf, a chasm': in Norse mythology
Ginnungagap was the vast empty space that preceded the
creation of our universe, the primordial void.  (By the way,
English <chaos> was originally borrowed from Greek with the
same senses as the Greek word and only gradually acquired
its modern sense.)

Brian