Hails Keth!

Þu qaþ

Sounds a bit like what they did in Israel. As you probably know,
the Hebrew language was pretty much extinct in the 19th century.
But they managed to resusciate it, because enough people were
once again living together to form a community.

ik qaþ
Difficult, but they showed it could be done, e.g. resurrecting an
extinct language.

þu qast
There also is a gothic language group, where they already
made some efforts to make gothic into a workable language.

ik qaþ
You might be refering to mine:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/The_Gothic_Language_Institute/messages
http://www.geocities.com/ordlag_godvegr/Gothic_Language_Institute.htm
I see value in Gothic because that is part of my identity, but it is
also the earliest extant Germanic language, circa 300 CE compared to
ON 1100 CE.
You could, to a very limited extent, make Old Norse more primordial
by understanding Gothic and Proto-Germanic.

þu qast
The problem with gothic is that its vocabulary is rather small.
Hence there is a need to invent new words for the words that
are missing from the dictionary one has been able to build.
These new words are called "neologisms" or something similar.
(neo-gothic?)

ik qast
Gothic is alot harder being there are much fewer extant Gothic texts.

þu qaþ
The problem is that it is very hard to find a system that everyone
agrees with. What do you for example call a car?
Do you simply use the American word, or do you make up a new gothic
word based upon gothic roots ?

ik qast
Problems for sure, with an expert understanding of Gothic linguist,
you should be able to reconstruct it at least logically. Wulfilas did
a great job in making gothic logically thus easier to learn.


þu qast
The same with Old Norse. The best bet would then be to simply use
modern Icelandic, that has already gone through the long process
of adapting itself to modern times.

ik qaþ
My take,
from neophyte onwards.
1 Have an accurate and comphrehensive ON linguistic resources.
2 Post daily ON sentences so that the beginner can get into the
climate and learn by osmosis as children do.
3 Have a daily Translated online newspaper
4 Have an online Old Norse linguistic community
5 Have local Old Norse groups that converse in the language on a
regular basis.


þu qast
Listening to the Icelandic radio sounds like a good idea.
What about television ? The thing is that I already tried
to read an Icelandic newspaper. But I had to stop because
I did not have the time. It was also difficult to get tuned
into the events there, when I am not there myself and can also
participate in how people feel about things.

ik qaþ
Cable t.v. video tapes and movies,
Something in the future that would be good.
video ON instruction and conversation, etc...
Sigurd Nordal Institute is now making a multimedia language
instruction program.

þu qast
A group of non-Icelanders will also have a very hard time to
"pull each other up" to a level of proficiency. The ideal situation
is that you are are alone surrounded by only people who speak
the other language, so that you are forced to use the language in
your daily life.

ik qaþ
As time evolves and hopefully ON materials and fluent ON speakers
become manifest and multiple, living communities could evolve on a
local basis and in some countries more then others.

þu qaþ
Learning a thing means to interact with it.
But, as Werner Heisenberg showed, interacting with
a thing (or "measuring" it) also changes it.
Heraklit also said that you can't step into the same river twice.

ik qaþ
My approach,
Understand and be competent in both Icelandic and Old Icelandic.
Take Icelandic and substitute where you can Old Icelandic words in
its place, consider also the varients of grammar, and then you would
have a modern version of Old Icelandic.
From there, there would be not much need in learning Moderen
Icelandic except if you are in Iceland.



Golja thuk,

Anþanareiks