Re: nonsense schmonsense

Haukur,

My apologies for taking so long to reply.

>> Personal Testimony:
>> "Thanks to the Norse Course, my friend and I
>> can enjoy a relatively lengthy
>> discussion of black cheese and long swords."

> :D I think I'll put that on the homepage if you'll
> allow.

Please do!

> Very quickly the relationship between modern
> Icelandic and Old Norse is similar to the
> relationship between the English you speak
> and the English of the King James Bible.

Thank you. I suspected this was probably the case.
And, yes, I have read the following e-mails which
also used this analogy.

> Not quite. Our word for electricity is 'rafmagn';
> made from 'raf' meaning amber and 'magn' meaning
> might or power. Thus 'rafmagn' is amber-power.
> This is, more or less, a translation of the greek
> word.

That sounds like a practical approach.

This makes me wonder.
Do you know how the pre-modern Old Norse speakers
treated unfamiliar objects? That is, when they
encountered something for the first time, did
they tend to create new names, or would they
adopt the names used by the people who
introduced them to the thing?

Cheers,
Mike

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