Ver þú heill, Jon !

>Haukur,
>What would the appropriate greeting be?
>Jon

I think Haukur has a very good point here.
As I understand it, he is saying that Americans (or others of the
English tongue), when the want to find an Icelandic Or Old Norse
word, simply scan the dictionary, until they find, for example,
the entry:

heilsa v. (að) 1. greet, wish luck, wellcome 2. heal, prosper

"Okay", they then say: "I can then write heilsa for greet, and
the matter is settled".

But what they fail to recognize is that "heilsa" is a verb,
and that what they have found is merely the lexical form
of the verb: the infinitive. They do not realize that
infinitives are mostly not used directly, but need to be
adapted according to syntactic function that one intends for
them.

Admittedly, this is difficult to understand for those who
start out on the basis of English, and have no other
languages that they can compare with. In languages like
French and German, this is, however, much clearer than in
English.

In French for example, the infinitive is "saluter".
But you cannot use it as a greeting like that.
In fact, first you need to remove the -er infinitive
ending, and then add the appropriate ending for the
1st person singular present indicative, to obtain:
"Je te salute!" = I greet thee!

But it is actually more complicated than that, for if
you speak as a representative of a group, it is
"Nous vous salutons!" = We greet thee!

In German the corresponding examples are
"Grüssen" = the infinitive form
"Ich grüsse dich" = I greet thee!
"Wir grüssen euch" = We greet thee!

In Icelandic it becomes:
"heilsa" = the infinitive form.
"Ek heilsa þér" = I greet thee!
"Vér heilsum yðr" = We greet thee!


Best Greetings
Keth

>In other news "Heilsa" is not an Icelandic/Old Norse greeting.
>It seems to be the result of a similar sort of translation style
>as the phrase you quoted. If you look up "to greet" in the
>dictionary you will indeed get "heilsa" but that doesn't mean
>that "heilsa" is an appropriate greeting.
>
>Kveðja,
>Haukur