Hail Hawk !
Thank you for your example that illustartes the point quite well.
(a frenchman is a "coat")
reminds me a bit of the war between the frenchies and the brits.
I think the brits were called "redcoats".

>> 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
>
>That's not what I was saying :-) Or at least I didn't
>mean that those sorts of translations were especially
>characteristic of English speakers. The same thing can
>happen to speakers of any language with insufficient
>knowledge of the language they are trying to translate
>into.

Mistakes are human, and happen regardless of nation
or culture. That is of course a verity. But in regard
to the English language, I once read a very interesting
book called "the miracle of language" (author, L.. something)
where it is explained how English represents the "avant-garde"
of a certain development that has affected many Germanic languages
to a varying degree; and that is that the meanings that were previously
conveyed by means of word-endings (inflections and declinations)
are now being conveyed by the order of the words.
For example in English:

The dog bites the man (a)
The man bites the dog (b)

are not the same, since the rule in English is that
the subject comes first.

In Icelandic (okay, I know I ought to use German examples,
because when I try to write Icelandic, I often make mistakes.
But I also enjoy the challenge of trying), there would actually
be *four* variants:

Maðurinn bítur hundinn (A)
Hundurinn bítur manninn (B)
Manninn bítur hundurinn (C)
Hundinn bítur Maðurinn (D)

Here (B) and (C) have the same meaning,
and so do (A) and (D).

Icelandic B/C should then correspond to English (a)
and Icelandic A/D to English (b).

(if I made *any* mistake, please correct ;)

leptonically
keth

>
>Here's one story.
>
>An Icelander wants to translate "Hver á þennan frakka?"
>(Who has this coat?) into English. He uses the dictionary:
>
>hver - hot spring
>á - river
>þessi - this
>frakki - Frenchman
>
>So he gets
>
>"Hot spring river this Frenchman?"
>
>which is not very helpful.
>
>Dictionaries are useful tools but one has to know how
>to use them. They are not sufficient for translating
>sentences into languages one doesn't know. There is not a
>one-to-one correspondance between the words and grammar
>of any two languages.
>
>Kveðja,
>Haukur
>
>
>
>Sumir hafa kvæði...
>...aðrir spakmæli.
>
>- Keth
>
>Homepage: http://www.hi.is/~haukurth/norse/
>
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