That was quite beautifully put, Haukr, and very eloquently might I add and all too true.

A reason I find Old Norse and set undeveloping, classical if you wish, languages a very interesting study is because of these very reasons, and I think that studying a classical language, rather than a modern living breathing one, even if they are very similar, offers the learner more in an understanding of the modern language than it would the other way around. I could study Modern Icelandic, and attempt to learn Old Icelanding from there, but it would be much harder for me.

Being a Swedish native, I have studied Swedish for what seems like ages. Spelling, grammatical structure and more recently, as I will continue doing for yet a year, poetry and prose. Now Swedish is a language which has developed very drastically the past 50 years or so. In Sweden we have no tradition of creating new words; we rather implement foreign ones or create a long descriptive word out of many smaller words (for example "the assistant of the general secretary" would be something along the lines of "generalsekreterarassistenten" - literally the-general-secretary-assistant). This means that our very small vocabulary is not growing. Furthermore, there was a trend in the 60's and 70's to spell everything the way it was pronounced, which means that today we have a large number of officially recognised words that are just Swedifications of English words. For example "juice" can in Swedish also be spelled "jos". This, I would assume, comes from the lower- and middle-class tradition of pronouncing everything the way it was spelled... which brings me back to the poetry part; there was once an upper class tradition of spelling things differently from the way they were pronounced.
Even today the so called educated classes have quite little knowledge on how to pronounce these less than a century old words with spellings that even my grandfather (1921-1997) grew up writing. I attend the school in Sweden with the highest grade average, on the programme with the highest grade average, and they don't know. Old Norse has helped me, there, to understand the pronounciation of 19th century poetry... and surnames, today mangled by our changed tongue.

It's not easy to go from having learnt English as a second language (B language, not A2), to trying to understand Chaucer. You can articulate the letters and understand him on a shallow plane, but the intriquite details, the gender, the supposed beauty in the grammar is completely lost on the avereage (and even advanced, in most cases, I would believe) learner, such as myself.

One would think it's easier to start from the bottom. If we can learn as much as possible and try to understand the nature of Old Norse, then perhaps, we can come closer to, perhaps even beyond (I'm not familiar with recent progress in the language, and how it's taught at school), a native's insight on Modern Icelandic.

/Emma

"All dwarfs are by nature dutiful, serious, literate, obedient and
thoughtful people whose only minor failing is a tendency, after one drink,
to rush at enemies screaming "Arrrrrrgh!" and axing their legs off at the
knee." -Terry Pratchett