I knew that there was something fishy when my prompt read “Brian Scott, May I have some help please?”
I should have known better.
Colm
From:
norse_course@yahoogroups.com [mailto:
norse_course@yahoogroups.com ] On Behalf Of Brian M. Scott
Sent: Wednesday, June 03, 2009
3:55 PM
To: puppetsan
Subject: Re: [norse_course] May I
have some help please?
At 6:41:41 PM on Tuesday, June 2, 2009, puppetsan
wrote:
> My name is Chris Bamlett, i'm 17 years old and currently
I can't help you with a translation of the modern English
> study French and Spanish at college, where I hope I can
> get the gradfes required for a languages degree.
> I have a friend who is also a linguist, and we often talk
> to each other and exchange bits of vocabulary with one
> another. He is one year younger than I and studies French
> and German. Anyway, today he asked me to find the Norse
> word for "Chaos" so I went looking. I have poured through
> several online translators and so far nothing. Norse is
> not a modern language and I think this is why it is
> difficult to find.
word, but <Ginnungagap> corresponds rather well to the
ancient Greek concept of <Chaos> as 'the first state of
existence, the rude, unformed mass; infinite space', later
'any wide, empty space, a gulf, a chasm': in Norse mythology
Ginnungagap was the vast empty space that preceded the
creation of our universe, the primordial void. (By the way,
English <chaos> was originally borrowed from Greek with the
same senses as the Greek word and only gradually acquired
its modern sense.)
Brian