Dear E.M.,
<Although I have read both the "old" claims that Icelandic was directly
related to Vedic (e.g., Max Muller) and some of the recent literature that
heaps scorn on those earlier claims, today was the first day that I sat down
with a grammar of the Icelandic language.
How nice. I am very pleased! There is a lot to learn, and much to read in
old Icelandic. We call it "Old Norse" in my part of the world. My parents
learned it in high school along with Latin and Old Greek, and so did I.
<After half an hour of reading about the phonology, grammar, and syntax of
Icelandic (i.e., knowing just a little more than nothing) I still am baffled
that anyone ever thought this language was especially "Indo-Aryan". It
certainly does not seem to have any strikingly "Vedic"/"Old Indo-Aryan"
features --i.e., no more than any other modern European language.
<the controversy over Muller (and the word "Aryan" generally) there were
still substantive reasons to suppose that early Icelandic had a direct
descent from India.
No one knows what aryan denotes. But you can have my opinion. It is probably
a loan word from semitic based on the root /'ar/ denoting free people as
opposed to slaves. There are some good semitic cognates. This was suggested
about more than one hundred years ago by the Danish linguist Herman Møller,
the inventor of the laryngal theory, one of the corner stones of modern
Indoeuropean comparative linguistics.
<This surprises me for more reasons than one; Rasmus Rask's thesis (now
widely accepted) is that the Nordic languages have their direct descent from
"Proto-Hungarian" (i.e., to the east).
That's interesting. Maybe I have missed somethimg in Rask's writings.
Ole Pind