He wasn't trying. And I really don't know what they taught him at school. Sorry.. probably a bad day - and the way he re heard was.. like he wasn't listening.. bad day on the field for him..
What is called "Old Norse" today is simply middle age Old Icelandic. That has nothing to do with the vikings. The vikings spoke Danish Language (Danelaw) which is a complete different language as attested in the hundreds of British Viking placenames such as Rugby, Baldersby, Arnesby, Hareby, Dalby, Allerby, Stisted, Felsted, Alsager, Overstrand, Riseholme, Birkholme, Marholm, Langholm, Sandtoft, Horning, Lindum etc. All these names are Danish. None of them are "Old Norse" Icelandic.
Fun fact : in French, we have the word "mésange" which comes from Frankish and has the same origin as "meisingar". I would never have guessed, but just checked.
Thanks for the explanation. I was wondering if there was any connection. Perhaps this is why there is a connection in mythology, which Tolkien implied in Lord of the Rings, between birds and spies or messages.
well if im not mistaken, the vikings did come to northern france which would be modern day normandy today so i guess there might exist some french words with roots in old norse? anyhow, pretty fascinating nonetheless
@@hannahwalmer1124 Well it is similar but still it can be quite difficult to read Old Norse poems for us BUT general text is not that difficult. Words have though changed through the centuries.
@@MrPicky ... the words haven't changed that much in form or meaning though a few have, many sound more formal, biblical or poetic... what I feel is the main problem for a modern day Icelander to understand Old Norse has more to do with cultural change. When I read old texts my main obstacle is words related to things and activities that are no longer a part of modern day life, experience and language. ... and that can render a text completely unintelligible. "As he came through the flounk he twank the oomah on the splunker..." if you get my drift ;-)
@@sgjoni words have changed with the changes of pronounciation, like Leifr became Leifur etc., and some words have changed meanings (like sími was a thread but is now phone) but otherwise I agree with you. My answer was just "simpler" ;)
I'm Icelandic and I concur - his Old Norse is tremendously Icelandic, but I also feel his spoken language exaggerated. Languages have the tendency of finding the lazy path. Comparing my experience of written vs. spoken Icelandic, Swedish, English as well as Turkish and Chinese, all have a strict set of how to write which doesn't always harmonize with how it's spoken. I seriously doubt that people would have said "áðr" even if they chose to write it that way - "u" is a natural sound there (áður) - pretty much like how he blows his "wh" in "where", he'd also sound hvalr (hvalur) like "hhúalr" rather than the more correct "kvalur".
As an Icelander, I was preparing myself for disappointment, because we've always been told we'd be able to communicate fairly easily with hypothetical Old Norse time travelers, and I half expected this video to come and dash that prideful dream... But no, I understood everything, even without the written form, and am very pleased to see we still got it!
I honestly don't see any reason at all to call Icelandic that rather than just Norse other than of course that Iceland is a nation now; there's no or very little disconnect between the Viking age and today in terms of population on the island and the language has undergone very little changes except in vowel sounds and some word endings
I’m not sure about that. At the end is not an Old Norse time traveler speaking but an American guy whose Icelandic influence is big and therefore we can’t factually say what he spoke was 100% right both grammatically and spoken.
@@YouGotUnlucky true but he's got likely the best reconstruction anywhere and if we can say with a high degree of certainty that classical latin pronunciation has been reconstructed, we can probably get just as close here
Being Norwegian, the Norwegian guy is totally lost. I didn’t understand everything, but I would say any other Norwegian would be about as good as the Dane
@@slickboxingidentityveritas1932 even if he doesn’t speak the “common norwegian” or whatever the fuck, his dialect doesn’t affect his understanding of norwegian. his dialect is literally unrelated to his understanding of old norse lmao
@@noahkirschtein8169 Not true. A Western Norwegian would (usually) understand it better than a Northern Norwegian because our dialects are more similar to old norse / icelandic than in the other regions.
@@Mari-eq8rx what on earth are you on about ‘’closer to old norse and icelandic’’? You might be better at understanding other languages, I don’t know, but don’t tell me western dialect is closer to old Norse and Icelandic 😂 because of ‘nynorsk’? No(r)way José
Love how everyone is looking in the beginning. The Norwegian, questioning every life choice, the Dane, realising he made a mistake agreeing to this and the Icelander just casually listening. Haha
@@joi76 The old norse sentences could definitely be used in some very poetic writing, they still make sense in icelandic, even though they aren't really how a normal person would speak. I do agree with you though, that he should've been more consistent in changing them to adhere to how people actually speak.
I'm from Iceland and I had the exact same reaction to everything as Óskar did! I knew we were quite close to Old Norse but I didn't realise it was this close. It would be interesting to travel back in time to medieval Norway and see just how much I'd understand.
Yes, it would be interesting to conduct a more in-depth experiment. Understanding five isolated sentences is one thing. But do you think you could hold a conversation with a speaker of Old Norse?
@@robertstewart239 It depends on the pronounciation. For example, I understand Faroese quite well but only in its written form, the pronounciation is quite different. All we have of Old Norse is the written language, but if most words are pronounced the same, then yes I could absolutely have a conversation with an Old Norse speaker.
Well, you people as island dwellers, kind of managed to preserve the old ways, having little to no influences from the continent. That's how I explain it. Greetings from RO!
"it's not a competition, nobody wins anything" Jackson... My sweet innocent Jackson... You have spent too long in Old Norse, you have no idea the lengths these three countries will go to, to out-do each other!
@@Bronzescorpion C'mon dude, we all know Norway was the senior part back in the Norway-Denmark and Norway-Sweden days. You shouldn't buy all the Danish and Swedish propaganda you hear on the internet! ;)
Jackson explained some of the lack of evolution processes that made Icelandic so close to Old Norse. In practice it's kind of "Nynorse". I'd be curious to see early Old Norse and speakers of old Norse-derived dialects - of whatever language it might be, with Icelandic being an easy choice, being so close to it, however Old Norse itself developed and had variation among different places in Scandinavia. I'm curious how the dialects compare to the Old Norse that was the closest to Proto- Norse.
@@viktorreiter8811 different enough to immediately tell theyre from Bergen (or at least western Norway) but completely understandable for anyone in the country
@@viktorreiter8811 norwegian dialects are so different from each other that they could be considered different languages. For me living in the middle of norway i find swedish easier to understand than for example bergensk
the Islandic is modern =/ i wanted t root language (traditional), i found a dictionary in eng with little words for old norse n then i mixed with t modern uen i dont find, is fk! If someone get some dictionary or gramatic book i thank.
As a norwegian I was a little disappointed by the norwegian guy in this video. He should have understood more. The Danish guy was better at connecting words I guess.
Interestingly, one could recognize most of the words used in the Norse sentences from modern Norwegian, but you'd have to pull from many dialects around the country. For instance being from western Norway I was surprised he didn't recognize "snjo" as snow, but I'm guessing there's less familiarity with dialects down south due to geography, being from so far up north.
Yeah, I feel bad for other Norwegians here thinking he was a good representation for Norway. Maybe his brain went derp cause he was nervous or something... Cause some of it was quite easy (to a Swede like myself).
@@Nekotaku_TV He was treating it like a competition when it was not and seems like it got to his nerves. I could sense it through the screen that he went in with the wrong mindset
@@Gist432 Still interesting to hear the similarities with Icelandic. For a Swedish translation, check out my comment on that, for those that may be interested. But yes a swede would have been nice aswell.
Little sad we had no swedish representative here! I as a Swede did understand parts of this and could have done some good guessing! To everyone complaining about the norwegian guy please stop. I know this dilemma all too well. When put on the spot you easily blackout and things that you normally would find simple get more difficult. Kudos to all participating for an entertaining video! :)
@@elvenkind6072 yes. It’s understandable. When hearing Icelandic or Norwegian dialects I need to get into the mode of thinking “I can understand what this means”. Otherwise I might just as well hear it as gibberish. And he tried to hear most of it very closely to the modern language instead of thinking of it like and old relative or someone living in the forest that haven’t come out from there for about 900 years.
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The Icelander looks like he's trying not to laugh, like he's thinking "So... when does the challenge actually start?" 🤣
It's not overstated at all, it's scary how conservative they are... You know the words feminine, neuter, singular, plural and all of those related terms... in Icelandic they have their own words for that. Einntal(singular) fleirtal(plural), the other languages technically could do the same, as most things are still pretty much slightly different Norse, however since the rest loves loanwords... I'd doubt it ever happen. After all, there's more German and French in Swedish than there is Norse...
German overall is a very conservative language, at least in terms of grammar. It has the noun cases and neuter gender like older Germanic languages, but the vocabulary has definitely been influenced by Latin and Greek. Icelandic feels like a language warded off from any outside influence, allowed to grow in a streamlined fashioned. In general, very archaic.
@@livedandletdie I get what you mean, but that was a bad call. In German you can also say Einzahl and Mehrzahl for singular and plural. These are used interchangeably. The same goes for German names for the grammatical genders (which are even preferred). I just looked it up and apparently, ental and flertal also exist in Swedish. So, in these cases loanwords only increased the vocabulary.
@@livedandletdie In German we also have Einzahl (singular) and Mehrzahl (plural) which are as understandable as Singular and Plural. But those two can be used as well, but they are more technical
@@MWoyde I don't speak German as a mother language in fact I've learned it as an adult, by reading Einntal and fleirtal I thought something like Einteil and Vielteil :D
I am Italian and fluent in Danish and Norwegian (after almost 40 years in Scandinavia). I simply cannot understand how the Norwegian guy was not able to perform better.
I'm not even Norwegian (or from Scandinavia) and, based on my limited knowledge of German and full knowledge of English, Dutch, and Frisian, I was, AT LEAST, able to *guess* what was being said and written. Even if my accuracy was pretty shit, I still didn't have as much trouble as the Norwegian bloke up there. He must have been experiencing the mother of all hangovers that morning to be *that* bad at deciphering *some* root words...
I'm half italian, half norwegian. I've lived in italy most of my life, but throughout the years I've studied various languages, many of which germanic. I think that being used to learning languages helps in this situation because you need to recognize slightly changed words, see patterns in how words change between languages, etc. I don't think it's much of a coincidence that the Danish guy was better *and* could also speak swedish properly + understand norwegian; he honed the skills he needed for this thing.
What did you expect? "Old Norse" IS Icelandic. Where did you think they got it from? Certainly not from the Scandinavian Vikings who spoke Danske Tunge in the Danelaw. All their villages still have Danish names to this day: Rugby, Baldersby, Arnesby, Hareby, Dalby, Allerby, Stisted, Felsted, Alsager, Overstrand, Riseholme, Birkholme, Marholm, Langholm, Sandtoft, Horning, etc.). There is no "Old Norse" in the Danelaw. No -Stadur´s there, what so ever.
I am a northerner, and my dialect defenetly helped me more. But I think his head was kind of locked on bokmål mabey. And I also think age and experience might be a factor here.
@@gaborodriguez1346 Romanian was surrounded by slavic languages as well as hungarian. I wouldn't be surprised if someone would find traces of an older language that was supersaded by latin way back when. Icelanders are descendants from the old Norsemen and Scottish/Northenglish women. So there's no real influence from other languages.
As a Danish person who has lived in Iceland, this was all really easy to understand, even without the written version. I would like to add that 12th century Norse and modern Scandinavian languages as well as Icelandic have a lot of words that phonetically sound almost the same in modern English. Just take words like: ship, boat, axe, hammer, sail, mast, anchor, shield, spear, sword, knife etc. 😀
Exactly, as an older literate native English speaker who also understands Scots I am constantly amazed by the amount of words I understand once I've heard them many times. The outrageously complex grammar hides a lot but then you hear that word in the right part of the sentence, sex, singular or plural and suddenly boom it's English
Geordie (English Newcastle dialect) is very interesting from this point as well considering their heavy viking influence and dialectal words such as "bairn/s" for children.
Shall. the slang word in australia to drink all your drink is to Scull your beer, go on a tour, sail, hound, a ford (though it is a difference thing. Way....
It seems almost unfair to the other two, but it's fascinating to see just how similar Icelandic is to Old Norse. A Viking time traveller would have little trouble communicating!
If you think about it. Iceland is out in the middle of the ocean. Isolated from the rest of Europe. The Danes and Norwegians traded and fought wars with the neighboring Germans and English, their languages changed while Iceland's remained mostly the same.
@@GundamGokuTV Yes, but still the Icelandic language could easily have changed more than it did. We had very many danish words in the Icelandic language for example in the 19th. century but then a group of Icelanders living in Denmark called Fjölnismenn started to fight for a language cleanup policy. That surely worked and there are stories about teachers expelleing young pupils from class if using Danish slang.
@@GundamGokuTV I'm Irish and I heard before that there's some very minor influence on modern Iceland from the Irish language from the Irish thralls they took from here!
Whether or not norwegians understands icelandic, depends from where in Norway the Norwegian comes from. The oslo norwegian is so close to danish it is almost the same
@@AtheistReligionIsCancer im from the same area as the norwegian dude but i understood more than he could. Think this is more about who you choose to guess these.
@@loffagood556 I agree, I think it is one thing to have an advantage on paper, another to use it. Yes, having a discussion in public like this will make a lot of people nervous and might lose that advantage because of that.
@@AtheistReligionIsCancer I think it really depends on what dialect you have. I'm from western-Norway and I felt I had a better idea and perhaps syntax to understand rather than the Norwegian representative because we still use a lot of these words.
Not really. He looks like he might have some Scandinavian ancestry, certainly at least broadly European, and then his native English is a Germanic language already. He's not a native American, so he's simply exploring his ethnic/cultural roots.
@@amjan I'm sorry my dude, but Americans have almost no "real" relationships to their ethnic roots unless they are newly arrived immigrants. A lot of Americans claim to be "Danish", for example but know nothing of the language, or even simple danish geography, and instead, they might perform some lame parody of Danishness by eating æbleskiver with remoulade and walking around in lederhosen during festivities. Americans don't really care about their roots, at least that has never been confirmed by my lived experience, and I come from a family of Danish-Americans (my side of the family simply went back to Denmark in the 20th century, so I guess we're Danish-American Danes if I were to put that in "American terms").
@@EusebiusAT Calm down. You totally missed the point. We are NOT talking about some random Americans, but about Mr. Jackson Crawford and what HE is doing.
What is really cool is seeing the cognates in English, given the history of old Norse is integral to the history of English linguistically. Literally "þessen" being the root of "this" and "these" is just one the coolest damn things to unpack when looking at Scandinavian languages old and modern.
I guessed a couple of words correctly here or there, but I don't speak any Nordic language. I did however learn German and was wondering if that was why. Now I'm not so sure.
@@warpedweft9004 I speak a tiny bit of Danish and did learn German in school years ago (I'm shite at it though), but I'm the most fluent in English. I think for the majority of the words I felt they were most similar to Danish and quite rarely English. It's difficult to tell, even in the written forms, when English doesn't use ð anymore
@@benas_st Its possible that because I'm an older person there are words we used as children that are no longer used. English vocabulary changed very rapidly after television and the internet became widely available. Becoming a "global village" had it's effect. No one uses words like "weald" anymore, except in place names. I noticed a huge difference when going back to the UK to visit. In the mid 1990s, all the regional accents were very obvious. In 2013, not so much. The accent seemed to have flattened considerably and word choice had changed, particularly in the "home counties".
@@Vini2157 but I think they are under greater pressure now than they ever have been. We're already losing adverbs and some nouns are being used as other word forms, not to mention the misuse of the apostrophe. There was actually a Society for the Preservation of the Apostrophe in Australia. Some work mates joined me up because I was always on their backs about their misuse of them, but sadly, that folded a few years back when they conceded defeat.
Woah 😳 I had Jackson Crawford as my Vikings and Norse Mythology professor at the University of Colorado a few years ago! So awesome to see him here on this channel!
... so why do you call something " viking mythology" ???? Viking is a verb - and the newer norse mythology ( Odin / Tor) is only the newest. The real origin is " vaner" - not " æser" - by the way was Freya ( Frøya) and Frey..and so on
@@heidifarstadkvalheim4952 If I may, the University usually requires the professor to title the class in that way in order to draw more students - even if it is less accurate (i.e. more students will recognize the basic overarching idea faster than simply "Norse mythology". Likewise, these professors will usually add that basic clarification during the first lecture.
@@heidifarstadkvalheim4952 Viking is never really used as a verb in English. It’s used as a noun (ex. “the Vikings” is used to refer to seafaring Scandinavian people from the late 8th to 11th century). It seems like it’s usually used as an adjective in English (ex. “Viking culture,” “Viking settlement,” “Viking Age,” “Viking trade,” etc.)
Allright, as far as I can understand it in Faroese: 1. Snjó fall ein dag í skóginum 2. Mangir fuglar búđu í hesum skógi 3. Í tí hægsta trænum í skóginum bygdu tvær títur reiđur sítt 4. Men áđrenn stormurin kom, stjól krákan teirra egg. 5. Vinur viđ veingjum hevur tann óvin, sum flýgur
As a Spanish speaker, without Subtitles, and without speaking English, I understood 0.3% of what they're saying. It seems like Icelandic is the closest language to Old Norse.
The only word I got art 3:23 was SNJOR or something like that, which I assume means "snow". Por cierto, quihubo, vato, yo también hablo español y apenas una palabra entre un millón entendí.
Yeah as a Swede that had to learn Spanish, the overlap between Nordic languages and Spanish is extremely limited. There are some loan words, but besides that there are only some basic words where you can sort of tell they come from the same root some time long ago. But yes Icelandic by far is the most similar to old Norse. More similar than written Spanish and Italian are to each other. Like really really similar. As a Swede I understood a little more than the Danish guy in the video. I think that was just due to some of the pronunciation and vocal/consonant sounds of the recreated old Norse sounded more like typical sounds in Swedish/Norwegian/Islandic than Danish. Danish pronunciation just went it’s own way and is pretty unique.
You're not expected to. Latin isn't even.close.. . You aren't expected to understand Basque either, no? ..only the Nordic grammar can be similar, if you get some vocab you could learn it pretty easily.. As a Norwegian with a little Latin in school and English, I think Spanish is quite available, and similar in construction..
My brother and sisters in iceland should be proud, to take care of their language all the way back from the Viking Age. best regards From a Norwegian. I realy love you and proud to call you brother and sisters.
Takk elsku frændi. There are a few remnants of Gaelic in the language, 3:40 is where Icelandic diverted from Old Norse and into Gaelic in pronunciation. In the other Nordic languages double L as in fell is pronounced as a soft and long L, whereas in Iceland esp. W-Iceland the double L is pronounced as -tl like you'd do in Gaelic.
not gonna lie, the Norwegian guy disappointed me a bit. Maybe his local dialect screwed him over a bit. not sure, but the Icelandic guy basically was there to just make sure the speaker spoke correctly haha :D The Danish guy was more what I expected the Norwegian guy would perform. impressed by how much the Dane got correct tho! And we are missing a swede in this "experiment" also! BUT to their defence, it's much harder to sit there and do it live, vs sitting here in my sofa saying "OFC IT IS the highest tree in the forest" etc. awesome content
I can't comment for Torleif, but I have allmost identical dialect as to him - just an hour or so from where he is. And I think my dialect helped me alot.
I'm from Tromsø, with relatives from Senja and Gudbrandsdalen. The local Tromsø dialect, _Tromsøværing,_ shouldn't really screw him over at all, since it's very close to _Nynorsk_ and thus closer to the original West Norse dialects. Also if you have relatives outside of town, you'd know a lot more Norse words already, that are closer to the original Norse than you see in the common city slicker dialects, or even sosiolects.
So I suggested this video a lot and I wish It would have been a Swede instead of an Icelander (no offense to any Icelanders) simply because Icelandic is so much closer to ON.
@@amjan sure, I just thought it would be a more even playing field without an Icelander, but as Jackson said, it’s not really a game but more of an experiment
@@amjan There are Norrländska,Gotlandish,Gothenburgish or even Elfadlians in Sweden, all of them have different gravy & spice in their languages/dialects. So it would be more intruiging if a Swede from Gotland or Norrland would take part as well
My grandfather was a Finland-Swede, born in 1888 in Ostrobothnia. He went back to Finland around 1970 with my mother, and she was told his Swedish seemed more like Icelandic than modern Swedish.
I think in that case "Icelandic" would just be a way of saying "hard to understand". Though I will say Modern Icelandic sounds somewhat similar to Finnish (which might have influenced his accent) due to pre-aspiration and stress patterns.
The Old Norse had a couple of dialects. This one is influenced by Old English and has the ‘th’ sound, written þ and ð and is only found in Icelandic. So the examples are more Old Icelandic than Old Norse spoken in Scandinavia.
I really enjoyed this. I speak Icelandic and can read some Norwegian and Danish. It was interesting learning the differences. All the participants were really good sports and seemed to be enjoying themselves. It seemes everyone wound up learning something interesting.
Haha, Icelander here... Yeah that was very easy. Not only is old Norse very similar to modern Icelandic but we also study it in school. Super interesting to watch! Props to Norwegian and Danish bros for trying their absolute best!
I’m curious, to you, does the old Norse just sound like he’s speaking with a weird accent or would it be closer to a modern English speaker reading Shakespeare?
@@maxwell9211 When Jackson (the american im assuming) was reading the sentances it just sounded to me like a foreigner trying to speak Icelandic. Im sure old norse men had a particular accent that would be more difficult for us to understand but on paper it just sounds like formal/poetic Icelandic. Sometimes it's like reading modern icelandic without grammar rules. There are also words here and there that we either don't use anymore or the meaning has changed a bit. Hope that helps! :)
@@GhostiesWorld yeah definitely helped. I’ve lived in Quebec for a few years so I’d imagine it’s somewhat like a Québécois French speaker, speaking to a French speaker from France
I've never been this enthusiastic about a language class. As a Dane, it's cool to see how the old and the neighboring languages compare. It's incredible how similar it is.
@@voidhunger7514 Norwegian: Ekkoet av Stemmen til bestemoren kunne høres i hennes barnebarns stemmer. I had to change the construction of the sentence. So it'll be more like this: The echo of the grandmother's voice was heard in her grandchildren's voices. We don't really have any words for "echoes". Echo is only a noun in Norwegian, not a verb. Which is an interesting difference. You can only observe the echo, but the echo is a reaction to sound. So nothing can create an echo. Also in Modern Norwegian I would say: Ekkoet av Bestemorens stemme kunne høres i stemmene til barnebarna. Which translates into: The echo of the Grandmother's voice could be heard in the voices of the grandchildren. However, that's a very modern interpretation.
@@voidhunger7514 A litural translation to icelandic: Rödd ömmunnar bergmálar í röddum barnabarna sinna. Rödd means voice. Grandmother means amma, and with "the" it's amman. Amman with the genetive (used mainly to show possession, grandmother's voice) is ömmunnar. Bergmál means echo. Voted the second most beautiful icelandic word for people born before 1987 (yes we held a competition). Berg means cliff or rock face. Mál means language. Language of the mountains. So when you shout in a valley, the mountains shouts back at you. Grandchildren means barnabörn. Barnabörn with the genetive is barnabarna. Literally means childrens childrens. So a grandmothers grandchildren are her childrens children. Sinna shows possession, her grandchildren.
As a Faroe Islander, these were all really easy, apart from the last one with its bonkers poetic/proverbial syntax :D As for the "áðr en," we've one-upped our Icelandic brothers and sisters, and slammed it into one word: "áðrenn"
@@andryuu_2000 Kinda sorta, I guess? Our languages have deviated quite a bit during the centuries. I can't speak for the Icelanders; I don't know how intelligible Faroese is to them, but I do know Icelandic is usually intelligible to Faroe Islanders -if- they make an effort to slow down their speech, and enunciate a bit more clearly than in everyday speech between Icelanders. Reading Icelandic is a piece of cake for most Faroe Islanders, and I'd guess the reverse is true as well.
@@MagnusMoerkoereJohannesen As an Icelander, I love your language. I've had a few roommates through the years that are from the FO and we could speak fairly well to each other in our native languages. There are of course plenty of words that have completely different meanings between the two languages, but nevertheless. Also, reading Faroese is fairly simple for us, with the thought in mind that the words might mean something different. I'd say that of close languages to Icelandic, Old Norse would be in first place and Faroese would be in second place.
@@axelrafn Yeah, I was fairly sure the situation was the same on both sides of the language divide, I just didn't want to commit to anything I wasn't absolutely certain of; I've made that mistake before, and that embarrassment was enough :D As for words having different meanings, I'll never forget the look on an Icelandic friend of mine's face, when I told him about one of my favourite stories as a child, Pippi Smokkuleggur 🤣 Shocked and disturbed was putting it mildly! :D
@@MagnusMoerkoereJohannesen I could tell almost immediately that Pippi Smokkuleggur is just what we call Lína Langsokkur but it's still really funny to me. Pippi Condomleg lol
The norwegian is hopeless lol, as an average norwegian most of these were at least 75% obvious with some weird words here and there. Especially when written down, his guesses were absurd
@@zerrierslizer1 nu må dokker slutte, vi har faktisk ikje peiling på koffer han ikje klarte å førstå, ting som nervøsitet osv. Erfaring, eller bare kordan man reagere i pressa situasjona. Kor godt han førstår norrønt sir egentli ikje særlig mye om kordan han e som lærer. Æ syns d blir før dumt å snakke stygt om folk, å nordmenn generelt må gje sæg på d å læse sæg nettvætt. (Å æ skriv bevist på dialækt nu)
@@IdaTheBraveFace eg og skrive no på mi eiga dialekt din sau! ka eg synes og ka du synes om han e vitt forskjellige ting, men det betyr ikkje att eg MÅ respektere han for det. helvete og, eg har ikkje noke respekt for lerara på grunn av att dei låste meg vekk berre på grunn av att eg har ADHD isteden for og HJELPE meg. skule systemet i Norge e rævkjøyrt uansett korleis man ser på det.
I'm a Norwegian from Oslo, I immediately heard "snow fell one day in the woods" 😅 I think my countryman simply must have misheard or something. He pronounced it "Snor" though, which is "cord" "Thessum" is "This".... I heard "Margir birds built in this/these forest/s", which was 1 word wrong and 1 not guessed. Meisingar was obviously "Meis" plural or "Meiser" though you can't say that. skóginum is skog, byggdu is bugilt, sitt is sitt, hreidr is rede, I is eg. Apparently it's easier to hear Old Norse for someone from Southern Norway Edit: Yes "Meis" is the same bird in Norwegian... and you don't have to be "good with birds" they are literally _everywhere,_ kjøttmeis in particular...
The fact that these men are trying to translate a language they don't speak (old norse), and are conversating about it in a language that they have learned (English), while comparing the translations to the language they were raised with in their own countries and discussing the similarities... is just so mindboggling to me! Truly TRULY impressive. I wish we were encouraged to be multilingual in America. It's truly something I find extremely impressive about the rest of the world.
Speaking as a Danish person: English evolved out of Old Norse. We have many words and syntaxes in common. It's easier to understand English for a Nordic speaker than you think it is. Examples: Window, Vindue Knife, kniv To think, at tænke To speak, at snakke We were, vi var Raised, rejst You see a pattern here? Many of these words aren't borrowed or translated they're just the same word that evolved differently
This was quite a show. As a 73 years old Icelander I must be worried about the future of our language. It's true what Óskar said about our isolation through the centuries, but believe me, I am worried about the future of our language. We have a ''difficult'' grammar and I sense that the young generation is losing its grip on the grammar. So in 30, 40 years my language will be very different from what I learned. I will be dead and gone then. Greetings from Iceland.
That's why it needs to be preserved as it is a treasure and legacy of our common european history. Me, as a Polish living in Germany, would give much to have the real opportunity to learn it :)
@The505Guys It's not so surprising, even without speaking English, pretty much every language is "striving" for efficiency. So in the big picture, almost all languages sooner or later remove difficulties or irregularities (given, sometimes new irregularities come up). This doesn't need to come from language contact, but can just be a sort of simplification. And in that light, it seems only logical that Icelandic would become easier too. But on the other hand, it conserved its complexity for so long, so who knows. I only can say for sure that German is and will be becoming a lot simpler.
I was always taught that evolving the language is a good thing since we will never stop being exposed to new things, ideas, concepts and so on. Sure conservatism sounds appealing on paper but it’s really not a natural human state of being to begin with.
BRAVO 👏👏👏👏 I like to thank Norbert for asking me to join. It didn't work out this time but here are my two cents at least: 1. The first sentence was easy, but I interpret Snjór as a name (similar to Snorre). The Swedish sentence would be "Snö föll i skogen". 2. When listening I interpret it as "many birds ... in this forest" ("många fåglar ... i denna skog"). "Þessa" sounds like the "dessa" in Swedish, which is the possessive case, so I just assumed it means "this" which made sense. The Swedish would be "Många fåglar bor i denna skog/den här skogen". 3. First I got "I ... har trä i skogen bygga två ... ... ...". Later I realized that meisingar is mesar in Swedish and after hearing the English translation, everything made sense. In Swedish "nest" is "bo" (lit. "live"). The sentence in Swedish would be: "I det högsta trädet i skogen byggde två mesar sina bon". 4. From the spoken Old Norse I got "I ... stormen kom ... ... deras ägg" but looking at it, it made much more sense. The second part was no problem at all and would be almost the same in Swedish ("stal (en) kråka deras ägg"). The full sentence would be "Innan stormen kom stal en kråka deras ägg". 5. All I got at first was "odin flies" ("oden flyger") which was obviously wrong. From the written sentence I got "med" ("with") and "har" ("has"). The relative clause starts just like in German, so being fluent in German, I should have got that. In contemporary Swedish it's just "som". I also suspected at first that ovin could be "uven" which is an alternative word for "the owl" but it all made sense eventually. The sentence, although being a bit weird, would be as follows: "(En) vän med vingar har den ovän som flyger."
It would have been great to hear a Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish speaker talk to each other though - I don't know any videos that have that sort of dynamic.
As a native Swedish speaker I understod the first sentence immediately: 1) SW: "Snön föll en dag i skogen" The second sentence I needed to see in written form, I had problems with "Margir" and "bjuggu", "Thessum" I associated with the Swedish word "dessa" (En: "these") so it was easy to interpret it to "this". "Bjuggu" resembles the Swedish word "bygga" (En: build). "Fuglar in Swedish is "fåglar" So my interpretation was: 2) SW: fåglar byggde (bo) i denna skog. In the third sentecnce I first had problem with "meisingar but the context made it clear that it was some kind of birds which led me to "mesar" which is a family of birds. So my interpretation was: 3) SW: I det högsta trädet i skogen, byggde två mesar sitt rede. In the fourth sentence I only did not understand "en athr en" My Interpretation: 4) SW: stormen kom, stal kråkan deras ägg. The fifth sentence was the hardest for me, I immediately recognised "flygr" which is "flyger" in Swedish. The "i" in "Vinr" and "ovin" confused me for a while, If it had been an "e" I would have recognised it immediately as "vän" and "ovän" in Swedish. After a while I interpreted it like: 5) SW: Vän med vingar har då ovän som flyger. I was surprised that I could understand so much of the written form, since Swedish is further away from Old Norse than the western Scandinavian languages.
Swede here. Everything you said is true to my own experience watching the video. Maybe a swede could at least understand close to what the danes and Norwegians could. Some words we don’t have, but the language is not too far away. When the Dane said he was lost, we immediately heard “kråka”. Maybe this is part why danes and swedes have trouble understanding each other. Even though the words have similar roots, the pronunciation can be different. Sometimes so different that we feel like the Norwegian guy did.
Ecolinguist! You should have totally got a Faroese person in this video! We are in between the Danish and icelantic. I'm by no means an "linguistics' nut" but I understood 95% without the spelling aid. we are of course a small nation but it is very interesting to see the mixing of danish and icelantic(old norse) that happens here :)
I would have been very curious to see how much a Faroese speaker is able to understand of these sentences, so thanks for sharing, now I know!:) So I assume you can also understand modern Icelandic?
Disclaimer from a Norwegian here: his internet must have been acting up or smth smth, cuz some of these were very understandable by someone who’s a native Norwegian, ESP the first sentence
It was a good effort tho!! The last sentences I guessed about the same as you as well :)) Just the first few ones that went well for me, but it might just be our dialects as I live much more South than you!
@@norwegianwithtorof course! What was really fun to see was how close Icelandic to Old Norse was. And honestly, how similar Danish and Norwegian were some places!
I'm fluent in Swedish and Norwegian and I also know quite a bit of Danish. Hearing the words and making sense of it was very hard. When seeing it spelled out I could guess about 50% of it. Once I got the translation it was all quite clear and I felt bad for not getting it right. Similar to my experience with Icelandic, which I guess makes sense.
I heard Swedish and Danish was so close to one another back in the day, that the armies had to force new soldiers to recite nursery rhymes to try to figure out if the new guy was just trying to switch sides when their side was losing. xD
I think these shows are so fascinating, this subject is very interesting and the guests are always good, I guess because they are all experienced youtubers already. It’s good to see Jackson Crawford doing this, his channel is very interesting, and he has spectacular mountain backdrops to his videos.
They truly are fascinating This channel gave me more than I bargained for I asked for Slavic language comparisons and got different language comparisons too! And some polish lessons as well! I might be able to put my polish friend to "shame" as he doesn't speak polish that well as he's no longer living in Poland but in the same country as me. We'll see!
"Good"? "teachers" ?? ..they don`t understand 50% of wich has been presented.. But I agree with YOU : I like Jackson Crawford!! : ) ..greetings from Norway..
@@ricoeugene2628 YEa I`m Dutch and I understood more, lol.. to be fair, it seems as if Dutch has more of the slightly different words in common with old Norse I guess. Which is why I`d love an Old Norse and/or Icelandic, Old English, modern (West) Frisian (the language, not the Dutch dialect), Dutch and German speaker mix it out.. Going back to their Saxon and Old Frisian root
@@pyruvicac.id_ Wow , You know a lot about languages. I am NOT an expert , but languages has always facinated and interested me. So Thank You! ..I was starting to think I was a bit hard on those three guys..
I love it when it's the Icelandic guy's turn, "Ok, what do you think it said?", and the Icelandic guy just repeats exactly what Jackson said (w/ just some minor pronunciation differences) - while the other two guys were struggling to guess even a single word...
That´s simply because "Old Norse" IS Icelandic. Which is nothing like the "Danske Tunge" language the Scandinavian Vikings spoke in the Danelaw. All their villages still have Danish names to this day: Rugby, Baldersby, Arnesby, Hareby, Dalby, Allerby, Stisted, Felsted, Alsager, Overstrand, Riseholme, Birkholme, Marholm, Langholm, Sandtoft, Horning, etc.). There´s no "Old Norse" in the Danelaw. No -Stadur´s there, what so ever.
@@JoanMaddie Nope. There was never such language as Old Norse. When you say "all of these names sounds like Norwegian too" it´s exactly because south-eastern Norwegian was regarded as Danish. This has nothing to do with Old Norse (Norrøn) which is predominantly describing Old Icelandic. According to all primary sources, - even the oldest Icelandic (Norrøn) text "Fyrsta Málfrœðiritgerðin"), - there were several Nordic languages including the "Danske Tunge" spoken in southern Scandinavia. The differences between Danish, Jutish and Norrøn concerns the complete separate understandings of how runic letters were to be interpreted and transcribed. You can compare this to how the written form "ski-" (as in "skive/skiva") is pronounced completely different in modern Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, thereby establishing the fact that these are three different languages even though the written form "ski-" is the same. In the Iron age, in eastern Denmark runes were presenting as girls´ and boys´ names and interpreted as double-syllabic morphemes and word-forming elements carrying meanings such as hovedleds-abbreviations ("Inge") reflexive markers ("eske") superlative markers ("ester"), etc. One famous example is the interpretation of how the "Gebu" and "Ingwaz"-runes were to be transcribed into Latin letters. In Eastern Denmark the "Ingwaz"-rune was understood as the girls´name "Inge" when being part of placenames (ex: Jyllinge). In Jutland simply as "-ing" (ex: Jelling). But in Iceland the "ingwaz"-rune was radically reduced and simply transcribed into the Latin letter "g", which is one of the important reasons for the notorious N-deletions in Old Icelandic showing how the construction of a word such as "mange" (English "many", both from "mer-an-give") lost the letter N in Icelandic and turned into "margir". The above mentioned Old Icelandic source explains exactly how this unique Icelandic change happened. This sort of reduction of runes are often seen in modern transcriptions such as the runic inscription HIR being transcribed as the word "here" rather than the older interpretation "hither"(for-H-ITH-ER) more closely revealing it´s original compounding: til (for-)Hid-hen-ad-hørende sig), or in English: for-H-ITH-adhering to. Compare with "for-bøde-hen(ad)-hørende sig" = forbuden/forbidden/verboten. The Icelandic interpretation that runes were merely single letters equivalent and interchangable one-to-one into Latin letters is a perfect example - and one of the main reasons - for the extreme changes that made Icelandic turn so far away from other Scandinavian languages, including far away from the languages the Vikings were speaking centuries earlier.
I'm an Icelander living in Norway and I speak Danish as well.... I understood everything right away, but I new the Norwegian guy would be in trouble with this... In tha 7 years I have lived here, I have seen that they don't understand old names of places or what their own names mean. It was really easy to learn norwegian because it's so close to old Norse wich is basically old Icelandic...but it is not vice versa, they don't have a clue what we say even though Icelanders seem it's nearly the same sentence
I think you may fare a little better in western Norway, and while I understand most of the written Icelandic, I have no idea what they say once they start speaking. Too fast to hang on.
You are right when it comes to South Eastern Norway, and parts of middle Norway but as many have said. It's much easier for west coast people to read Icelandic than for anyone else in rest of Norway.
@@fuglstad_explores how do you not have a dialect? Even østlending counts as a dialect. Unless you speak bokmål, which isn't really possible since it's a written language
Hey, stop picking on the Norwegian guy, he did his best. Old Norse is hard for all non-Icelanders, even Scandinavians. As an Icelander, I got most of it down, had a bit of trouble with the egg-stealing crow. The way Jackson pronounced kráka, it sounded almost exactly like the Swedish word "krocka" which means collide with something, as in a car collision. Back to the Norwegian guy, that expression on his face, when the Icelander introduced himself --- it was simply priceless! It was so obvious he didn't understand a single word. =D
Well, the Norwegian is clearly failing. I love the way Jackson gradually cares less and less for the Norwegians perspective (cause it was so obvious in it's unhelpfulness). Just like my greek professor used to do when he thought someone was asking stupid questions.
In comparison to this, I would like to see how Norwegians, Danes and Swedes understand Low German. Seeing how Low German had a huge influence on our languages.
I am Norwegian never learned German but after 1 week in Germany I started to understand what they was saying when I started to get used to it (words that are similar is pronounced differently and in different order compared to Norwegian).
I am curious about this too, since Denmark has been in close connection with Germany, I wonder if we understand more German than other Scandinavians or whether it's the same!
@@a64738 Yes. But Low German is really different from the standard German. Low German is in some ways closer related to Dutch, particularly the old Low German that influenced Scandinavian.
It goes both ways. When he the norwegian said "snakke", I immediately knew that he was saying "talk", because it's the same word in the low german dialects and that is imported from the scandinavians, not the other way round, because no other german dialects have that word, not even in a modified form. Btw. I was also surprised with the second sentence. Because both the dane and the norwegian had problems with "thessum". I wouldn't have recognized it since I don't speak any scandinavian language, but in german we also change articles just like that and "dies" (the equivalent to the english "this") would become "diesem" in the context of this sentence, which even sounds quite similar if you listen to it closely. ^^
@@Konterfeit Thessum was one of the words I understood, sounded like the Norwegian Lom dialect. I don't speak Lom so I can't say for sure, but it just sounds like something they would say for "this/these". I think the problem was the Norwegian guy didn't really have that good knowledge of dialects. He kept talking about the Tromsø dialect, but that's not really a difficult dialect, no crazy vocabulary like there is with some dialects in Gudbrandsdalen, Sogn, Setesdalen, Hardanger. I think with a Norwegian who has been exposed a little more to dialects, it would have been a different story.
I would like to have Simon Roper give some Old English sentences and see if the Icelandic dude can understand them. I would say maybe 50 percent considering Old English used the th sound with the same letter.
@@Chevymonster203 I mean Simon Roper already collabed with Jackson Crawford in a video. They understood each other using Old Norse and Old English so I'm pretty sure Old English would be a piece of cake to the Icelandic guy.
@@metalheadcomicbookfan797 Well not completely, in old norse around the 1200's they didnt have the w sound. A lot of words in old english use the w sound, old english is more related to East Norse spoken around the 9th to 10th century which I believe Jackson Crawford pointed out in his old norse old english video. I believe the pronunciation changed.
I recognized "meisingar" almost immediately because of the French word "mésange" (titmouse in English), which it turns out is of Frankish (and therefore Germanic) origin. Languages are so fascinating!
So did I (because I speak French!). But as an Icelander it was the only word I did not immideately recognize. That is because we don't have any blue-tits or mésanges in Iceland. But we have the word which is (blá)meisa/-meisur.
Also `Mees` (maes) in Dutch. Seems indeed a strong Frankish influence. Even in southern dutch and flamish dialects the words stay the same which could explain a low-franconian origin
Italian guy here (who knows a few words in Swedish): I am fascinated by the sound of nordic languages, it's so cool! A Swedish friend of mine (hej Jeanette!) confirmed to me that Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are very similar to one another but they differ from Icelandic. She also told me that Old Norse sounds and reads pretty much like Icelandic; and this video proves it 🙂
I've been told that the continental Scandinavian languages are like a spectrum of dialects across the countries. Meaning that people close to the shared border, but in two different countries will understand each other better than people from the other side of their own country.
@@UmamiPapi This is correct. I can understand someone in Sweden across the border of Denmark pretty decently, but I can travel 4 hours west into the Danish western mainland and have difficulty understanding people over there xD Of course highly local societies may increase the extremity of the dialect differences, but it's overall a pretty accurate statement.
@@Real_MisterSir Very odd to think about since I don't know any of those languages. Can people usually speak a standardized dialect in each country? Like one based on the biggest city's speech or something?
@@UmamiPapi With some effort most people (probably all) can speak in a way that is commonly understood, but to your specific question; no. There isn't a common standardized dialect that everyone can speak. Dialects are very set in stone, some are more similar than others, but usually people will only speak their own dialect as other dialects will be foreign and unnatural to them, thus certain ways of expressing words/sentences will be highly local. To be clear, there IS a standardized dialect in Danish, called "Rigsdansk", which is based in the Royally/formally acknowledged standard way of speaking Danish (and it used to be the only speech allowed on public radio etc some decades ago), but most regions have local dialects that influence said official speech to a lesser or higher degree depending on where you're from. Most people can understand eachother perfectly fine, and everyone can understand the official "Rigsdansk" dialect, but some minorities might have trouble being understood well by others from the opposite side of the country. Generally, the further away from the capitol you get, the more diverse the dialects become. As for Norway and Sweden, I believe they experience a somewhat similar phenomenon within their geographic regions - to which exact extend I am not sure.
As a German speaker I was thrilled to get some words right as soon as I saw the written form. Kinda cool since I don't understand shit listening to ANY nordic language, old or new. Not the same in German, but overall definitely recognizable: Haeste - höchste, meisingar- Meise, kraka - Krähe, stal - stahl, thessum - diese, mangir - manche, theira- deren... and sometimes, I find even more similarities wirhin the pronunciation of eastern Austrian dialects.
I'm faroese and I understood the first four sentences. The last one I should have understood, but I made the mistake of thinking that óvin (even though it has the same meaning in faroese) could mean bad habit (óvani in faroese) and translated the text into "Friends with wings have a bad habit of flying (off)". Which of course is wrong - but it's also better :)
@@nickdavila94 relatively yes. Reading icelandic is very easy as most words are very similar. Understanding each other when speaking is unfortunatey not as easy. The pronouncation is different and icelanders also tend to talk very fast which makes is more diffucult. Unfortuntely we usually speak english and danish to each other, but both parts feel silly for doing so as the languages are so similar. For an outsider it probably looks bizare hearing us talking in english, as most outsiders wouldn't hear the difference between icelandic and faroese.
@@hansjuulhansen2664 for some reason when i ( a norwegian ) traveling to dennmark the danes will always force the conversation to English, guess it look just as silly , and fells just as silly to me :p
This channel is incredible! You bring together all these people to make these incredible experiments. I think this project deserves way more recognition.
I agree! These aren't just interesting and fun to watch, but really help me to understand the relationships between related languages. It's much more effective than reading a few paragraphs in a book on the topic.
As a German trying to learn some Icelandic, I really enjoyed all you people's efforts. Thank you so much. I'll search if you tried it another time without birds. No one lost, everyone showed how connected or unconnected languages can become over time. On the other hand, we have the word "Meise" in German, so I had at least one connection you didn't immediately have. Nice, enjoyable, entertaining and teaching.
Well I should say that Crawford lost. He pronounced 'ere' like ear. Seriously? This guy is supposed to be a linguist? Americans are about as suited for linguistics as Saudi Arabians are for rain forest management.
@@john.premose I agree. This is the old story (Ludvig Holberg: "Jean de France") that you can fool people who have no knowledge of a certain language into believing that you are an expert in said language. It takes only a decent knowledge of runes and Iron-age Scandinavian languages to show that Crawford´s knowledge and understanding of old Scandinavian languages is severely lacking.
I loved this - amazing! Being Danish myself it was so wonderful to watch - I've always loved our language brothers and sisters, and I've always loved Old Norse. I almost cried from the joy this brought me.
Reading the comment section is a delight as always. Everybody be like: Dane = One clap, good show old sport. Islending= Native, ah yes. Good one, two claps. Norlending= How is he a language teacher?
@John John outraged? You surely jest, we like to point out that we did not send our best, and gloat that our part of Norway is better then the other parts 😂
Lol, Dr Jackson Crawford actually used the Icelandic word for "Internet channel", "netrás", it actually somewhat makes sense in this case since there's actually a language committee in Iceland that creates new words for the language based on Old Norse instead of accepting loanwords from other languages, so the words would make sense in Old Norse, so i think it makes perfect sense in this case.
@@meginna8354 Idk what you just said, but here we have a committee doing the exact opposite, meaning they`ll see how we should update our spelling system.. It`s probably why at some point all our languages look so different, when I`m positive old Norse was just a new version of Frankish/old Dutch at some point around 6th or 7th century-ish.. Like I got more from this video understanding Dutch thus old English and English, some German than those Scandinavian guys did for a large part lol though I`m positive they should have gotten way more than they did clearly..
@@pyruvicac.id_ All languages come from a common germanic language. So dutch doesn't really come from german or nordic languages or vice versa. They're basically just cousins.
As a Dane, this is hard to understand, but I suspect that it would not take very long for a Dane, or any scandinavian with a flare for language to pick up and use Old Norse. Very interesting video, and made me realize how similar modern Icelandic language is to Old Norse, pretty fascinating.
@@RK-xl1od Would Swiss understand it better? We have many Plattdeutsch speakers where I live in USA. You can always hear them speaking as they are walking around.
@@jays-move8803 My guess is that Dutch or Danish people could get it a lot easier but I'm not sure if a German speaker would understand more than a Swiss-German speaker ( we know German as well ) but I think from the pronunciation perspective I could get even more. ( That's just a guess though)
@@fr3238 Eg er samd i det, tykkjer det ser ut som ein «meir norrøn» utgåve av nynorsk sjølv om det er eit eige mål. Interresant å lesa på, dei bruker mange ord som på norsk berre finst i nynorsk.
The icelandic guy is absolutely right, its just the fact that Iceland didnt have outside influence and was very isolated so they kept the old norse way of speaking for at much much longer time, almost up to present day.
Extremely interesting video, many thanks to all the participants. Dr. Jackson brings up a very good point about why Icelandic has stayed relatively unchanged for so long when he mentions the Edda and the sagas. I always thought it was mostly the isolation that had kept us so "old-fashioned" language-wise but when he talked about the literary aspect of it it just made so much sense. Brings a whole new light to the matter. I enjoyed the video a lot, takk fyrir.
That was fun! I am a 46 years old German an I joined in this game. As our danish friend I had no chance to understand mutch Old Norse when you red it. But in the written form it was mutch easier for me and I was quite surpised about how often I was close to the sence of the sentence. We are all mutch closer to each other then we might think and I would love to see it when something like this would happend in schools! Thank you very mutch for this realy cool video!
This is great stuff. I'm amazed by how similar Icelandic was to old Norse. Even isolated as it is, I would expect any language to change a lot more in 800 years.
Honestly, I don't think the Norwegian did a good job in representing the similarities of Norwegian and Old Norse. Some of these sentences were pretty understandable, but the Norwegian had no ability to tie together loose ends. "Meisingar" for example, is "Meis" in Norwegian. Not that different...
Being Swedish and all, some words felt quite similar but. I guess the hardest part is to put the words in to a sentence that would make any sense. It was really interesting and enjoyable to watch!
As someone who has studied Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and currently Swedish, this was such a great episode. I think it would have been useful to have had someone from Sweden aswell. Old Norse and modern Icelandic are so similar that the Icelander had an unfair advantage. Takk fyrir!
I have a Swedish friend who got the first four sentences on the first hearing. No. 5 he got after seeing it in print. But then, he's been studying with Dr. Crawford for several years.
@@sarahpassell226 I'm Swedish. I never studied any Nordic languages but understand Norwegian well. I didn't nail the sentences but over all I think I got them better than both the Norwegian and the Dane. I'm a bit surprised no Swede got to participate.
@@katam6471 Jag också! I think a Swede should have been included. Perhaps Norbert will do another episode to include a Swede and someone from the Faroes.
very interesting to learn about the roots of these languages. For someone who grew up as a Dutch native speaker I can tell we're all using very similar languages. The dialect from my area in the Netherlands actually shares a lot of words with Danish. Grammar-wise we're more on the German track, but not fully.
I think it's more that we just haven't evolved as much as others in our neighborhood, we are a tiny island with few people (compared to all but the Faroe Islands) and we've lived the same life for so long, few new words have "invaded" our language. Until recently that is. But I agree, it's fairly close to what we speak to day.
@@BenjiEnergy You can study Icelandic and you will be able to read and speak pretty much all Old Norse I think. There is still little difference between the languages. Perhaps in grammar and spelling yes, but when you read it aloud it sounds pretty much the same, only a bit more old fashioned and formal.
My intuition is that, considering how difficult Old Norse was for the non-Icelanders, that the modern mutual intelligibility between the continental Scandi languages is due to later intercultural influence over the centuries rather than all the languages being mutually intelligible just through their common root in Old Norse.
South Scandinavian language has a common root in Danske Tunge as it was spoken by the vikings in the Danelaw 250 hundred years before Icelandic was a thing. All their villages still have Danish names to this day: Rugby, Baldersby, Arnesby, Hareby, Dalby, Allerby, Stisted, Felsted, Alsager, Overstrand, Riseholme, Birkholme, Marholm, Langholm, Sandtoft, Horning, etc.). There´s no "Old Norse" in the Danelaw. No -Stadur´s there, what so ever.
It’s interesting how Icelandic preserved an old form of language through poems and literature. The same happened with Persian with the Shahnameh which I think was a deliberate preservation of old Persian forms as a response to foreign influences, whereas Icelandic just carried on without foreign influences.
@@Borrelaas i was about to say! How the f*ck would he understand Old Norse from one year of studying Danish, when im danish and was lost at the third sentence. Would mean i had to study more :(
Absolutely loved this video! But as a fellow Norwegian country man i can testify that i understood a lot better the Norse language, both spoken and written than the Norwegian representative in this video did, so i think it's also very related to where in Norway you might be from, as i myself come from the mid-western part of Møre og Romsdal
I'm watching this as a Dutch person with a good knowledge of English and some German and I could guess about 15% of the words in the sentences, I absolutely love to see the relations between our languages!
![BOWKYLION - วิงวอน (ex-change) [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/cLdnZWDaO-w/mqdefault.jpg)
Me, an Italian, watching the whole thing without understanding a single word: entertained.
Here an Spanish watching it exactly in the same way. I don't understand anything but I loved the video
Me dutch, netherlands the same
And also a Romanian now, guys this is not our zone🤣🤣🤣🤣
same, i'm from germany
Welsh here
icelandic guy : just chilling
danish guy : trying hard to understand
norwegian guy : why i am here
Am I real viking?
þú jafnvel víkingur bróðir?
@@toddwebb7521 það er skemmtilegt!
He wasn't trying. And I really don't know what they taught him at school. Sorry.. probably a bad day - and the way he re heard was.. like he wasn't listening.. bad day on the field for him..
Highly accurate
Key take away: if you are going to time travel back to the Viking age, take an Icelander with you.
it is an absolute must if you do
@@heartonfire583 just because you learn a language doesn’t mean you know the sound changes from its old form
You could also argue that a Greek would be the better choice, albeit for completely different reasons.
Or, a linguistically interested west Norwegian. Like me! :D
What is called "Old Norse" today is simply middle age Old Icelandic. That has nothing to do with the vikings. The vikings spoke Danish Language (Danelaw) which is a complete different language as attested in the hundreds of British Viking placenames such as Rugby, Baldersby, Arnesby, Hareby, Dalby, Allerby, Stisted, Felsted, Alsager, Overstrand, Riseholme, Birkholme, Marholm, Langholm, Sandtoft, Horning, Lindum etc.
All these names are Danish. None of them are "Old Norse" Icelandic.
Fun fact : in French, we have the word "mésange" which comes from Frankish and has the same origin as "meisingar". I would never have guessed, but just checked.
Merci pour l'indice. Je n'y aurais pas pensé.
Oui, j'y avais pensé aussi.
Thanks for the explanation. I was wondering if there was any connection. Perhaps this is why there is a connection in mythology, which Tolkien implied in Lord of the Rings, between birds and spies or messages.
@@matthewgrumbling4993 Seems more likely that came from the use of birds to send messages for much of history.
well if im not mistaken, the vikings did come to northern france which would be modern day normandy today so i guess there might exist some french words with roots in old norse? anyhow, pretty fascinating nonetheless
Icelandic guy is like "when are we gonna stop speaking Icelandic and get to the Old Norse?"
I know, right? I"m looking at it like, "where's the difference?" lol. Kind of a stretch to call them separate languages
@@hannahwalmer1124 Well it is similar but still it can be quite difficult to read Old Norse poems for us BUT general text is not that difficult. Words have though changed through the centuries.
@@MrPicky ... the words haven't changed that much in form or meaning though a few have, many sound more formal, biblical or poetic... what I feel is the main problem for a modern day Icelander to understand Old Norse has more to do with cultural change. When I read old texts my main obstacle is words related to things and activities that are no longer a part of modern day life, experience and language.
... and that can render a text completely unintelligible. "As he came through the flounk he twank the oomah on the splunker..." if you get my drift ;-)
@@sgjoni words have changed with the changes of pronounciation, like Leifr became Leifur etc., and some words have changed meanings (like sími was a thread but is now phone) but otherwise I agree with you. My answer was just "simpler" ;)
I'm Icelandic and I concur - his Old Norse is tremendously Icelandic, but I also feel his spoken language exaggerated. Languages have the tendency of finding the lazy path. Comparing my experience of written vs. spoken Icelandic, Swedish, English as well as Turkish and Chinese, all have a strict set of how to write which doesn't always harmonize with how it's spoken. I seriously doubt that people would have said "áðr" even if they chose to write it that way - "u" is a natural sound there (áður) - pretty much like how he blows his "wh" in "where", he'd also sound hvalr (hvalur) like "hhúalr" rather than the more correct "kvalur".
As an Icelander, I was preparing myself for disappointment, because we've always been told we'd be able to communicate fairly easily with hypothetical Old Norse time travelers, and I half expected this video to come and dash that prideful dream... But no, I understood everything, even without the written form, and am very pleased to see we still got it!
Kemr mann í opna skjöldu
Já okey áhugavert
I honestly don't see any reason at all to call Icelandic that rather than just Norse other than of course that Iceland is a nation now; there's no or very little disconnect between the Viking age and today in terms of population on the island and the language has undergone very little changes except in vowel sounds and some word endings
I’m not sure about that. At the end is not an Old Norse time traveler speaking but an American guy whose Icelandic influence is big and therefore we can’t factually say what he spoke was 100% right both grammatically and spoken.
@@YouGotUnlucky true but he's got likely the best reconstruction anywhere and if we can say with a high degree of certainty that classical latin pronunciation has been reconstructed, we can probably get just as close here
Being Norwegian, the Norwegian guy is totally lost. I didn’t understand everything, but I would say any other Norwegian would be about as good as the Dane
Swede here and yes its not that difficult. I understand about half the words without reading.
His dialect is too northern and cut off
@@slickboxingidentityveritas1932 even if he doesn’t speak the “common norwegian” or whatever the fuck, his dialect doesn’t affect his understanding of norwegian. his dialect is literally unrelated to his understanding of old norse lmao
@@noahkirschtein8169 Not true. A Western Norwegian would (usually) understand it better than a Northern Norwegian because our dialects are more similar to old norse / icelandic than in the other regions.
@@Mari-eq8rx what on earth are you on about ‘’closer to old norse and icelandic’’? You might be better at understanding other languages, I don’t know, but don’t tell me western dialect is closer to old Norse and Icelandic 😂 because of ‘nynorsk’? No(r)way José
Super interesting to see how Icelandic isolation has helped to retain a large proportion of the old language.
Not necessarily just isolation, but an active preservation of the language, including modern reforms to remove Danish loan words after independence
Icelandic has changed drastically. It happened when the runes were transliterated into Latin letters.
I would be very curious to see the Icelander compete with a Faroe Islander to see just how well Faroese fares in this challenge.
Love how everyone is looking in the beginning. The Norwegian, questioning every life choice, the Dane, realising he made a mistake agreeing to this and the Icelander just casually listening. Haha
🤣🤣🤣🤣
Lol!
YES finally! Now all we need is “Old English can Dutch, German and West Frisian speaker understand it” video and my life will be complete
I agree with this!
They might figure it out much better than native english speakers
I would love that too, being a German speaker myself, but even more I would like to see one featuring West Low German/Low Saxon.
That video is exactly what we need
@@elenna_alexia Absolutely yes! People just do not realise how diverse the German language is.
I love the Icelander just repeating back the exact same sentence when asked to translate
🇮🇸
exactly... he's not translating it at all... just putting Icelandic accent to the old norse. I think he misunderstood what he was meant to do there
@@joi76 The old norse sentences could definitely be used in some very poetic writing, they still make sense in icelandic, even though they aren't really how a normal person would speak. I do agree with you though, that he should've been more consistent in changing them to adhere to how people actually speak.
Ahahaha
@@joi76 There isn't much to translate.
I'm from Iceland and I had the exact same reaction to everything as Óskar did! I knew we were quite close to Old Norse but I didn't realise it was this close.
It would be interesting to travel back in time to medieval Norway and see just how much I'd understand.
Yes Sir,...one Delorean coming up.
Yes, it would be interesting to conduct a more in-depth experiment. Understanding five isolated sentences is one thing. But do you think you could hold a conversation with a speaker of Old Norse?
@@robertstewart239 It depends on the pronounciation. For example, I understand Faroese quite well but only in its written form, the pronounciation is quite different. All we have of Old Norse is the written language, but if most words are pronounced the same, then yes I could absolutely have a conversation with an Old Norse speaker.
Just speak Icelandic with a Norwegian accent.
Well, you people as island dwellers, kind of managed to preserve the old ways, having little to no influences from the continent. That's how I explain it. Greetings from RO!
"it's not a competition, nobody wins anything" Jackson... My sweet innocent Jackson... You have spent too long in Old Norse, you have no idea the lengths these three countries will go to, to out-do each other!
Only if Sweden was a part of it as well. Denmark and Sweden fighting over Norway, ah the good old times.
@@Bronzescorpion Sweden didn't get through to the finals.
@@Bronzescorpion C'mon dude, we all know Norway was the senior part back in the Norway-Denmark and Norway-Sweden days. You shouldn't buy all the Danish and Swedish propaganda you hear on the internet! ;)
@@Gilmaris Not surprised as modern swedish is very close to arabic.
@JohanOffline Yeah. Except it's own people when they need refuge from the refugees.
Invandring är inget man skryter med Johan
This is practically Icelandic. Or should we say Icelandic is almost the same as old Norse. Very easy to understand for us Icelanders.
Jackson explained some of the lack of evolution processes that made Icelandic so close to Old Norse. In practice it's kind of "Nynorse".
I'd be curious to see early Old Norse and speakers of old Norse-derived dialects - of whatever language it might be, with Icelandic being an easy choice, being so close to it, however Old Norse itself developed and had variation among different places in Scandinavia. I'm curious how the dialects compare to the Old Norse that was the closest to Proto- Norse.
@@galgrunfeld9954 Interesting ideas.
I'd really like to learn Icelandic language, but Is almost impossible to find a good material on the internet...😞
@@francesco_giangre bro, icelandic people pratically dont speak their language, it's just english, it's sad
Once I ignored the pronunciation & focused on just what I figured the words were meant to be, I understood most of it.
Expert: "Snjór fell einn dag í skóginum"
Norwegian: " I don't know this Snjorbert dude"
Yeah. I don't know him either. Perhaps a friend of Norbert walking in the woods on a snowy day?
That would be in swedish: "Snön föll en dag i skogen"
lol
In southern Norway we would say " Snøen falt en dag i skogen" But we have problems understanding the northern Norwegians.
I was laughing because to me, as a native spanish speaker, it sounde almost exactly like "señor" (sir, in english)
I am Norwegian, from Bergen. I can somewhat understand the written language. Understanding the spoken word is far more difficult.
do they speak a significatly different norwegian in bergen?
@@viktorreiter8811 different enough to immediately tell theyre from Bergen (or at least western Norway) but completely understandable for anyone in the country
@@viktorreiter8811 norwegian dialects are so different from each other that they could be considered different languages. For me living in the middle of norway i find swedish easier to understand than for example bergensk
Thoose seaside cities dialects are tricky to understand.
the Islandic is modern =/ i wanted t root language (traditional), i found a dictionary in eng with little words for old norse n then i mixed with t modern uen i dont find, is fk! If someone get some dictionary or gramatic book i thank.
Every Icelander watching this has realised they could easily get a qualification in Old Norse
Pretty much yeah😂
If old norse folk happen to come to us, we'll count on you icelanders. You'll be perfect to comunicate with them than 😀
Makes sense.
Are you Icelandic-speaker? If so pleased to meet you. If not, pleased to meet you as well.
@@HasufelyArod No, I'm a Welsh speaker, and also a Japanese and Scottish Gaelic learner
@@NiaJustNia Wonderful. As I said previously, nice to meet you. Braf cwrdd â chi.and
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrowyllllantysiliogogogoch
As a norwegian I was a little disappointed by the norwegian guy in this video. He should have understood more. The Danish guy was better at connecting words I guess.
^tenkte det samme!
Interestingly, one could recognize most of the words used in the Norse sentences from modern Norwegian, but you'd have to pull from many dialects around the country. For instance being from western Norway I was surprised he didn't recognize "snjo" as snow, but I'm guessing there's less familiarity with dialects down south due to geography, being from so far up north.
Yeah, I feel bad for other Norwegians here thinking he was a good representation for Norway. Maybe his brain went derp cause he was nervous or something... Cause some of it was quite easy (to a Swede like myself).
@@Nekotaku_TV He was treating it like a competition when it was not and seems like it got to his nerves. I could sense it through the screen that he went in with the wrong mindset
Its like those people here in Denmark who say they don't understand Swedish or Norwegian on the spot. In my mind it is so easy to connect the words.
As a swede, this is incredibly interesting. You should have gotten a Swedish speaker here also. 👍🏻
Agreed! I understood more than both the Norwegian and the Danish :)
Why is he even there? It’s not even a challenge for Icelandic people. A Swede would be more interesting.
@@Gist432 Still interesting to hear the similarities with Icelandic. For a Swedish translation, check out my comment on that, for those that may be interested. But yes a swede would have been nice aswell.
hell no.
there was no space on the screen
Little sad we had no swedish representative here! I as a Swede did understand parts of this and could have done some good guessing! To everyone complaining about the norwegian guy please stop. I know this dilemma all too well. When put on the spot you easily blackout and things that you normally would find simple get more difficult. Kudos to all participating for an entertaining video! :)
Good to hear someone standing up for the Norwegians! 👍
@@elvenkind6072 yes. It’s understandable. When hearing Icelandic or Norwegian dialects I need to get into the mode of thinking “I can understand what this means”. Otherwise I might just as well hear it as gibberish. And he tried to hear most of it very closely to the modern language instead of thinking of it like and old relative or someone living in the forest that haven’t come out from there for about 900 years.
The Icelander looks like he's trying not to laugh, like he's thinking "So... when does the challenge actually start?" 🤣
_"In the highest tree of the forrest"_
I guess the propability of finding a forrest in Iceland is the same as finding a train station.
@@AtheistReligionIsCancer Or a skin pigment
@@filiphelset872 Iceland is actually very diverse
@@sarapesenacker4781 Which is terrible, it should be Icelanders only.
@@sapereaude5121 I think Icelanders dont mind having immigrants living there, as long as they do what Romans do in Rome.
Man, I always wondered if the conservativeness of Icelandic was overstated, but this was a beautiful demonstration!
It's not overstated at all, it's scary how conservative they are... You know the words feminine, neuter, singular, plural and all of those related terms... in Icelandic they have their own words for that.
Einntal(singular) fleirtal(plural), the other languages technically could do the same, as most things are still pretty much slightly different Norse, however since the rest loves loanwords... I'd doubt it ever happen. After all, there's more German and French in Swedish than there is Norse...
German overall is a very conservative language, at least in terms of grammar. It has the noun cases and neuter gender like older Germanic languages, but the vocabulary has definitely been influenced by Latin and Greek. Icelandic feels like a language warded off from any outside influence, allowed to grow in a streamlined fashioned. In general, very archaic.
@@livedandletdie I get what you mean, but that was a bad call. In German you can also say Einzahl and Mehrzahl for singular and plural. These are used interchangeably. The same goes for German names for the grammatical genders (which are even preferred). I just looked it up and apparently, ental and flertal also exist in Swedish. So, in these cases loanwords only increased the vocabulary.
@@livedandletdie In German we also have Einzahl (singular) and Mehrzahl (plural) which are as understandable as Singular and Plural. But those two can be used as well, but they are more technical
@@MWoyde I don't speak German as a mother language in fact I've learned it as an adult, by reading Einntal and fleirtal I thought something like Einteil and Vielteil :D
I am Italian and fluent in Danish and Norwegian (after almost 40 years in Scandinavia). I simply cannot understand how the Norwegian guy was not able to perform better.
We Norwegians can't either. Hopefully it's a technical sound problem or something, if not this guy has nothing to do being a teacher.
I'm not even Norwegian (or from Scandinavia) and, based on my limited knowledge of German and full knowledge of English, Dutch, and Frisian, I was, AT LEAST, able to *guess* what was being said and written. Even if my accuracy was pretty shit, I still didn't have as much trouble as the Norwegian bloke up there. He must have been experiencing the mother of all hangovers that morning to be *that* bad at deciphering *some* root words...
I'm half italian, half norwegian. I've lived in italy most of my life, but throughout the years I've studied various languages, many of which germanic. I think that being used to learning languages helps in this situation because you need to recognize slightly changed words, see patterns in how words change between languages, etc.
I don't think it's much of a coincidence that the Danish guy was better *and* could also speak swedish properly + understand norwegian; he honed the skills he needed for this thing.
@@lisahogholt9713 I agree. I live now in the Netherlands and I am also fluent in Dutch and German. Germanic languages help.
Yeah, I don't even speak any of the languages in the video (I've studied Swedish for 7 years) but I got much more than he did.
I'm totally shocked to see that Icelandic and Old Norse are basically the same language... Cheers for Iceland !
I'm not.
What did you expect? "Old Norse" IS Icelandic. Where did you think they got it from? Certainly not from the Scandinavian Vikings who spoke Danske Tunge in the Danelaw. All their villages still have Danish names to this day: Rugby, Baldersby, Arnesby, Hareby, Dalby, Allerby, Stisted, Felsted, Alsager, Overstrand, Riseholme, Birkholme, Marholm, Langholm, Sandtoft, Horning, etc.). There is no "Old Norse" in the Danelaw. No -Stadur´s there, what so ever.
@@Rhoadie1Me neither!
I really want to learn Icelandic. It seems so interesting
@@pxolqopt3597Download the book series “Íslenska fyrir alla”. Free books and free audios. Happy learning.
As a norwegian, i'm shocked at how little Torleif understood. So many of those words are similar in Norwegian. Atleast how we speak in western-Norway.
I completely agree. Even with regular bokmål, you should be able to get at least as much as the Danish guy, if not more.
Yeah, from Eastern Norway and I totally agree
I am a northerner, and my dialect defenetly helped me more. But I think his head was kind of locked on bokmål mabey. And I also think age and experience might be a factor here.
Jaja, slapp av. Løken har ødelagt hele omdømmet sitt generelt og kommer aldri noensine til å bli invitert tilbake til en lignende greie, alt er bra.
They speak Bokmål in the west, ye? I thought that Nynorsk would be similar because they use "Eg" to say "I" and so does Iceland.
The Icelandic dude is just chilling, incredible how this language is conservative.
Because it evolved alone. Same with Romanian on the other side.
@@gaborodriguez1346 And what with Romanian ?
@@thewhiteknight5018 It is very similar to Latin, it preserved the neutral grammatical gender and all.
@@gaborodriguez1346 Romanian was surrounded by slavic languages as well as hungarian.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone would find traces of an older language that was supersaded by latin way back when.
Icelanders are descendants from the old Norsemen and Scottish/Northenglish women.
So there's no real influence from other languages.
I always assumed that languages isolated would evolve and diverge more, it's strange that it's so conservative.
This video should be called "Icelandic: can Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic speakers understand it?"
Or may be "Old Icelandic: Can Norwegian, Danish & modern Icelandic speakers understand it?"
@@NikhileshSurve Or maybe "Old Norse: Can Norweigan, Danish, and Modern Norse speakers understand it?"
@@jeremias-serus Yes, that sounds good too.
I just wonder who claimed old Norse and modern Icelandic to be two different languages in the first place... :p
@@germanguywithjumpercables7955 Depends on your definition of language.
As a Danish person who has lived in Iceland, this was all really easy to understand, even without the written version.
I would like to add that 12th century Norse and modern Scandinavian languages as well as Icelandic have a lot of words that phonetically sound almost the same in modern English. Just take words like: ship, boat, axe, hammer, sail, mast, anchor, shield, spear, sword, knife etc. 😀
Exactly, as an older literate native English speaker who also understands Scots I am constantly amazed by the amount of words I understand once I've heard them many times. The outrageously complex grammar hides a lot but then you hear that word in the right part of the sentence, sex, singular or plural and suddenly boom it's English
Geordie (English Newcastle dialect) is very interesting from this point as well considering their heavy viking influence and dialectal words such as "bairn/s" for children.
Yeah, I get thrown back with suprise, realizing I can faintly understand some words as a Native english speaker. I would never have guessed that.
Scandinavian borrowed a ton of words from Low Saxon, and English borrowed a ton of words from Scandinavian.
Shall. the slang word in australia to drink all your drink is to Scull your beer, go on a tour, sail, hound, a ford (though it is a difference thing. Way....
It seems almost unfair to the other two, but it's fascinating to see just how similar Icelandic is to Old Norse. A Viking time traveller would have little trouble communicating!
If you think about it. Iceland is out in the middle of the ocean. Isolated from the rest of Europe. The Danes and Norwegians traded and fought wars with the neighboring Germans and English, their languages changed while Iceland's remained mostly the same.
@@GundamGokuTV Yes, in that way Iceland became a sort of Noah's Ark for the Old Norse language.
@@GundamGokuTV Yes, but still the Icelandic language could easily have changed more than it did. We had very many danish words in the Icelandic language for example in the 19th. century but then a group of Icelanders living in Denmark called Fjölnismenn started to fight for a language cleanup policy. That surely worked and there are stories about teachers expelleing young pupils from class if using Danish slang.
@@harahara1960 that’s really interesting. Where can I read about this, any good sources in particular?😮I’m danish
@@GundamGokuTV I'm Irish and I heard before that there's some very minor influence on modern Iceland from the Irish language from the Irish thralls they took from here!
I feel bad for my fellow Norwegian, he looks like he's suffering from a hangover or something and doing his best to stay focused.
Whether or not norwegians understands icelandic, depends from where in Norway the Norwegian comes from. The oslo norwegian is so close to danish it is almost the same
@@AtheistReligionIsCancer im from the same area as the norwegian dude but i understood more than he could.
Think this is more about who you choose to guess these.
lol he was nervous as hell
@@loffagood556 I agree, I think it is one thing to have an advantage on paper, another to use it. Yes, having a discussion in public like this will make a lot of people nervous and might lose that advantage because of that.
@@AtheistReligionIsCancer I think it really depends on what dialect you have. I'm from western-Norway and I felt I had a better idea and perhaps syntax to understand rather than the Norwegian representative because we still use a lot of these words.
Wow, an American speaking Old Norse. That's being Mr. worldwide
Not really. He looks like he might have some Scandinavian ancestry, certainly at least broadly European, and then his native English is a Germanic language already.
He's not a native American, so he's simply exploring his ethnic/cultural roots.
@@amjan I'm sorry my dude, but Americans have almost no "real" relationships to their ethnic roots unless they are newly arrived immigrants. A lot of Americans claim to be "Danish", for example but know nothing of the language, or even simple danish geography, and instead, they might perform some lame parody of Danishness by eating æbleskiver with remoulade and walking around in lederhosen during festivities. Americans don't really care about their roots, at least that has never been confirmed by my lived experience, and I come from a family of Danish-Americans (my side of the family simply went back to Denmark in the 20th century, so I guess we're Danish-American Danes if I were to put that in "American terms").
@@EusebiusAT Calm down. You totally missed the point. We are NOT talking about some random Americans, but about Mr. Jackson Crawford and what HE is doing.
@@amjan wiki says he has no Scandinavian heritage and is Scottish. So a Celtic/Scots ancestry
@@broadh2o980 Some parts of Scotland were conquered by Vikings and were ruled by them long time.
What is really cool is seeing the cognates in English, given the history of old Norse is integral to the history of English linguistically. Literally "þessen" being the root of "this" and "these" is just one the coolest damn things to unpack when looking at Scandinavian languages old and modern.
I guessed a couple of words correctly here or there, but I don't speak any Nordic language. I did however learn German and was wondering if that was why. Now I'm not so sure.
@@warpedweft9004
I speak a tiny bit of Danish and did learn German in school years ago (I'm shite at it though), but I'm the most fluent in English. I think for the majority of the words I felt they were most similar to Danish and quite rarely English. It's difficult to tell, even in the written forms, when English doesn't use ð anymore
@@benas_st Its possible that because I'm an older person there are words we used as children that are no longer used. English vocabulary changed very rapidly after television and the internet became widely available. Becoming a "global village" had it's effect. No one uses words like "weald" anymore, except in place names. I noticed a huge difference when going back to the UK to visit. In the mid 1990s, all the regional accents were very obvious. In 2013, not so much. The accent seemed to have flattened considerably and word choice had changed, particularly in the "home counties".
@@Vini2157 but I think they are under greater pressure now than they ever have been. We're already losing adverbs and some nouns are being used as other word forms, not to mention the misuse of the apostrophe. There was actually a Society for the Preservation of the Apostrophe in Australia. Some work mates joined me up because I was always on their backs about their misuse of them, but sadly, that folded a few years back when they conceded defeat.
Woah 😳 I had Jackson Crawford as my Vikings and Norse Mythology professor at the University of Colorado a few years ago! So awesome to see him here on this channel!
... so why do you call something " viking mythology" ???? Viking is a verb - and the newer norse mythology ( Odin / Tor) is only the newest. The real origin is " vaner" - not " æser" - by the way was Freya ( Frøya) and Frey..and so on
@@heidifarstadkvalheim4952 If I may, the University usually requires the professor to title the class in that way in order to draw more students - even if it is less accurate (i.e. more students will recognize the basic overarching idea faster than simply "Norse mythology". Likewise, these professors will usually add that basic clarification during the first lecture.
@@heidifarstadkvalheim4952 Viking is never really used as a verb in English. It’s used as a noun (ex. “the Vikings” is used to refer to seafaring Scandinavian people from the late 8th to 11th century). It seems like it’s usually used as an adjective in English (ex. “Viking culture,” “Viking settlement,” “Viking Age,” “Viking trade,” etc.)
First Simon Roper, now Dr Crawford. Such a treat! Would be interested to hear Faroese too.
Don't forget Luke Ranieri.
Faroese! Definitely would be interesting.
Allright, as far as I can understand it in Faroese:
1. Snjó fall ein dag í skóginum
2. Mangir fuglar búđu í hesum skógi
3. Í tí hægsta trænum í skóginum bygdu tvær títur reiđur sítt
4. Men áđrenn stormurin kom, stjól krákan teirra egg.
5. Vinur viđ veingjum hevur tann óvin, sum flýgur
@@johnagefrost Nice! How we just need Gothic to round it out.
@@campodemarte4352 Ranieri was on the Latin episode if you haven't seen that one.
As a Spanish speaker, without Subtitles, and without speaking English, I understood 0.3% of what they're saying. It seems like Icelandic is the closest language to Old Norse.
The only word I got art 3:23 was SNJOR or something like that, which I assume means "snow".
Por cierto, quihubo, vato, yo también hablo español y apenas una palabra entre un millón entendí.
😂😂😂😂😂
Yeah as a Swede that had to learn Spanish, the overlap between Nordic languages and Spanish is extremely limited.
There are some loan words, but besides that there are only some basic words where you can sort of tell they come from the same root some time long ago.
But yes Icelandic by far is the most similar to old Norse.
More similar than written Spanish and Italian are to each other. Like really really similar.
As a Swede I understood a little more than the Danish guy in the video.
I think that was just due to some of the pronunciation and vocal/consonant sounds of the recreated old Norse sounded more like typical sounds in Swedish/Norwegian/Islandic than Danish.
Danish pronunciation just went it’s own way and is pretty unique.
You're not expected to. Latin isn't even.close.. . You aren't expected to understand Basque either, no? ..only the Nordic grammar can be similar, if you get some vocab you could learn it pretty easily.. As a Norwegian with a little Latin in school and English, I think Spanish is quite available, and similar in construction..
@@HasufelyArod The J threw me wildly off there.
My brother and sisters in iceland should be proud, to take care of their language all the way back from the Viking Age. best regards From a Norwegian. I realy love you and proud to call you brother and sisters.
Takk elsku frændi.
There are a few remnants of Gaelic in the language, 3:40 is where Icelandic diverted from Old Norse and into Gaelic in pronunciation. In the other Nordic languages double L as in fell is pronounced as a soft and long L, whereas in Iceland esp. W-Iceland the double L is pronounced as -tl like you'd do in Gaelic.
i just see Norwegians as my brothers and sisters
As an Icelander, I have always considered Norwegians as our adored older siblings and Icelandic as the oldest and best-preserved Norwegian dialect...
not gonna lie, the Norwegian guy disappointed me a bit. Maybe his local dialect screwed him over a bit. not sure, but the Icelandic guy basically was there to just make sure the speaker spoke correctly haha :D The Danish guy was more what I expected the Norwegian guy would perform. impressed by how much the Dane got correct tho! And we are missing a swede in this "experiment" also! BUT to their defence, it's much harder to sit there and do it live, vs sitting here in my sofa saying "OFC IT IS the highest tree in the forest" etc.
awesome content
I can't comment for Torleif, but I have allmost identical dialect as to him - just an hour or so from where he is. And I think my dialect helped me alot.
@@ZShalafi then he was just bad? is that what ur saying ? Because I understood a whole lot more than him.
@@puNktumTV Yes, he was just bad.
I'm from Tromsø, with relatives from Senja and Gudbrandsdalen. The local Tromsø dialect, _Tromsøværing,_ shouldn't really screw him over at all, since it's very close to _Nynorsk_ and thus closer to the original West Norse dialects. Also if you have relatives outside of town, you'd know a lot more Norse words already, that are closer to the original Norse than you see in the common city slicker dialects, or even sosiolects.
Agreed, im a little dissapointed in the Norwegian Guy. pretty sure it was his dialect that screwed him over
The icelandic has a clear advantage. He's wearing a real icelandic sweater. That's cheating!
As a Swede I understood about half the words in each sentence, and when Jackson explained some of the changes I understood a lot more
Lite orättvist att en svensk inte fått bidra i denna video:(
So I suggested this video a lot and I wish It would have been a Swede instead of an Icelander (no offense to any Icelanders) simply because Icelandic is so much closer to ON.
@@caseyrogers573 But the Danish guy spoke Swedish.
@@amjan sure, I just thought it would be a more even playing field without an Icelander, but as Jackson said, it’s not really a game but more of an experiment
@@amjan There are Norrländska,Gotlandish,Gothenburgish or even Elfadlians in Sweden, all of them have different gravy & spice in their languages/dialects. So it would be more intruiging if a Swede from Gotland or Norrland would take part as well
My grandfather was a Finland-Swede, born in 1888 in Ostrobothnia. He went back to Finland around 1970 with my mother, and she was told his Swedish seemed more like Icelandic than modern Swedish.
I think in that case "Icelandic" would just be a way of saying "hard to understand". Though I will say Modern Icelandic sounds somewhat similar to Finnish (which might have influenced his accent) due to pre-aspiration and stress patterns.
The Icelandic guy was cheating all the time by simply repeating the Old Norse sentence and calling it Icelandic.
Well I mean being fluent in Icelandic in a Old Norse hearing contest is already some kind of advantage
The Old Norse had a couple of dialects. This one is influenced by Old English and has the ‘th’ sound, written þ and ð and is only found in Icelandic. So the examples are more Old Icelandic than Old Norse spoken in Scandinavia.
Some people really seem to miss the sarcasm of my posting... *rolleyes*
I really enjoyed this. I speak Icelandic and can read some Norwegian and Danish. It was interesting learning the differences. All the participants were really good sports and seemed to be enjoying themselves. It seemes everyone wound up learning something interesting.
@@helgividar Aren't both the th-sounds derived from Proto-Germanic, just that they have disappeared in most modern Germanic languages?
Haha, Icelander here... Yeah that was very easy. Not only is old Norse very similar to modern Icelandic but we also study it in school. Super interesting to watch! Props to Norwegian and Danish bros for trying their absolute best!
I’m curious, to you, does the old Norse just sound like he’s speaking with a weird accent or would it be closer to a modern English speaker reading Shakespeare?
@@maxwell9211 not even a weird accent just an accent for me personally, some words are outdated but 99% of it is just like listening to an old person.
@@maxwell9211 When Jackson (the american im assuming) was reading the sentances it just sounded to me like a foreigner trying to speak Icelandic. Im sure old norse men had a particular accent that would be more difficult for us to understand but on paper it just sounds like formal/poetic Icelandic. Sometimes it's like reading modern icelandic without grammar rules. There are also words here and there that we either don't use anymore or the meaning has changed a bit. Hope that helps! :)
@@GhostiesWorld yeah definitely helped. I’ve lived in Quebec for a few years so I’d imagine it’s somewhat like a Québécois French speaker, speaking to a French speaker from France
Next: Can Proto-Germanic, Gaulish, and Latin speakers understand Proto-Indo-European?
Good one!
Hahaha, I suspect Latin is way too modern for this :)
I also think Latin is too modern for that.
I have always been curious about how mutually intelligible proto germanic and Latin were
OK, gentlemen, let's put a proto-IE speaker in charge of a match with a native Lithuanian, native Latvian and native speaker of Hindi.
I've never been this enthusiastic about a language class. As a Dane, it's cool to see how the old and the neighboring languages compare. It's incredible how similar it is.
"The voice of the grandmother echoes in her grandchildren's voices." Absolutely beautiful intro from Jackson.
Yeah, I would like to see this sentence written here in all those languages.
@@voidhunger7514 Norwegian:
Ekkoet av Stemmen til bestemoren kunne høres i hennes barnebarns stemmer.
I had to change the construction of the sentence. So it'll be more like this:
The echo of the grandmother's voice was heard in her grandchildren's voices.
We don't really have any words for "echoes". Echo is only a noun in Norwegian, not a verb. Which is an interesting difference.
You can only observe the echo, but the echo is a reaction to sound. So nothing can create an echo.
Also in Modern Norwegian I would say:
Ekkoet av Bestemorens stemme kunne høres i stemmene til barnebarna.
Which translates into:
The echo of the Grandmother's voice could be heard in the voices of the grandchildren.
However, that's a very modern interpretation.
@@MasterKnutA Tusen takk!
@@voidhunger7514
A litural translation to icelandic:
Rödd ömmunnar bergmálar í röddum barnabarna sinna.
Rödd means voice.
Grandmother means amma, and with "the" it's amman. Amman with the genetive (used mainly to show possession, grandmother's voice) is ömmunnar.
Bergmál means echo. Voted the second most beautiful icelandic word for people born before 1987 (yes we held a competition). Berg means cliff or rock face. Mál means language. Language of the mountains. So when you shout in a valley, the mountains shouts back at you.
Grandchildren means barnabörn. Barnabörn with the genetive is barnabarna. Literally means childrens childrens. So a grandmothers grandchildren are her childrens children.
Sinna shows possession, her grandchildren.
@@hryggleysingi433 Þakka þér
As a Faroe Islander, these were all really easy, apart from the last one with its bonkers poetic/proverbial syntax :D As for the "áðr en," we've one-upped our Icelandic brothers and sisters, and slammed it into one word: "áðrenn"
Is faroese intelligible with Icelandic?
@@andryuu_2000 Kinda sorta, I guess? Our languages have deviated quite a bit during the centuries. I can't speak for the Icelanders; I don't know how intelligible Faroese is to them, but I do know Icelandic is usually intelligible to Faroe Islanders -if- they make an effort to slow down their speech, and enunciate a bit more clearly than in everyday speech between Icelanders. Reading Icelandic is a piece of cake for most Faroe Islanders, and I'd guess the reverse is true as well.
@@MagnusMoerkoereJohannesen As an Icelander, I love your language. I've had a few roommates through the years that are from the FO and we could speak fairly well to each other in our native languages. There are of course plenty of words that have completely different meanings between the two languages, but nevertheless.
Also, reading Faroese is fairly simple for us, with the thought in mind that the words might mean something different. I'd say that of close languages to Icelandic, Old Norse would be in first place and Faroese would be in second place.
@@axelrafn Yeah, I was fairly sure the situation was the same on both sides of the language divide, I just didn't want to commit to anything I wasn't absolutely certain of; I've made that mistake before, and that embarrassment was enough :D As for words having different meanings, I'll never forget the look on an Icelandic friend of mine's face, when I told him about one of my favourite stories as a child, Pippi Smokkuleggur 🤣 Shocked and disturbed was putting it mildly! :D
@@MagnusMoerkoereJohannesen I could tell almost immediately that Pippi Smokkuleggur is just what we call Lína Langsokkur but it's still really funny to me. Pippi Condomleg lol
The norwegian is hopeless lol, as an average norwegian most of these were at least 75% obvious with some weird words here and there. Especially when written down, his guesses were absurd
noke seie meg att han ikkje var en norsk lærar. han oppførte seg ikkje som en ihvartfall.
@@zerrierslizer1 nu må dokker slutte, vi har faktisk ikje peiling på koffer han ikje klarte å førstå, ting som nervøsitet osv. Erfaring, eller bare kordan man reagere i pressa situasjona. Kor godt han førstår norrønt sir egentli ikje særlig mye om kordan han e som lærer. Æ syns d blir før dumt å snakke stygt om folk, å nordmenn generelt må gje sæg på d å læse sæg nettvætt. (Å æ skriv bevist på dialækt nu)
@@IdaTheBraveFace eg og skrive no på mi eiga dialekt din sau! ka eg synes og ka du synes om han e vitt forskjellige ting, men det betyr ikkje att eg MÅ respektere han for det. helvete og, eg har ikkje noke respekt for lerara på grunn av att dei låste meg vekk berre på grunn av att eg har ADHD isteden for og HJELPE meg. skule systemet i Norge e rævkjøyrt uansett korleis man ser på det.
Yep, as a Norwegian myself this was just embarrassing. Is he hungover or something?
@@user-nk5es9iy8i haha! almost looked like it xD
I'm a Norwegian from Oslo, I immediately heard "snow fell one day in the woods" 😅 I think my countryman simply must have misheard or something.
He pronounced it "Snor" though, which is "cord"
"Thessum" is "This".... I heard "Margir birds built in this/these forest/s", which was 1 word wrong and 1 not guessed.
Meisingar was obviously "Meis" plural or "Meiser" though you can't say that. skóginum is skog, byggdu is bugilt, sitt is sitt, hreidr is rede, I is eg. Apparently it's easier to hear Old Norse for someone from Southern Norway
Edit: Yes "Meis" is the same bird in Norwegian... and you don't have to be "good with birds" they are literally _everywhere,_ kjøttmeis in particular...
The fact that these men are trying to translate a language they don't speak (old norse), and are conversating about it in a language that they have learned (English), while comparing the translations to the language they were raised with in their own countries and discussing the similarities... is just so mindboggling to me! Truly TRULY impressive. I wish we were encouraged to be multilingual in America. It's truly something I find extremely impressive about the rest of the world.
That's Europe. Raise your standards
@@ryandietzjr.5756 doesn’t make it any less impressive
They teach English at quite a young age in northern Europe
@@angycucumber4319 They start teaching kids English in Sweden at the age of 7 in schools
Speaking as a Danish person: English evolved out of Old Norse. We have many words and syntaxes in common. It's easier to understand English for a Nordic speaker than you think it is.
Examples: Window, Vindue
Knife, kniv
To think, at tænke
To speak, at snakke
We were, vi var
Raised, rejst
You see a pattern here? Many of these words aren't borrowed or translated they're just the same word that evolved differently
This was quite a show. As a 73 years old Icelander I must be worried about the future of our language. It's true what Óskar said about our isolation through the centuries, but believe me, I am worried about the future of our language. We have a ''difficult'' grammar and I sense that the young generation is losing its grip on the grammar. So in 30, 40 years my language will be very different from what I learned. I will be dead and gone then. Greetings from Iceland.
That's why it needs to be preserved as it is a treasure and legacy of our common european history. Me, as a Polish living in Germany, would give much to have the real opportunity to learn it :)
@The505Guys True.
Thank you for your input. And not to worry, as a young one I'll put it on my language list as well :)
@The505Guys It's not so surprising, even without speaking English, pretty much every language is "striving" for efficiency. So in the big picture, almost all languages sooner or later remove difficulties or irregularities (given, sometimes new irregularities come up). This doesn't need to come from language contact, but can just be a sort of simplification.
And in that light, it seems only logical that Icelandic would become easier too. But on the other hand, it conserved its complexity for so long, so who knows. I only can say for sure that German is and will be becoming a lot simpler.
I was always taught that evolving the language is a good thing since we will never stop being exposed to new things, ideas, concepts and so on.
Sure conservatism sounds appealing on paper but it’s really not a natural human state of being to begin with.
BRAVO 👏👏👏👏
I like to thank Norbert for asking me to join. It didn't work out this time but here are my two cents at least:
1. The first sentence was easy, but I interpret Snjór as a name (similar to Snorre). The Swedish sentence would be "Snö föll i skogen".
2. When listening I interpret it as "many birds ... in this forest" ("många fåglar ... i denna skog"). "Þessa" sounds like the "dessa" in Swedish, which is the possessive case, so I just assumed it means "this" which made sense. The Swedish would be "Många fåglar bor i denna skog/den här skogen".
3. First I got "I ... har trä i skogen bygga två ... ... ...". Later I realized that meisingar is mesar in Swedish and after hearing the English translation, everything made sense. In Swedish "nest" is "bo" (lit. "live"). The sentence in Swedish would be: "I det högsta trädet i skogen byggde två mesar sina bon".
4. From the spoken Old Norse I got "I ... stormen kom ... ... deras ägg" but looking at it, it made much more sense. The second part was no problem at all and would be almost the same in Swedish ("stal (en) kråka deras ägg"). The full sentence would be "Innan stormen kom stal en kråka deras ägg".
5. All I got at first was "odin flies" ("oden flyger") which was obviously wrong. From the written sentence I got "med" ("with") and "har" ("has"). The relative clause starts just like in German, so being fluent in German, I should have got that. In contemporary Swedish it's just "som". I also suspected at first that ovin could be "uven" which is an alternative word for "the owl" but it all made sense eventually. The sentence, although being a bit weird, would be as follows: "(En) vän med vingar har den ovän som flyger."
Jag trodde han ba sket i svenska haha, som svensk vart jag lite sårad
But birds nest in Swedish is more specifically “rede”, which did make the old Norse "hreiðr" quite transparent for me as a Swedish speaker.
It is a shame you could not join, it would have been great to have a Swedish speaker there as well.
Greetings from Poland. Much love send to my fav country Sweden
It would have been great to hear a Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish speaker talk to each other though - I don't know any videos that have that sort of dynamic.
As a native Swedish speaker I understod the first sentence immediately:
1) SW: "Snön föll en dag i skogen"
The second sentence I needed to see in written form, I had problems with "Margir" and "bjuggu", "Thessum" I associated with the Swedish word "dessa" (En: "these") so it was easy to interpret it to "this". "Bjuggu" resembles the Swedish word "bygga" (En: build). "Fuglar in Swedish is "fåglar" So my interpretation was:
2) SW: fåglar byggde (bo) i denna skog.
In the third sentecnce I first had problem with "meisingar but the context made it clear that it was some kind of birds which led me to "mesar" which is a family of birds.
So my interpretation was:
3) SW: I det högsta trädet i skogen, byggde två mesar sitt rede.
In the fourth sentence I only did not understand "en athr en" My Interpretation:
4) SW: stormen kom, stal kråkan deras ägg.
The fifth sentence was the hardest for me, I immediately recognised "flygr" which is "flyger" in Swedish. The "i" in "Vinr" and "ovin" confused me for a while, If it had been an "e"
I would have recognised it immediately as "vän" and "ovän" in Swedish. After a while I interpreted it like:
5) SW: Vän med vingar har då ovän som flyger.
I was surprised that I could understand so much of the written form, since Swedish is further away from Old Norse than the western Scandinavian languages.
Swede here. Everything you said is true to my own experience watching the video. Maybe a swede could at least understand close to what the danes and Norwegians could. Some words we don’t have, but the language is not too far away. When the Dane said he was lost, we immediately heard “kråka”. Maybe this is part why danes and swedes have trouble understanding each other. Even though the words have similar roots, the pronunciation can be different. Sometimes so different that we feel like the Norwegian guy did.
Ecolinguist! You should have totally got a Faroese person in this video! We are in between the Danish and icelantic.
I'm by no means an "linguistics' nut" but I understood 95% without the spelling aid.
we are of course a small nation but it is very interesting to see the mixing of danish and icelantic(old norse) that happens here :)
Yes definitely. That is exactly what I thought. (From shetland)
I would have been very curious to see how much a Faroese speaker is able to understand of these sentences, so thanks for sharing, now I know!:) So I assume you can also understand modern Icelandic?
I'm Danish and I agree, someone from the Faeroes in there would have been really interesting!
You are not a small nation you are a part of the great kingdom of denmark never forget it.
@@zuai946 what utter BS :P
it's like the UK, we are our own sovereign state ;)
I am norwegian, and i understood way more that this Norwegian guy.
Jeg også, sjokkert
Den første setningen var jo utrolig enkel! Hvordan er denne fyren en norsk lærer?
@@tjhr6612 lurte på akkurat det samme. "I dont know this Snorbert" Det er serriøst for dårlig.
Same here, I was surprised how easy it was to understand
Han tror man kan snakke nynorsk og bokmål. Enough said 🥴
Disclaimer from a Norwegian here: his internet must have been acting up or smth smth, cuz some of these were very understandable by someone who’s a native Norwegian, ESP the first sentence
Hi, yeah I messed up the first sentence.
Now I realize how similar it was to Norwegian.
It was a good effort tho!! The last sentences I guessed about the same as you as well :)) Just the first few ones that went well for me, but it might just be our dialects as I live much more South than you!
@@ayumehirano1894 And it was just for fun anyways. I don't represent Norway or anything :)
@@norwegianwithtorof course! What was really fun to see was how close Icelandic to Old Norse was. And honestly, how similar Danish and Norwegian were some places!
Yeah. I had no problems understanding it, and i’m not a teacher.
I'm fluent in Swedish and Norwegian and I also know quite a bit of Danish. Hearing the words and making sense of it was very hard. When seeing it spelled out I could guess about 50% of it. Once I got the translation it was all quite clear and I felt bad for not getting it right. Similar to my experience with Icelandic, which I guess makes sense.
U should not feel bad for something you had no control over.
Same
I’m more shocked over the fact that I as a swede could understand the Dane
Yeah, I thought the same. I think he was enunciating extremely carefully, which makes Danish sound a little less porridge-y I guess.
I heard Swedish and Danish was so close to one another back in the day, that the armies had to force new soldiers to recite nursery rhymes to try to figure out if the new guy was just trying to switch sides when their side was losing. xD
@@kebman Lol that doesn't sound far fetched
Same. Modern Danish usually sounds too German for me as a Norwegian speaker to understand properly.
Hahaha svenske faen. Måtte bare få fram det ordet... Du skjønner meg eller kvad
Wow, Jackson Crawford on Ecolinguist
Yeah, buddy
I think these shows are so fascinating, this subject is very interesting and the guests are always good, I guess because they are all experienced youtubers already. It’s good to see Jackson Crawford doing this, his channel is very interesting, and he has spectacular mountain backdrops to his videos.
They truly are fascinating
This channel gave me more than I bargained for
I asked for Slavic language comparisons and got different language comparisons too! And some polish lessons as well! I might be able to put my polish friend to "shame" as he doesn't speak polish that well as he's no longer living in Poland but in the same country as me. We'll see!
"Good"? "teachers" ?? ..they don`t understand 50% of wich has been presented.. But I agree with YOU : I like Jackson Crawford!! : ) ..greetings from Norway..
@@ricoeugene2628 YEa I`m Dutch and I understood more, lol.. to be fair, it seems as if Dutch has more of the slightly different words in common with old Norse I guess. Which is why I`d love an Old Norse and/or Icelandic, Old English, modern (West) Frisian (the language, not the Dutch dialect), Dutch and German speaker mix it out.. Going back to their Saxon and Old Frisian root
@@pyruvicac.id_ Wow , You know a lot about languages. I am NOT an expert , but languages has always facinated and interested me. So Thank You! ..I was starting to think I was a bit hard on those three guys..
I love it when it's the Icelandic guy's turn, "Ok, what do you think it said?", and the Icelandic guy just repeats exactly what Jackson said (w/ just some minor pronunciation differences) - while the other two guys were struggling to guess even a single word...
That´s simply because "Old Norse" IS Icelandic. Which is nothing like the "Danske Tunge" language the Scandinavian Vikings spoke in the Danelaw. All their villages still have Danish names to this day: Rugby, Baldersby, Arnesby, Hareby, Dalby, Allerby, Stisted, Felsted, Alsager, Overstrand, Riseholme, Birkholme, Marholm, Langholm, Sandtoft, Horning, etc.). There´s no "Old Norse" in the Danelaw. No -Stadur´s there, what so ever.
@@jesperlykkeberg7438 Not as Danish as you believe. All these names sounds like Norwegian too. That is old Norse!
@@JoanMaddie Nope. There was never such language as Old Norse. When you say "all of these names sounds like Norwegian too" it´s exactly because south-eastern Norwegian was regarded as Danish. This has nothing to do with Old Norse (Norrøn) which is predominantly describing Old Icelandic. According to all primary sources, - even the oldest Icelandic (Norrøn) text "Fyrsta Málfrœðiritgerðin"), - there were several Nordic languages including the "Danske Tunge" spoken in southern Scandinavia. The differences between Danish, Jutish and Norrøn concerns the complete separate understandings of how runic letters were to be interpreted and transcribed.
You can compare this to how the written form "ski-" (as in "skive/skiva") is pronounced completely different in modern Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, thereby establishing the fact that these are three different languages even though the written form "ski-" is the same.
In the Iron age, in eastern Denmark runes were presenting as girls´ and boys´ names and interpreted as double-syllabic morphemes and word-forming elements carrying meanings such as hovedleds-abbreviations ("Inge") reflexive markers ("eske") superlative markers ("ester"), etc.
One famous example is the interpretation of how the "Gebu" and "Ingwaz"-runes were to be transcribed into Latin letters. In Eastern Denmark the "Ingwaz"-rune was understood as the girls´name "Inge" when being part of placenames (ex: Jyllinge). In Jutland simply as "-ing" (ex: Jelling).
But in Iceland the "ingwaz"-rune was radically reduced and simply transcribed into the Latin letter "g", which is one of the important reasons for the notorious N-deletions in Old Icelandic showing how the construction of a word such as "mange" (English "many", both from "mer-an-give") lost the letter N in Icelandic and turned into "margir". The above mentioned Old Icelandic source explains exactly how this unique Icelandic change happened.
This sort of reduction of runes are often seen in modern transcriptions such as the runic inscription HIR being transcribed as the word "here" rather than the older interpretation "hither"(for-H-ITH-ER) more closely revealing it´s original compounding:
til (for-)Hid-hen-ad-hørende sig), or in English: for-H-ITH-adhering to.
Compare with "for-bøde-hen(ad)-hørende sig" = forbuden/forbidden/verboten.
The Icelandic interpretation that runes were merely single letters equivalent and interchangable one-to-one into Latin letters is a perfect example - and one of the main reasons - for the extreme changes that made Icelandic turn so far away from other Scandinavian languages, including far away from the languages the Vikings were speaking centuries earlier.
Icelandish guy be smirking the whole time like 'This only sounds like me afi speaking'
lol
afi?
@@Vingul afi is the Icelandic word for grandfather.
I'm an Icelander living in Norway and I speak Danish as well.... I understood everything right away, but I new the Norwegian guy would be in trouble with this... In tha 7 years I have lived here, I have seen that they don't understand old names of places or what their own names mean. It was really easy to learn norwegian because it's so close to old Norse wich is basically old Icelandic...but it is not vice versa, they don't have a clue what we say even though Icelanders seem it's nearly the same sentence
I think you may fare a little better in western Norway, and while I understand most of the written Icelandic, I have no idea what they say once they start speaking. Too fast to hang on.
Sounds like France, a complete loss of awareness of one's linguistical rootsk
You are right when it comes to South Eastern Norway, and parts of middle Norway but as many have said. It's much easier for west coast people to read Icelandic than for anyone else in rest of Norway.
As a Norwegian with a western Norwegian dialect I could understand close to everything in written form, but quite a bit less just pronounced.
As a swede from the coast of the northern part of Sweden and know the dialect bondska I feel that when I hear it I understand better.
As a Norwegian without a dialect I understood most everything. This Norwegian in this video was a really bad representation of our knowledge haha.
@@fuglstad_explores how do you not have a dialect? Even østlending counts as a dialect. Unless you speak bokmål, which isn't really possible since it's a written language
@@lynxplayz8474 Well, my dialect is very close to straight up Bokmål. So to make it easier for foreigners to understand I said "No dialect".
@@lynxplayz8474 oslosk lol
Needs to be retitled: Old Norse and Icelandic dudes have a chat while Norwegian and Dane look on.
Hey, stop picking on the Norwegian guy, he did his best. Old Norse is hard for all non-Icelanders, even Scandinavians. As an Icelander, I got most of it down, had a bit of trouble with the egg-stealing crow. The way Jackson pronounced kráka, it sounded almost exactly like the Swedish word "krocka" which means collide with something, as in a car collision. Back to the Norwegian guy, that expression on his face, when the Icelander introduced himself --- it was simply priceless! It was so obvious he didn't understand a single word. =D
jackson looks like a professor taking oral exam of the students 😂
Looks like a teacher that I'd love to watch
Kinda
I mean, that is literally his job lol
makes sense
Well, the Norwegian is clearly failing. I love the way Jackson gradually cares less and less for the Norwegians perspective (cause it was so obvious in it's unhelpfulness). Just like my greek professor used to do when he thought someone was asking stupid questions.
In comparison to this, I would like to see how Norwegians, Danes and Swedes understand Low German. Seeing how Low German had a huge influence on our languages.
I am Norwegian never learned German but after 1 week in Germany I started to understand what they was saying when I started to get used to it (words that are similar is pronounced differently and in different order compared to Norwegian).
I am curious about this too, since Denmark has been in close connection with Germany, I wonder if we understand more German than other Scandinavians or whether it's the same!
@@a64738 Yes. But Low German is really different from the standard German. Low German is in some ways closer related to Dutch, particularly the old Low German that influenced Scandinavian.
It goes both ways. When he the norwegian said "snakke", I immediately knew that he was saying "talk", because it's the same word in the low german dialects and that is imported from the scandinavians, not the other way round, because no other german dialects have that word, not even in a modified form.
Btw. I was also surprised with the second sentence. Because both the dane and the norwegian had problems with "thessum". I wouldn't have recognized it since I don't speak any scandinavian language, but in german we also change articles just like that and "dies" (the equivalent to the english "this") would become "diesem" in the context of this sentence, which even sounds quite similar if you listen to it closely. ^^
@@Konterfeit Thessum was one of the words I understood, sounded like the Norwegian Lom dialect. I don't speak Lom so I can't say for sure, but it just sounds like something they would say for "this/these". I think the problem was the Norwegian guy didn't really have that good knowledge of dialects. He kept talking about the Tromsø dialect, but that's not really a difficult dialect, no crazy vocabulary like there is with some dialects in Gudbrandsdalen, Sogn, Setesdalen, Hardanger.
I think with a Norwegian who has been exposed a little more to dialects, it would have been a different story.
I'm Welsh, but I speak Danish and I was astonished at how much I understood. Thanks.
The gap between Celtic and North Germanic languages is really quite significant. But I suppose knowing English makes it much easier.
it's so simple for the icelandic dude that he's like "pff c'mon, i need something harder, at least gimme these sentences in proto-germanic man"
Or Swiss-German, nobody understands that.
I would like to have Simon Roper give some Old English sentences and see if the Icelandic dude can understand them. I would say maybe 50 percent considering Old English used the th sound with the same letter.
@@waterdrager93 Legit. Swiss German / Can German speakers understand it?
@@Chevymonster203 I mean Simon Roper already collabed with Jackson Crawford in a video. They understood each other using Old Norse and Old English so I'm pretty sure Old English would be a piece of cake to the Icelandic guy.
@@metalheadcomicbookfan797 Well not completely, in old norse around the 1200's they didnt have the w sound. A lot of words in old english use the w sound, old english is more related to East Norse spoken around the 9th to 10th century which I believe Jackson Crawford pointed out in his old norse old english video. I believe the pronunciation changed.
I recognized "meisingar" almost immediately because of the French word "mésange" (titmouse in English), which it turns out is of Frankish (and therefore Germanic) origin. Languages are so fascinating!
So did I (because I speak French!). But as an Icelander it was the only word I did not immideately recognize. That is because we don't have any blue-tits or mésanges in Iceland. But we have the word which is (blá)meisa/-meisur.
german speaker here - "meisingar" is called "Meise" in german, so that was one of the words i recognized
Absolutely. When I read that "Meisingar", me being German, I immediately thought of the "Meise".
Also `Mees` (maes) in Dutch. Seems indeed a strong Frankish influence. Even in southern dutch and flamish dialects the words stay the same which could explain a low-franconian origin
Being from Québec, that's the first thing that came to mind! Languages are super fascinating and very fun! It's nice to see the similarities!
Italian guy here (who knows a few words in Swedish): I am fascinated by the sound of nordic languages, it's so cool! A Swedish friend of mine (hej Jeanette!) confirmed to me that Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are very similar to one another but they differ from Icelandic. She also told me that Old Norse sounds and reads pretty much like Icelandic; and this video proves it 🙂
I've been told that the continental Scandinavian languages are like a spectrum of dialects across the countries. Meaning that people close to the shared border, but in two different countries will understand each other better than people from the other side of their own country.
@@UmamiPapi This is correct. I can understand someone in Sweden across the border of Denmark pretty decently, but I can travel 4 hours west into the Danish western mainland and have difficulty understanding people over there xD Of course highly local societies may increase the extremity of the dialect differences, but it's overall a pretty accurate statement.
@@Real_MisterSir Very odd to think about since I don't know any of those languages. Can people usually speak a standardized dialect in each country? Like one based on the biggest city's speech or something?
@@UmamiPapi With some effort most people (probably all) can speak in a way that is commonly understood, but to your specific question; no. There isn't a common standardized dialect that everyone can speak. Dialects are very set in stone, some are more similar than others, but usually people will only speak their own dialect as other dialects will be foreign and unnatural to them, thus certain ways of expressing words/sentences will be highly local.
To be clear, there IS a standardized dialect in Danish, called "Rigsdansk", which is based in the Royally/formally acknowledged standard way of speaking Danish (and it used to be the only speech allowed on public radio etc some decades ago), but most regions have local dialects that influence said official speech to a lesser or higher degree depending on where you're from. Most people can understand eachother perfectly fine, and everyone can understand the official "Rigsdansk" dialect, but some minorities might have trouble being understood well by others from the opposite side of the country. Generally, the further away from the capitol you get, the more diverse the dialects become.
As for Norway and Sweden, I believe they experience a somewhat similar phenomenon within their geographic regions - to which exact extend I am not sure.
it sounds more different than it reads
As a German speaker I was thrilled to get some words right as soon as I saw the written form. Kinda cool since I don't understand shit listening to ANY nordic language, old or new.
Not the same in German, but overall definitely recognizable:
Haeste - höchste, meisingar- Meise, kraka - Krähe, stal - stahl, thessum - diese, mangir - manche, theira- deren...
and sometimes, I find even more similarities wirhin the pronunciation of eastern Austrian dialects.
I'm faroese and I understood the first four sentences. The last one I should have understood, but I made the mistake of thinking that óvin (even though it has the same meaning in faroese) could mean bad habit (óvani in faroese) and translated the text into "Friends with wings have a bad habit of flying (off)". Which of course is wrong - but it's also better :)
I was looking for this comment! Is it relatively easy for faroese to understand icelandic people?
@@nickdavila94 relatively yes. Reading icelandic is very easy as most words are very similar. Understanding each other when speaking is unfortunatey not as easy. The pronouncation is different and icelanders also tend to talk very fast which makes is more diffucult. Unfortuntely we usually speak english and danish to each other, but both parts feel silly for doing so as the languages are so similar. For an outsider it probably looks bizare hearing us talking in english, as most outsiders wouldn't hear the difference between icelandic and faroese.
I think that this feels more right. Like ”Vänner med vingar har en ovana att flyga iväg” in swedish
@@hansjuulhansen2664 for some reason when i ( a norwegian ) traveling to dennmark the danes will always force the conversation to English, guess it look just as silly , and fells just as silly to me :p
@@mareli82 I think they speak english to one another. The danes are weird like that :)
This channel is incredible! You bring together all these people to make these incredible experiments.
I think this project deserves way more recognition.
I agree! These aren't just interesting and fun to watch, but really help me to understand the relationships between related languages. It's much more effective than reading a few paragraphs in a book on the topic.
@@chadmensa Totally! You can basically practice multiple languages altogether, it's really the best
As a German trying to learn some Icelandic, I really enjoyed all you people's efforts. Thank you so much. I'll search if you tried it another time without birds.
No one lost, everyone showed how connected or unconnected languages can become over time.
On the other hand, we have the word "Meise" in German, so I had at least one connection you didn't immediately have.
Nice, enjoyable, entertaining and teaching.
Same here! "Du hast wohl einen an der MEISE!
.
Ich dachte an Maisinger See in Bayern
Well I should say that Crawford lost. He pronounced 'ere' like ear. Seriously? This guy is supposed to be a linguist? Americans are about as suited for linguistics as Saudi Arabians are for rain forest management.
@@john.premose I agree. This is the old story (Ludvig Holberg: "Jean de France") that you can fool people who have no knowledge of a certain language into believing that you are an expert in said language. It takes only a decent knowledge of runes and Iron-age Scandinavian languages to show that Crawford´s knowledge and understanding of old Scandinavian languages is severely lacking.
I loved this - amazing! Being Danish myself it was so wonderful to watch - I've always loved our language brothers and sisters, and I've always loved Old Norse. I almost cried from the joy this brought me.
Reading the comment section is a delight as always.
Everybody be like:
Dane = One clap, good show old sport.
Islending= Native, ah yes. Good one, two claps.
Norlending= How is he a language teacher?
This comment section in a nutshell :
@John John outraged?
You surely jest, we like to point out that we did not send our best, and gloat that our part of Norway is better then the other parts 😂
@@gaborodriguez1346 This videos comment section is literally people reacting to people reacting to people reacting to languages, lol.
@@jeremias-serus Indeed.
Hehe, ja, hva skal man si...
Lol, Dr Jackson Crawford actually used the Icelandic word for "Internet channel", "netrás", it actually somewhat makes sense in this case since there's actually a language committee in Iceland that creates new words for the language based on Old Norse instead of accepting loanwords from other languages, so the words would make sense in Old Norse, so i think it makes perfect sense in this case.
that's awesome
I don´t think there is a special commitee. But there are definitely a bunch of people ready to make new words for modern things all the time.
@@adamlarus1 Ég held að það sé Árnastofnun sem sér um að skapa nýyrði.
@@meginna8354 Idk what you just said, but here we have a committee doing the exact opposite, meaning they`ll see how we should update our spelling system.. It`s probably why at some point all our languages look so different, when I`m positive old Norse was just a new version of Frankish/old Dutch at some point around 6th or 7th century-ish.. Like I got more from this video understanding Dutch thus old English and English, some German than those Scandinavian guys did for a large part lol though I`m positive they should have gotten way more than they did clearly..
@@pyruvicac.id_ All languages come from a common germanic language. So dutch doesn't really come from german or nordic languages or vice versa. They're basically just cousins.
As a Dane, this is hard to understand, but I suspect that it would not take very long for a Dane, or any scandinavian with a flare for language to pick up and use Old Norse. Very interesting video, and made me realize how similar modern Icelandic language is to Old Norse, pretty fascinating.
Aside from relearning your entire case system? sure.
@@NH-ge4vz well I meant more in the sense of speaking rather than writing Old Norse, but I get your point.
As a Dane too i found it surpringsly easy tho, but im also from a Frisian Household so that probaly has something to do with it.
It’s so funny to see the grin of the icelandic guy as the others struggle to understand
I would have another idea; can speakers of German, Dutch and Danish or other Germanic languages understand Plattdüütsch, or Low German
I would love to say that.
I'd love to be the Swiss frenemy here 😏🤣
@@RK-xl1od Would Swiss understand it better? We have many Plattdeutsch speakers where I live in USA. You can always hear them speaking as they are walking around.
@@jays-move8803 My guess is that Dutch or Danish people could get it a lot easier but I'm not sure if a German speaker would understand more than a Swiss-German speaker ( we know German as well ) but I think from the pronunciation perspective I could get even more. ( That's just a guess though)
@@RK-xl1od Thanks. That's interesting. I appreciate it.
Would've been great to see a Faroese person in this, that's all I'm saying
Faroese is basically in the Middle of Danish and Icelandic, as a language and probably in terms of understanding Old Norse.
@@meginna8354 Exactly how I see it, its a middle ground, but I would say even more like a conservative version of present Norwegian Nynorsk.
No, we're closer to Norwegian than Danish. And I would love to see some Faroese representation.
@@fr3238 Eg er samd i det, tykkjer det ser ut som ein «meir norrøn» utgåve av nynorsk sjølv om det er eit eige mål. Interresant å lesa på, dei bruker mange ord som på norsk berre finst i nynorsk.
Eg haldi ikki tað er so ræðuliga brúkisligt at kjakast um hvussu nógv er okkurt annað mál í staðin fyri bara at siga akkurát hvat tað er.
What a great initiative, Norbert. Congrats!
The icelandic guy is absolutely right, its just the fact that Iceland didnt have outside influence and was very isolated so they kept the old norse way of speaking for at much much longer time, almost up to present day.
Extremely interesting video, many thanks to all the participants.
Dr. Jackson brings up a very good point about why Icelandic has stayed relatively unchanged for so long when he mentions the Edda and the sagas. I always thought it was mostly the isolation that had kept us so "old-fashioned" language-wise but when he talked about the literary aspect of it it just made so much sense. Brings a whole new light to the matter.
I enjoyed the video a lot, takk fyrir.
That was fun! I am a 46 years old German an I joined in this game. As our danish friend I had no chance to understand mutch Old Norse when you red it. But in the written form it was mutch easier for me and I was quite surpised about how often I was close to the sence of the sentence.
We are all mutch closer to each other then we might think and I would love to see it when something like this would happend in schools!
Thank you very mutch for this realy cool video!
I agree with you on the spoken words. I´m a Swede and the written sentences was easyer to understand .
This is great stuff. I'm amazed by how similar Icelandic was to old Norse. Even isolated as it is, I would expect any language to change a lot more in 800 years.
Norwegian here. This was amazing!
Honestly, I don't think the Norwegian did a good job in representing the similarities of Norwegian and Old Norse. Some of these sentences were pretty understandable, but the Norwegian had no ability to tie together loose ends. "Meisingar" for example, is "Meis" in Norwegian. Not that different...
Yes. I think the norwegian guy was confused by the actual sound of Old Norse. For a dane its also very hard to understand.
When i realized that it was a kind of bird I immediately knew what it was. It's called "mes" is swedish.
Being Swedish and all, some words felt quite similar but. I guess the hardest part is to put the words in to a sentence that would make any sense. It was really interesting and enjoyable to watch!
As someone who has studied Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and currently Swedish, this was such a great episode. I think it would have been useful to have had someone from Sweden aswell. Old Norse and modern Icelandic are so similar that the Icelander had an unfair advantage. Takk fyrir!
I have a Swedish friend who got the first four sentences on the first hearing. No. 5 he got after seeing it in print. But then, he's been studying with Dr. Crawford for several years.
@@sarahpassell226 I'm Swedish. I never studied any Nordic languages but understand Norwegian well. I didn't nail the sentences but over all I think I got them better than both the Norwegian and the Dane. I'm a bit surprised no Swede got to participate.
@@katam6471 Then I bet my friend is, too. Or is everyone who participates in one of these also a TH-cam presenter in his own right?
@@katam6471 Jag också! I think a Swede should have been included. Perhaps Norbert will do another episode to include a Swede and someone from the Faroes.
@@katam6471 I`m Dutch and I even got it better than the Norwegian and the Dane most of the time..
very interesting to learn about the roots of these languages. For someone who grew up as a Dutch native speaker I can tell we're all using very similar languages. The dialect from my area in the Netherlands actually shares a lot of words with Danish. Grammar-wise we're more on the German track, but not fully.
Should've gotten a faroese person on here, there is a lot of norse that sounds the same
Faroese would have been amaziiing to see ! It sounds so similar to Icelandic but feels like it has been put in a blender 😂
Maybe it was hard for them to find. There isn’t a lot of faroese speakers out there
Dzięki Norbert!! Prosiłem ostatnio o "tego gościa od Old Norse'a" i jak zwykle dostarczasz takie skarby!!!
What i find is that old norse is a lost language. But the Icelandic have more or less saved it. That earns respect!
I think it's more that we just haven't evolved as much as others in our neighborhood, we are a tiny island with few people (compared to all but the Faroe Islands) and we've lived the same life for so long, few new words have "invaded" our language. Until recently that is. But I agree, it's fairly close to what we speak to day.
@@axelrafn Do you think learning Old Norse fluently would be possible? Or is it as lost as all the religious pages the vikings burned?
@@BenjiEnergy You can study Icelandic and you will be able to read and speak pretty much all Old Norse I think. There is still little difference between the languages. Perhaps in grammar and spelling yes, but when you read it aloud it sounds pretty much the same, only a bit more old fashioned and formal.
@@axelrafn Great, Im happy to hear!
Old Norse is not a lost language at all. Icelandic is basically modern old norse.
My intuition is that, considering how difficult Old Norse was for the non-Icelanders, that the modern mutual intelligibility between the continental Scandi languages is due to later intercultural influence over the centuries rather than all the languages being mutually intelligible just through their common root in Old Norse.
South Scandinavian language has a common root in Danske Tunge as it was spoken by the vikings in the Danelaw 250 hundred years before Icelandic was a thing. All their villages still have Danish names to this day: Rugby, Baldersby, Arnesby, Hareby, Dalby, Allerby, Stisted, Felsted, Alsager, Overstrand, Riseholme, Birkholme, Marholm, Langholm, Sandtoft, Horning, etc.). There´s no "Old Norse" in the Danelaw. No -Stadur´s there, what so ever.
It’s interesting how Icelandic preserved an old form of language through poems and literature. The same happened with Persian with the Shahnameh which I think was a deliberate preservation of old Persian forms as a response to foreign influences, whereas Icelandic just carried on without foreign influences.
I understood almost everything! I'm crying 😭 😭 😭 😭 One year of studying Danish didn't pass in vain
Good job!!!
@@jonathanemslander6896 tusind tak!!!
you understood old norse from studying danish as a 2nd lanugage? Or did you mean that you understood almost everything of what the danish person said
@@Borrelaas i was about to say! How the f*ck would he understand Old Norse from one year of studying Danish, when im danish and was lost at the third sentence. Would mean i had to study more :(
I guess your textbook was a out of date :D ;)
Absolutely loved this video!
But as a fellow Norwegian country man i can testify that i understood a lot better the Norse language, both spoken and written than the Norwegian representative in this video did, so i think it's also very related to where in Norway you might be from, as i myself come from the mid-western part of Møre og Romsdal
Jeg er fra Harstad (rett ved Tromsø), og jeg forsto mye mer. Tror ikke hvor du er fra har så ekstremt mye å si.
@@oyvismoe Det kan godt være du har rett i
@René Nord Norsk e ikkje mer likt norrønt en de fleste andre dialektene, om noge så "snakke" dokk bokmål med aksent :P Kom te Vestlandet du
I'm watching this as a Dutch person with a good knowledge of English and some German and I could guess about 15% of the words in the sentences, I absolutely love to see the relations between our languages!