The Little Book of Icelandic - by Alda Sigmundsdóttir
A book about one of the oldest and most complex languages in the world, and the heart and soul of the people who use it.
Icelandic is a complicated language. It’s a bloody mess grammatically, a nightmarish mishmash of inflected nouns, verbs, adjectives and pronouns, corresponding to four different cases, three different noun genders, moods, voices and constructions, plus any number of exceptions and rules that seem completely arbitrary, and very often are.
This is not a textbook. It is not about the technicalities of Icelandic. Rather it is about the Icelanders’ love of their mother tongue, their zealous attempts at keeping it pure, their often-hilarious way of cobbling together vocabulary, and their idioms and proverbs that are such a strong reflection of the things they consider truly important. All in short essays that are light, humorous, and easy to read.
The Little Book of Icelandic is written by Alda Sigmundsdóttir and illustrated by Megan Herbert.
More books from Alda in our shop, same shipping price if you order both with it:
The Little Book of the Icelanders by Alda Sigmundsdóttir
The little book of Tourist in Iceland
CanadaI would give it five stars and I enjoyed it. It gave good insights into the language and being a bit of a word junky I am always interested in the way all languages have odd little expressions which take on meaning of their own or words that really can’t be translated because they don’t exist in other languages as the concept hasn’t been identified or refined. Window weather would be a great example. So it was an educational and fun little book.
Takk fyrir Walt! Gott að heyra!