The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.1961, Page 27

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
25
students who enter such institutions
with a good knowledge of Latin are
more likely to obtain higher marks in
•languages than those who have no
knowledge of that language. This is
partly due to the rigid discipline which
the sentence structure of a highly in-
flexional language imposes on the stu-
dent.
I have read somewhere Chat Icelandic
students at the University of Copen-
hagen often used to obtain top marks
in Latin, simply because they had been
brought up under the strict discipline
of their mother tongue.
From the morphological point of
view the syntax of Modern English
has been greatly simplified compared
with its ancertsral languages or dialects.
In some respects this may be an asset.
The famous linguist Edward Sapir has
stated that “the form tends to linger
on when the spirit has flown or chang-
ed its being” (Language, p. 98). In Eng-
lish the word order of the sentence
has to a large extent taken over the
role of inflexional endings as we can
see by comparing two sentences ident-
ical in meaning, one from English and
the other from Icelandic. In English
we have “the farmer kills the duck”,
and in Icel. “bdndinn drepur ondina”.
If we reverse the word order of the
English sentence and say “the duck
kills the farmer” the meaning has also
been completely reversed. Even though
we give the Icelandic sentence the
same treatment as its English counter-
part and say “ondina drepur bondinn”
the meaning has not been changed at
all as the declension endings, but not
the order of the words, are the decisive
factors as regards the meaning. This
example reveals in essentials the syn-
tactic difference between Modern Eng-
lish and Icelandic.
GRIMM’S LAW OR RASH'S LAW
Comparative philology, in the mod-
ern sense, is a relatively recent field
of learning. Eighteenth century schol-
ars interested themselves in etymology,
but they were on the wrong track and
seemed to cling to the theory that most
languages were descendants of Hebrew.
It was not until the early 19th century
that the foundation of modern com-
parative philology was laid through re-
search on the origin of the Icelandic
or Old Norse language. I shall come
back to this point later.
In the year 1822 a German phil-
ologist, by the name of Jakob Grimm,
published a work which dealt with
correspondence between consonants in
the Germanic languages and those of
other Indo-European languages,
especially Greek, Latin and Sanskrit.
In this work a grammatical law, on
which modern comparative philology
rests, was fully laid down. This law is
generally referred to as Grimm’s Law,
a term which, however, gives too much
credit to Grimm, because a Danish
philologist, Rasmus Kristjan Rask, was
the first to discover the law. The out-
lines of this law are given in a
work he published in 1818. This work
will be further discussed later in this
article.
To be able to understand and make
use of Grimm’s Law itihe language stu-
dent has to know at least one lan-
guage of purely Germanic origin and
some other languages outside the Ger-
manic group of languages, as for in-
stance Latin or Greek. In this case it
is only logical that the student select
Icelandic as his field of study as it is
of purely Germanic origin .
Below, the application of Grimm’s
law is briefly outlined by comparing
Icelandic and Latin.