The recording was fine, it's from a different RUclips channel where Nordic speakers are trying to understand a professor speaking old Norse. It sounded better for them.
the one with old norse and icelandic guy is hilarious - everyone has problems, it gets down the icelandic guy who says "oh it's similar" and says nearly 1:1 the same thing as the original :D
Icelandic is the true inheritors of the Viking legacy,… they were saved from foreign influence by being very isolated on an Island that were not very welcoming for immigrants and invaders. Icelandic ppl is how Vikings looked 1100 yrs ago.
Swede here. In school I never learned about the language, only that it existed pretty much and I learned a little bit about the runes, both old and new futhark. We mainly focused on the history. Most of what I know about old norse comes from Jackson Crawford pretty much. Like previous comments have said, in school we learn Swedish and English from an early age, and when we are about 12 years old we will learn an additional language, most often Spanish, French or German. In high school I also had the option to learn basic Italian. I have seen some other videos about old norse where Icelandic people have been present, and they definetly understand way more old norse than us Scandinavians.
Can confirm as a Norwegian - its mostly the same. If we happen to have a good teacher they could understand a bit of Old Norse and would try to teach it, but I dont think it is a requirement at all so it was more to show it and most of us didn't use any energy at it. We have a lot more focus on history sagas and Snorre Sagas (Heimskringla) and those was already translated in our textbook.
you need to mention that you're speaking from the perspective of the public (lol) school system in sweden. people with engaged and committed parents put their kids into private schools instead and then the setup can be wildly different. if i recall in the public school system english classes start when people are 9 or something. private schools often start at 5-6, with additional languages added every few years. hell when i was 12 we were studying 5 languages at that point. its also worth pointing out for people who do not know that in sweden private schools do not really cost any extra as it is still mostly covered by taxes, what it requires is only parents who are interested enough in their kids that they dont raise their kids through an automated system but instead take an active role in picking the best educational options.
@ Italian was in High School, when I was 16, and only because there was a teacher that knew Italian, so it is not very common I would presume. :P But that was over 20 years ago now so....not sure you are older than me. :P
Norwegian here, and we learned about Old Norse in school in the 90's when I was a kid/teen. We learned about the Futhark alphabet and how to write our own names, and we also learned about how Old Norse changed into modern Norwegian by introducing foreign words. One example my teacher used was "skomaker" in modern Norwegian, which is "shoemaker" in English. It's apparently and old Dutch word that made its way to Norway (likely via the Hanseatic League trade and Norwegians who worked in the Netherlands). The word replaced the Old Norse word for "shoemaker", which I forgot (which illustrates my point). Also, in modern Norwegian the word for "forest" is "skog", so you can see the similarity with Old Norse. We simply shortened the word, which seems to be a common practice.
skogen is correct in bokmål but in dialect you might also find skau, also skog is not a shortening in the whole country, I have heard people use skogen in the context of a forest being far away as in "skogen over der" meaning the forest over there, I have noticed that places where they use skau more commonly they also use skauen a lot more compared to areas that use skogen, also the -en suffix translate to "the" as in bilen = the car, skoen = the shoe et cetera
Another Norwegian here, I don't remember learning any of this at school. We also barely learnt anything at all of Norwegian literature history, I'm relearning it all now as an adult (and enjoying it).
Norwegian here as well xP We did learn about old norse and runes, and I'd more often see someone who gets really into runes, actually use it, I know one person who used it to write a journal and adapted it a bit to compensate for the newer sounds/letters x) So reading is one thing, but hearing it is another.
Norwegians at least around my age and older (‘95->) learnt about the Futhark and changes from Old Norse to Modern Norwegian. Especially the introduction of Low German vocabulary and Danish influence. I also especially remember that they taught us how Old Norse, like Icelandic today, has a case system that makes sentence structure more flexible than Scandinavian languages today. There was this example in the book about Olav and a horse, how the sentence could mean the exact same despite flipping the nouns, as long as the endings were conjugated according to their role in the sentence.
the playback was horrible, I could not make out anything, not until I saw the text, but I could not hear a thing from that, it was like he spoke under water
Thanks, this was really entertaining! I speak Icelandic and read a lot in Old Norse. Icelandic is actually *extremely* similar to Old Norse. The whole language structure is essentially the same; what differs is mainly pronunciation, which is of course very speculative for O. N. It ceases to be a problem as soon as you get an Icelander to read your Old Norse for you 😆 They mistranslated the second sentence, by the way. Their sentence says 'many birds *lived* in this forest'. Otherwise it would be 'búa'. Small point, but it could have made a difference to people's ability to understand.
OK, first off, the pronunciation of the Old Norse sentences sounded like they were being pronounced by a Danish man that is being strangled while under water. Impossible to hear or understand, so no wonder they were unable to understand that. Secondly, the sentence "Margir fuglar bjuggu í ɒessum skogi" was incorrectly translated. That sentence translates to "Many birds lived in this forest". What they said it translates to is "Many birds live in this forest", but "bjuggu" is actually the past tense of "búa". Búa means to live/reside in a place, and is very similar to the Norwegian dialect word "bu", which means to live/reside in a place - for example in Norwegian Nynorsk: "Ei bru der ingan kunna tru at nokon kunna bu", would mean "A bridge where no one could believe that anyone could live". The "bu" in that sentence means "to live" - just like "búa" in Old Norse. If they had gotten their sentence structure correct for the Old Norse, I think the Norwegian woman would have got that one. Because they used "bjuggu" instead of "búa", they guessed that the sentence had something to do with the birds building nests, which is a good guess, as "bjuggu" is a lot like bygge or byggja in Norwegian, which both mean "to build", and if there is something birds build, its nests. This could lead one to incorrectly think that "Margir fuglar bjuggu í ɒessum skogi" translates to something like the modern sentence "Mange fugler bygger i disse skogene", meaning "Many birds build in these forests" - what do they build? nests. Why do they build them? To live in the forest. So "Many birds build nests (to live) in this forest". But actually the translation is the slightly more macabre "Many birds lived in this forest", which leads one to wonder why they don't live there any more.
Norwegian here! We do study a little bit of the structural differences between the modern language and Old Norse. Like how cases work and the different word order. We do not study it a lot though. Maybe a few weeks in elementary school at age 13-15 and a little bit in highschool if you're in a theoretical minded highschool aswell.
@iamrichlol Quite alot when we look at the poetry in Old Norse. Old Norse poetry could have any word order because of the case system and they often did play with word order. Alliteration in Norse poetry was key, and messing with word order makes it easier to create. In the sagas the word order is more similar, but different in some aspects compared to the modern language.
I think what confused them with "live" is that "bjuggu" is the plural past-tense of the of the verb "býr", we still do it like that in Icelandic. I´m pretty sure they are using the audio from one of Jackson Crawford´s videos, I remember those sentances but the audio is so bad here I could not understand a word. Icelandic is still close enough to old norse that most of us can still understand probably over 95% of it. ( found the original Crawford video ) you might like that one ruclips.net/video/5MRfVHU9fr0/видео.html
I can say in Japan they study Classical Japanese in both middle and high school, but it's not something that sticks with them. I can understand it significantly more than the vast majority of Japanese people, which isn't me singing my own praises. If Japanese people in general really hunkered down and studied it even a fraction as much as I have they'd leave me in the dust. Though I guess that just means that I get to have the privilege of being the one who tries to make it more accessible to English speakers and not another random Japanese guy who would make my understanding look like a joke. I guess being super into a very niche topic has its benefits after all.
It’s great the Italian students get some exposure to Latin as a source language for Italian. Here in the U.S., some pre-college curricula offer a Latin course. My high school in California certainly didn’t. We could learn Spanish as an elective, which I’m thankful for taking. I feel we should at least have the option of also learning some Old English. But, you know, US primary education is hit-or-miss, depending on where you live and how well-funded your school is.
This has maybe changed in the last few decades, but as part of Swedish class, here in Sweden, we had a few lessons where we looked at our neighboring languages - Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Faroese - so that we would have a rudimentary knowledge of them and our common history. It wasn't a lot, but we had to read a text in each language, discuss what we could understand, and what the differences were. There was also a part of Hávamál in Old Norse for the historic context.
Swede here, I will attempt to give my experience from my education and answer questions. We were taught about the Futhark in Swedish class, and the Vikings/Norse obviously show up during history class, but the Old Norse language itself isn't taught beyond illustrating what the letters stand for in the modern latin alphabet and a few words. It's been a fair few years since I would have taken those classes, but I know for sure we were taught about the Futhark when I was 16-17 in my First year of the Swedish equivalent of Highschool (Gymnasiet). Modern Swedish for Forest is Skog or Skogen meaning The Forest. I believe they are using the Audio from another video where an expert is doing a similar thing with a Dane, a Norwegian and an Icelandic guy. I recognize the sentences, so potentially they simply cut out those bits of audio. Perhaps that video would be of interest for you to react to as well. If not, then simply to watch on your own time 🙂 You can find it by searching for "Can Scandinavians understand Old Norse" - the channel name is Ecolinguist.
Hey Dane here. I speak both Norwegian and Danish. I was taught about old norse in first grade and second grade, and I was taught more throughly about the langauge in high school. We also read the sagas both in history class, danish class, and religion class.
In Germany when you go to highschool, there are 3 different levels of schools . There's the Gymnasium for advanced teachings (which is the hardest). There's medium. And then there's the "Hauptschule" for basic (this one's the easiest). Of course the school your parents pick for Ou will later decide over your career. But latin is only taught in the upper level one, the Gymnasium. It's not taught in the two others. In medium we've also had french. Well for those like me who chose it over working with wood. And English is taught in all three of them.
They also should have brought in an Icelander and a Faroe Islander. Icelandic and Faroese are the closest to Old Norse, so they would've had an easier time.
Faroese is clover than the others but it's nowhere near Icelandic in terms of cloeseness to Old Norse. Icelandic is essentially the same language while a faroe islanders can only guestimate most of the sentances
Norwegian here. In my fourties, I might add. We learned a little bit about old Norse in school. I still almost remember some sayings we learned as examples.
My experience with old norse and futhark is basically from history education in school, I cannot specifically say when but somewhere between 4th and 9th grade. While we didn't go into speaking it, there was some reading exercises and rune-recognition exercises. I'm only speculating here, but I think that the reason for us not really learning to speak it is due to the fact that it fell out of use where latin evolved and was used in the church for example, and Neo-Latin was used for scientific papers, and a form of it is the official language of the Vatican? Northern countries not only evolved languages away from old norse, and Christianity brought latin.
In high school I learned just some small details of Old Norse, and even Proto-Norse, small details about the futhark and some words but we did not learn the language. We learned some mostly related to learning about Swedish literature. Though I truly wished these recordings were better, you can barely hear what is being said. Just based on what you shown so far. I really wish these three would see the difference between a thorn þ and p.þessum being similar to Swedish dessa. It would be easier for them to connect the dots if they could. The bad sound recording did not help.
I learned about old norse in high school, but that was during a prep year for going to university, so I dont think people doing vocational studies (electricians, carpenters etc) have that in their curriculum. Our study focused on how different it to modern Norwegian, taking a look at Danish influence, and getting a feel for the writing style of the old sagas.
You are absolutely correct in your guess that Icelandic speakers will understand more Old Norse, according to this video by "Ecolinguist" (with Dr. Jackson Crawford, which you should really watch!) You can see that a native Icelandic speaker's level of understanding of Old Norse is significantly higher than that of speakers of Danish and Norwegian: ruclips.net/video/5MRfVHU9fr0/видео.html
Yeah Swede here, as others have said we did learn about the runic alphabets some runic inscriptons etc, also because I live close to one of the most famous rune stones (Rökstenen, Rök Runestone) we had a school trip there, learned about Snorri Sturlusons poetic edda. I think there is a huge difference in Latin vs old Norse, there is huge amounts of preserved literature in Latin, while very little old norse is preserved, that is why Snorri Sturluson's poems are such a big source because it's some of few surviving literary works, but that is also just one dialect (icelandic) at one time (1100s) at the tail end of old Norse.. Otherwise it's very fragmented especially from the earlier times with just some rock carvings here and there..
I haven't learned any of the languages yet, but I can usually catch some words and phrases due to my Mennonite Low German background and my on / off studying of High German. Even my Finnish helps a little bit with the vocabulary, since Finland used to be ruled by Sweden and their language picked up a lot of Swedish loan words.
Norwegian here, we study Norwegian and English from first grade and then get a 3rd optional language from grade 10 and onwards (usually we get to pick from German,French and Spanish). When I went to school in the 90's and ealry 00's we did not learn much about old norse, we learned some basic history around the viking period but most of what I learned about it was through me chosing to have an exam in norse history as my final exam during year 12 of school.
Commenting a third time, in case nobody mentioned it. 😅 I'm not sure about the Scandinavian languags, but at least in High German there are two different verbs for "to live": "leben" and "wohnen" (or "läwen" and "wonen" in my Low German). I think they can sometimes be used interchangeably, but the general rule that "leben" is usually used to say someone or something is alive, and "wohnen" is like saying "reside", so when talking about where you live ("Ich wohne in Kanada" = "I live in Canada", for example). It seems like these three also have a similar thing, since the Danish lady said both "lever" and "bor". Finnish actually had the same difference.
In old norse, the grammatic cases of Dativ and Accusative are used for location or direction. Like in German. Skoginum is dativ and skogi is either genitiv or accusative (I think)
We don't only say "en" for one in norway. Depending dialect you can have, ein, ei and probably variants, more given how varied our spoken dialects are.
Swede here, we study Swedish from year 1 to year 9 in school then there are Gymnasium 1 year of Swedish and then you can choose advanced Swedish. We start studying English from year 3 to year 9 and then 1 year in Gymnasium and again you can choose to study advanced the remainder 2 years, we then start to study German or French or Spannish from year 6 to 9 and then Gymnasium you can choose to continue to study the third language if you want.
Oh and btw, im related to the man who first translated the runestones, his latin name was Johannes Thomae Agrivillensis Bureus. He also created a very comprehensive family book, which included the womens lines as well as bastards, which is why many swedes can trace their lineage back to him. Oh and im also related to the birka warrior woman. Just in case anyone thought it fun to know.
When I went to secondary school (35 years ago) we were introduced to old norse. We had selected text we had to learn and at least have some grasp of. I've been interested in old norse and icelandic ever since and now I have a fairly good grasp of it. Perhaps B1 or B2 level.
10:56 In Swedish, we use both the word "bo" and "rede" when referring to birds. Fåglarna har sitt rede högt upp i trädet (The bird has its nest high up in the tree.)
We don't study Latin in France, unless it's a special option, so I'm not surprised they wouldn't study Old Norse either. The furthest we go, with the main teachings, is in reading Montaigne (1500s philosopher) which on a sentence-per-sentence basis is rather easy to understand, but pretty tiring if you keep on going: nearly all the words still exist to this day, but the way sentences are formed, the conjugation employed... all that reads pretty foreign already.
An Icelandic person would have added here. And a Dutch one might help a tiny bit. The "thessum" (with that special not th letter) would be "deze" in Dutch, however we would not use it together with wood/forest today. The problem with "live" in the wood/forest is that it's idiom and this easily changes over time. Birds may "live" there, they might "be" there or "habitate" there. As to studying, learning our old language, this is a matter of preference and priority. What comes first, understanding the old language, or being able to communicate with the neighbours? So we spend the time on learning English and/or German and/or French and/or Spanish and/or Italian. And then many relatively late arrivals in the country still want to learn the language of the family elsewhere in the world. The bjuggu really bugged me.
I tried to read a reprint of a book from 1880is . the worst thing was that the spelling of many words has changed a lot. so it felt like reading another language. they didn´t have a Islandic girl. because that is the language that has most common with old norse.
IIRC I believe I read a comment somewhere from an Icelander. He said that they can read and understand old Norse the same way we do Shakespearean english
In Wales, or rather Welsh-medium schools in Wales, we only study Middle Welsh (Cymraeg Canol) Welsh was c1250 as part of the A Level course if you study the Mabinogi (mythology which was written down in C13th) and court poetry from that period - people like Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Goch, Sion Cent etc. But, once you take out the unstandardised spelling (which is true of all European languages at the time) there isn't a huge difference, probably similar to Chaucer in English. But Middle Welsh isn't taught, it's close enough that you can understand it fairly easily though words have evolved and some structures seem old fashioned.
The written version of the first sentence was perfectly understandable as a Norwegian, but the audio quality made it impossible to make out a single word. The other sentence I didn't really understand.
A few notes to add: I am assuming that the participants on this channel are not scholars for the most part. It should be relatively obvious that “þessum” (or whatever it said) would mean something like “desse” and therefore also could be anything from “denne” to “den”. The Norwegian “representative” should also make a point out of the fact that most Norwegians (at least geographically speaking) diverge substantially from Danish. At least when asked about the indefinite “einn” she could’ve mentioned that it’s also “ein” in Modern Norwegian. Or the “fuglar” which is also identical in Norwegian today. “Bjuggu” would be a stretch but imagine “å bu” (to live (somewhere)) or “å byggje” (to build) - there could be drawn a line between that and “to live” but I would personally guess “to build” as well. Also the last (?) sentence was so random and out of context I’d be struggling with guessing the content anyways because it doesn’t make sense. Maybe it’d be better to choose some more regular sentences. Would be fun to see an Icelandic / Faroese / Rural Norwegian here as well.
As someone who speaks Dutch it's quite similar to what I know. Forest is really different, we say "bos"which, I just realised at 10:40, is similar to bosco in italian!
Latin was a written language, and survived into modern times. Old Norse wasn't really, it changed enormously. The Runes were so specific, memorials, written by experts. But yes, Icelandic for sure would have a better chance of understanding Old Norse, because they have some of the old way of pronouncing. The Icelandic author Snorri Sturlasson wrote most of it down in the 13th Century. And Actually, in the 13th century even Swedish was seldom written down. Those who could write, wrote in Latin (!).
As a Norwegian I had "old norse" and the runic (futhark) alphabeth in middle school. It was thechnically not old norse but the elder and younger edda, so close enough. We we're supposed to be able to read, somewhat understand spoken, and be able to "translate" to modern norwegian. If they'd pick someone from the west/northwest coast and nortward, they'd probably understand it even better, as they still have many spoken words which are similar, but maybe more different in the written form. This m8ght be true for people in the valley in the east as well, but not familiar enough with their dialect to say either or.. In regards to the birds they were correct in the translation "many birds builds in this forrest". This is the direct translation to modern, and while I'm not sure, I think it's technically the same in old norse, but the meaning behind building we're more in line with settling in a place. This meaning is also used in newer old lierature. So in short, if the bird builds in this forest, it also lives in this firest.
I watch this video yesterday but had to give it up at the second audio because I could not hear what the sentence in Old Norse was. Like listening under water.
When I went to school in the 90s and into the 00s, we did learn some Old Norse, but it was not very in-depth, and was a little bit comperasions of a few words only, but it was only during 1 year, and a couple of classes locked for it, nothing over time, but we were giving some texts to read to try to see how much we could understand I recall. When reading it was easier to get some context of certain things, but spoken Old Norse is a different beast. Same with Icelandic. Faroese as well, but written Faroese is quiet easy to understand as its somewhat closer than Icelandic and Old Norse. Norwegian by the way. Also with Norwegian, it also depends on your dialect, as Norway is the land of 5 million people and probably 5 million dialects almost 🤣
I'd say spoken Faroese is easier to understand for a Norwegian (especially from western Norway) than spoken Icelandic. Faroese is linguistically closer to modern Norwegian than Icelandic is, if I'm not mistaken.
@@Onnarashi Faroese is the closest of them, specially to some west coast dialects, and also to the most conservative dialect in Norway, the "Valle" dialect in Setesdalen, that also got a lot more of its norse roots, and still got some of the grammar that is found in Icelandic and Faroese, but that has died out in the continental languages.
In Scandinavia its not mandatory to teach old Norse, but some enthusiastic teachers may teach it a bit if they find the time. One of my Swedish teachers actually had one lesson about it but i remember nothing
You can’t really compare learning old norse to latin. Old Norse have no written text exept for the runstones. So you can study futharken and read a runstone (or runes on an rock outcrop). Those are like giant short sms (most of them in Sweden). The rest is archaeology. While latin was written and the language of the church even here in scandinavia for a while. Historians here also go to other countrys to see what there is written about for ex the Vikings.
We study lots of languages just not dead ones. I learned spanish from age 11-15 and german 15-19. And of course english. We start studying english when we are about 8 or 9 and continue throughout the mandatory school years (age 18-19).
Icelandic is the closest to Old Norse since their language is very insular and they can most likely understand a lot of Old Norse. We learn a lot about our history, the different time periods (first settlers, vendel period, viking age, middle ages etc.). I remember learning how to read/write runes to some extent. We knew about Old Norse but we didn't learn about the language itself beside the fact it's the language that all but one Nordic country stems from. I don't know if todays school go as deep into it as my generation did.
We do learn about Old Norse, at least here in Sweden. Its history, pronunciation, how it relates to modern North Germanic languages and how to read runes. But we don't really learn how to understand or speak it. People generally don't feel any need to learn it since it isn't super useful. Icelanders seem to understand it pretty well though.
In Norwegian high school we have to learn both bokmål and nynorsk (one as the main the other as the secondary). In addition, we do have to learn about some sagas which are translated but also display some of the original. We are not taught the language but we are exposed a bit to it. On the other hand schools are more preoccupied with teaching kids how to knit, and as of late, how to make meh food, while things such as mathematics are put on hold (last time I worked with a kid they said that they were only introduced to calculating areas in like 6th or 7th grade which is about 3 years later than some other countries). So, them not knowing Old Norse when they already have a bad language system with two languages and a poor school career, shouldn’t come as a surprise.
As a former teacher, also in mathematics, I can say that Norwegian schools are extremely concerned that everyone should go through the same syllabus at all times. The legislation gives the opportunity to do things differently, but there cannot be fixed level groups that work over a long period of time. This can be solved by having a fluid transition between the groups, and by having different groups in different subjects. I have tested level division at grade 4. - 6. over three years, and had very good results with it. The students in all three level groups benefited from it. The brightest students in Norway are held back because one teacher does not have the capacity to teach several different levels at the same time in a class of 20 students or more. The reason I was able to test it out was that I worked at a school with two teachers who shared the entire grade, approx. 40 students. Therefore, we had greater flexibility, but I was the only one who tried it out. There is a consensus in Norway that students lift each other up when they work together at different levels. The only problem is that the brightest don't get the challenges they need. In my class, they were only divided when teaching was going on. They went back to their desks and worked on assignments with the whole class, so they had the chance to work across the level groups while working independently on the subject.
To my knowledge in Sweden, English is a required subject from the very first grade, then German Spanish or French from seventh grade, if a school offers other languages for a trinary they can offer those like mandarin Chinese. We learn of Norwegian and Danish and the protocol requires some ability to understand them but otherwise there's no old norse studying in the slightest. I see more value in learning latin than old norse.
As Norwegian (of the older type) we did not learn old norse, we learned about the vikings and all that ofcourse, learned what runes are and in some cases typed our names. That said . we learn from early age 3 languages at school, we have norwegian ofcourse like bokmål that is the main language you learn, then you have classes in New Norwegian (Nynorsk) both spoken and written, and ofcourse we learn English... some even takes German or french or some other languages as "Valgfag"... also if you are of other etnicity like Italian you have the right to have some classes with italian ... and if you are sami you ofcourse have the right to learn Sami as well, we call it "Morsmål" as in mothers tounge. All this while we speak our own dialects... With all this said, the trick with old norse is to read it with nynorsk, many older nynorsk words are similar ... at 4:35 in Norwegian you say Snøen in norse its Snjór, fell(norse) falle (norwegian nynorsk) einn (norse) einn and in norwegian you would use "en" or in nynorsk "Ein" Dag is pretty much the same now as then, Skóginum ... well Skog in norwegian, or Skogen ... that goes to both nynorsk and norwegian.
As as swede, having listened to old Norse. I could kind of understand that "Oh that word is probably bird, stone, forest, ect." But I didn't understand what the point was. Icelandic people can actually understand old norse but they will think they speak funny and some words here and there doesn't work. Swedish word for forest is "Skog" Yes, scandinavia has a good spot to learn both german and english. Listening to german or english without knowing it only knowing Swedish can actually a very similar experience to listening to old Norse. Like you kind of recognize some words and put them together to make sense. I'd say they represent the average person well.
The word bygge/byggja still means to inhabit/'live somewhere' in Norwegian. But it's rarely used in that way, it usually means to build, so I'm not surprised a native speaker might not recognise that meaning
Hello, I am Danish. We learn more often Latin in Danish schools than Old Norse. I had Latin in public school in school when I was 13 years old, and I also had it (all over again) in the gymnasium/high school. Old Norse is not considered as a direct predecessor of Danish. Old Norse is in reality Old Icelandic. That might explain it. But of course Old Danish from the 9th Century and Old Norse would be very related. In Denmark we miss old litterature as the Icelandic sagas.
As a Norwegian speaker, I find it really weird that they couldn't understand "Skóginum" at first. The modern word is "Skog", which is pronounced very differently, but it's very easy to see the connection.
I mean it depends from where you live (speaking from a Norwegian perspective). I lived in a more rural area in Norway as a child, and I was taught the songs and about Håvamål in detail, but I heard that kids in the bigger cities don't learn much about other than history wise. The education system isn't equal across the country even though we love to brag about it.
Teachers in Norwegian schools have quite a lot of freedom to focus on what they themselves have expertise in. The goals in the subject plan are general, but due to time pressure, most choose to follow the textbooks in the subjects, but spend different amounts of time on the various subjects. As a former teacher, I think that boasting that education is the same for everyone shows little understanding that all people are different. We should differentiate much more than we do. I have tried it myself, and have very good experiences doing it.
@@ahkkariq7406 The problem is that that the standards are way too different. Some kids don't know how to read properly and others have no problem with it. Same with maths and IT skills... Rural areas lack resources, and has lacked resources for quite a while, yet it's still underprioritized. Student that would want to study IT would be so far behind depending on where they live. Public schools from the age of 6 to 15 should have the same standards for education so that every students has a fair shot at choosing their own futures and education from age 16 onward, but that is not what we have today.
Old norse being more similar to Icelandic means that those countries would have a very hard time understand the spoken words, but quite possibly understanding the writing. It's much easier to understand written old Norse for a modern Nordic person. You also get more time to think when reading then when listening.
Maybe it's just me, but their English is amazing. The Danish lady would probably fool me had she introduced herself as American. I haven't visited Scandinavia yet, but if most of the people speak like them, then their level of English something I envy. Their diction and the way of enunciating makes them easier to understand than some native English speakers.
Students in Nordic countries start learning English from first grade, and have already gained some familiarity with the language in kindergarten (at least in Norway). English is taught throughout the course of education up to and including the first stage of upper secondary school. Only then can you opt out. In addition to the focus on English in school, it is not usual to dub programs on TV (this only happens for the youngest children), instead all programs are subtitled. Nordic children bathe in the English language from the time they can read. Much of the popular music is also in English, and they are on the internet and communicate with people from all over the world as soon as they have a good command of the language. No normally developed adults in the Nordics like dubbed programs on TV. We prefer the original language, and that also applies to languages other than English.
I grew up in Sweden and you are right my dear metatron we have in highschool and primary school small "history" about old norse but we never study it like you study latin in school in Italy, however we do have some days in the subject of swedish were we study or have a small test of norwegian and danish .... Icelandic is the most conservative of the scandinavian languagues...
Swede here, and i caught the "Thessum" meaning "this" since it is so similar to english rather than modern scandinavian (we would use the word "denna" instead), There is still some similarities between olde english and norse that modern scandinavian has lost,
11:50 I don't know what's the case with Nordic languages but for example in Dutch we have two different verbs for the English "live": - "wonen" which means to live somewhere as in to have your home there - "leven", meaning to live in the sense of being a living creature Still, both are quite basic words but I wondered if you were referring to the "being alive" kind of live, while they might have meant the "inhabiting" one. Or who knows it's even more complicated in those languages 😅
Hi there !! We do indeed have 2 different words to describe what you are asking. "Leve" (infinitiv) for your "Leven", and "Bo"(also infinitiv) for your "wonen". 🙂
in swedish bo/bodde/bor is like live in/lived in/living in, maybe second one could sound similar to the word they used in the video. and leva is more like living as in being alive
It would have been a lot better if they could afford proper sound quality on the recording, as well as someone who knew their own language (and maybe know something aboyt grammatical endings).
The biggest reason for many words being hard to recognise is because old Norse had more grammatical forms. Which icelandic kept and the others got rid of.
To cut a long story short; we don't learn about it, because noone knows what it sounded like and old Norse as we know it, is based on medieval Icelandic (west Norse). The written record of contemporary east Norse and west Norse are too simple and too often nearly the same sentence (i.e. "This rock was raised by the sons of Halfdan who died at so-and-so...") so it doesn't really make sense to even try on a general public basis. We learn about runes, how to write with them and so on, that is write modern Danish with them, but we don't learn the language which is contemporary with the use of runes (although runes were in some form of usage for much longer than their "official" use as a written language, f.ex. it was used to basically encode messages during war time for a very long time after our languages had evolved). Also because Latin very quickly became the administrative language because of the church, even the medieval old Danish f.ex. is not exactly numerous, but it's actually not that difficult to understand and likely not incredibly different from contemporary east Norse. There's a song in old Danish from a Scanian lawbook ca. 13th century which says "Drømdæ mik æn drøm i nat um silki ok ærlik pæl" in old Danish, if just read out phonetically it sounds a lot like the modern Danish equivalent "Drømte mig en drøm i nat om silke og ærlig pæl" just with more hard consonants. Tl;Dr we do learn about it, but nothing like Latin because there's just not enough of a written source for it, especially east Norse. I think you may have a bit of a Latin bias perhaps, or blind side maybe., as to the fact that contemporary languages with Latin in Europe wasn't written down, except in rocks which doesn't lend itself to a manuscript. Like, i know all of this just by paying attention in folkeskole and gymnasium (primary and secondary school, i guess) i'm not an academic lol
A huge difference when comparing old norse / modern scandinavian and latin / italian is that old norse haven't been used by anyone for a very long time, while latin have been used by the church. So the only reason ever to learn old norse is for the fun of it. And how often did someone go to school for the fun of it 100-200 years ago?
I have to say I'm really impressed with those girls, particularly with how bad the recording sounds! I couldn't imagine not only listening to an ancient form of my language but listening to it on such horrible quality. I don't think I would have guessed anything correctly! Lol.
As a Swede, I can say that I can't understand either Icelandic or Finnish, but Danish and Norwegian are so closely related to each other that I can understand almost every word, but sometimes I can find it a bit complicated. Luckely most Swedish, Danish and Norwegians can speak English, so that make it easier for most people in scandinavia to comunicate. I think that the geographic position of Iceland and Finland have made their base language shift to much during history. The fact that Finland is on the other side of the Baltic Sea has made it so that their language seems to have developed from those neighboring countries. And Icelandic has probably kept the root "Norse" so long because of their "issolation" from the "mainland".
I hate it when people here in Scandinavia switch over to English as soon as they encounter someone who speaks one of the other languages. We understand each other just fine when we speak our native languages, so stop switching to English! When it comes to Finnish being noticeably different, that's not because Finnish has changed more from Old Norse over time than the other Nordic languages. Finnish has no relationship to Old Norse. It's a Finno-Ugric language; Finnish is closer to Hungarian than it is to Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, German or English. The Finns are not the only Finno-Ugric speakers in the Nordics either; the Sami people also speak languages in the same language family.
@@KayJay01 I can agree a liitle that it can be anoying when some people switch over to english by default. I did default to english when I was younger to when I was talking to danish and norwegian speaking people because I couldn't understand them not because they couldn't understand me. But now, after gettintg more experience, I do understand more and have gotten more comfortable speaking swedish with them. I don't default to it now!
@@KayJay01 i can't agree, i'm not at all familiar with norwegian or danish, maybe it wouldn't be to bad if i was more familiar with it. norwegian can be understandable but there seem to be plenty of potential mistakes, and oslo is probably easier than some places. and limited experiences with danish was very challenging, pretty much didn't understand anything.
I am a Swede and a polyglot +5 (I speak all the above languages fluently) and I would say that I understand about 50-60% of the old norse if I get to read it and think about it a bit... Islandic people will understand around 90% or more of old Norse
Margir fuglar bjuggu i thessum skogi. Many Birds live in these forests. margir and bjuggu are words that don't exist in the modern Nordic languages, however the other form of margir mangir exists until today as mange, and a form of bjuggu exists as bo in Swedish.
Link to the original video
ruclips.net/video/GRO0YXDcQcg/видео.html
react to french differences from france belgium and quebec
It's a shame the Old Norse was recorded with a potato.
The recording was fine, it's from a different RUclips channel where Nordic speakers are trying to understand a professor speaking old Norse. It sounded better for them.
I think they're just playing snippets of Ecolinguist's vid with Crawford on a speaker with only room audio, no overdubs
Hey, it's not like we had microphones back then.
@@KayJay01the vikings didn't have potatoes either. They should have used a turnip.
@@element4element4
The contestants could hear it clearly and I guess that’s all that matters.
Crawford did a similar video. I think on Ecolinguist's channel. An Icelander took part and it was fairly easy for him. I hope Metatron reacts to it.
The clips are literally from that vid
@elchivo8244 I thought so, but wasn't sure. But I still think the format was done better.
the one with old norse and icelandic guy is hilarious - everyone has problems, it gets down the icelandic guy who says "oh it's similar" and says nearly 1:1 the same thing as the original :D
@@elchivo8244 i was about to say! I thought i recognized his voice, even through a loudspeaker lol
Icelandic is the true inheritors of the Viking legacy,… they were saved from foreign influence by being very isolated on an Island that were not very welcoming for immigrants and invaders. Icelandic ppl is how Vikings looked 1100 yrs ago.
Swede here. In school I never learned about the language, only that it existed pretty much and I learned a little bit about the runes, both old and new futhark. We mainly focused on the history. Most of what I know about old norse comes from Jackson Crawford pretty much.
Like previous comments have said, in school we learn Swedish and English from an early age, and when we are about 12 years old we will learn an additional language, most often Spanish, French or German. In high school I also had the option to learn basic Italian.
I have seen some other videos about old norse where Icelandic people have been present, and they definetly understand way more old norse than us Scandinavians.
Can confirm as a Norwegian - its mostly the same. If we happen to have a good teacher they could understand a bit of Old Norse and would try to teach it, but I dont think it is a requirement at all so it was more to show it and most of us didn't use any energy at it. We have a lot more focus on history sagas and Snorre Sagas (Heimskringla) and those was already translated in our textbook.
Swede here too. I had to study old norse at university.
Im probably older than you I could chooe spanish french and german but not italian.
you need to mention that you're speaking from the perspective of the public (lol) school system in sweden. people with engaged and committed parents put their kids into private schools instead and then the setup can be wildly different. if i recall in the public school system english classes start when people are 9 or something. private schools often start at 5-6, with additional languages added every few years. hell when i was 12 we were studying 5 languages at that point.
its also worth pointing out for people who do not know that in sweden private schools do not really cost any extra as it is still mostly covered by taxes, what it requires is only parents who are interested enough in their kids that they dont raise their kids through an automated system but instead take an active role in picking the best educational options.
@ Italian was in High School, when I was 16, and only because there was a teacher that knew Italian, so it is not very common I would presume. :P But that was over 20 years ago now so....not sure you are older than me. :P
Norwegian here, and we learned about Old Norse in school in the 90's when I was a kid/teen. We learned about the Futhark alphabet and how to write our own names, and we also learned about how Old Norse changed into modern Norwegian by introducing foreign words. One example my teacher used was "skomaker" in modern Norwegian, which is "shoemaker" in English. It's apparently and old Dutch word that made its way to Norway (likely via the Hanseatic League trade and Norwegians who worked in the Netherlands). The word replaced the Old Norse word for "shoemaker", which I forgot (which illustrates my point).
Also, in modern Norwegian the word for "forest" is "skog", so you can see the similarity with Old Norse. We simply shortened the word, which seems to be a common practice.
skogen is correct in bokmål but in dialect you might also find skau, also skog is not a shortening in the whole country, I have heard people use skogen in the context of a forest being far away as in "skogen over der" meaning the forest over there, I have noticed that places where they use skau more commonly they also use skauen a lot more compared to areas that use skogen, also the -en suffix translate to "the" as in bilen = the car, skoen = the shoe et cetera
Schoenmaker in Dutch :)
Another Norwegian here, I don't remember learning any of this at school. We also barely learnt anything at all of Norwegian literature history, I'm relearning it all now as an adult (and enjoying it).
Norwegian here as well xP
We did learn about old norse and runes, and I'd more often see someone who gets really into runes, actually use it, I know one person who used it to write a journal and adapted it a bit to compensate for the newer sounds/letters x)
So reading is one thing, but hearing it is another.
Norwegians at least around my age and older (‘95->) learnt about the Futhark and changes from Old Norse to Modern Norwegian. Especially the introduction of Low German vocabulary and Danish influence. I also especially remember that they taught us how Old Norse, like Icelandic today, has a case system that makes sentence structure more flexible than Scandinavian languages today. There was this example in the book about Olav and a horse, how the sentence could mean the exact same despite flipping the nouns, as long as the endings were conjugated according to their role in the sentence.
the producers added the challenge of having the voice play out of a 1980s walkman
the playback was horrible, I could not make out anything, not until I saw the text, but I could not hear a thing from that, it was like he spoke under water
The original audio is from a zoom call, so it's unfortunately terrible quality from the source
i don't think they had to use an ancient microphone for immersion
Thanks, this was really entertaining! I speak Icelandic and read a lot in Old Norse.
Icelandic is actually *extremely* similar to Old Norse. The whole language structure is essentially the same; what differs is mainly pronunciation, which is of course very speculative for O. N. It ceases to be a problem as soon as you get an Icelander to read your Old Norse for you 😆
They mistranslated the second sentence, by the way. Their sentence says 'many birds *lived* in this forest'. Otherwise it would be 'búa'. Small point, but it could have made a difference to people's ability to understand.
4:36 the modern word for forest (at least in swedish) is skog, and the forest is skogen. Pretty close to the old norse.
In Danish it's 'skov' and 'skoven'.
OK, first off, the pronunciation of the Old Norse sentences sounded like they were being pronounced by a Danish man that is being strangled while under water. Impossible to hear or understand, so no wonder they were unable to understand that.
Secondly, the sentence "Margir fuglar bjuggu í ɒessum skogi" was incorrectly translated. That sentence translates to "Many birds lived in this forest". What they said it translates to is "Many birds live in this forest", but "bjuggu" is actually the past tense of "búa". Búa means to live/reside in a place, and is very similar to the Norwegian dialect word "bu", which means to live/reside in a place - for example in Norwegian Nynorsk: "Ei bru der ingan kunna tru at nokon kunna bu", would mean "A bridge where no one could believe that anyone could live". The "bu" in that sentence means "to live" - just like "búa" in Old Norse. If they had gotten their sentence structure correct for the Old Norse, I think the Norwegian woman would have got that one.
Because they used "bjuggu" instead of "búa", they guessed that the sentence had something to do with the birds building nests, which is a good guess, as "bjuggu" is a lot like bygge or byggja in Norwegian, which both mean "to build", and if there is something birds build, its nests. This could lead one to incorrectly think that "Margir fuglar bjuggu í ɒessum skogi" translates to something like the modern sentence "Mange fugler bygger i disse skogene", meaning "Many birds build in these forests" - what do they build? nests. Why do they build them? To live in the forest. So "Many birds build nests (to live) in this forest".
But actually the translation is the slightly more macabre "Many birds lived in this forest", which leads one to wonder why they don't live there any more.
Norwegian here! We do study a little bit of the structural differences between the modern language and Old Norse. Like how cases work and the different word order. We do not study it a lot though. Maybe a few weeks in elementary school at age 13-15 and a little bit in highschool if you're in a theoretical minded highschool aswell.
How much does the sentence structure differ from modern Norwegian?
@iamrichlol Quite alot when we look at the poetry in Old Norse. Old Norse poetry could have any word order because of the case system and they often did play with word order. Alliteration in Norse poetry was key, and messing with word order makes it easier to create.
In the sagas the word order is more similar, but different in some aspects compared to the modern language.
You read Old Norse in highschool in Norway
@@se6369 Mostly translations, but a few examples of Norse poetry and some samples from the sagas
I think what confused them with "live" is that "bjuggu" is the plural past-tense of the of the verb "býr", we still do it like that in Icelandic. I´m pretty sure they are using the audio from one of Jackson Crawford´s videos, I remember those sentances but the audio is so bad here I could not understand a word. Icelandic is still close enough to old norse that most of us can still understand probably over 95% of it. ( found the original Crawford video ) you might like that one ruclips.net/video/5MRfVHU9fr0/видео.html
More of this please, I love this kind of content!
I can say in Japan they study Classical Japanese in both middle and high school, but it's not something that sticks with them. I can understand it significantly more than the vast majority of Japanese people, which isn't me singing my own praises. If Japanese people in general really hunkered down and studied it even a fraction as much as I have they'd leave me in the dust. Though I guess that just means that I get to have the privilege of being the one who tries to make it more accessible to English speakers and not another random Japanese guy who would make my understanding look like a joke. I guess being super into a very niche topic has its benefits after all.
In Sweden we do read the Icelandic sagas - which basically is the closest we get: old icelandic. Like Egil Skallagrimssons Saga.
It’s great the Italian students get some exposure to Latin as a source language for Italian.
Here in the U.S., some pre-college curricula offer a Latin course. My high school in California certainly didn’t. We could learn Spanish as an elective, which I’m thankful for taking. I feel we should at least have the option of also learning some Old English. But, you know, US primary education is hit-or-miss, depending on where you live and how well-funded your school is.
Interestingly, English also has silva as a word for tree.
Silvaculture, like agriculture, but meaning the cultivation of trees specifically.
That's so interesting, in Portuguese it has a similar meaning(name given to several kinds of bushes).
This has maybe changed in the last few decades, but as part of Swedish class, here in Sweden, we had a few lessons where we looked at our neighboring languages - Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Faroese - so that we would have a rudimentary knowledge of them and our common history. It wasn't a lot, but we had to read a text in each language, discuss what we could understand, and what the differences were. There was also a part of Hávamál in Old Norse for the historic context.
Always great content. Thank you.
Swede here, I will attempt to give my experience from my education and answer questions. We were taught about the Futhark in Swedish class, and the Vikings/Norse obviously show up during history class, but the Old Norse language itself isn't taught beyond illustrating what the letters stand for in the modern latin alphabet and a few words. It's been a fair few years since I would have taken those classes, but I know for sure we were taught about the Futhark when I was 16-17 in my First year of the Swedish equivalent of Highschool (Gymnasiet).
Modern Swedish for Forest is Skog or Skogen meaning The Forest.
I believe they are using the Audio from another video where an expert is doing a similar thing with a Dane, a Norwegian and an Icelandic guy. I recognize the sentences, so potentially they simply cut out those bits of audio.
Perhaps that video would be of interest for you to react to as well. If not, then simply to watch on your own time 🙂
You can find it by searching for "Can Scandinavians understand Old Norse" - the channel name is Ecolinguist.
Hey Dane here. I speak both Norwegian and Danish. I was taught about old norse in first grade and second grade, and I was taught more throughly about the langauge in high school. We also read the sagas both in history class, danish class, and religion class.
A Viking man can impress women by demonstrating how he takes his longship up a canal to deliver seeds which can be planted in fertile places.
In Germany when you go to highschool, there are 3 different levels of schools . There's the Gymnasium for advanced teachings (which is the hardest). There's medium. And then there's the "Hauptschule" for basic (this one's the easiest). Of course the school your parents pick for Ou will later decide over your career.
But latin is only taught in the upper level one, the Gymnasium. It's not taught in the two others.
In medium we've also had french. Well for those like me who chose it over working with wood. And English is taught in all three of them.
They also should have brought in an Icelander and a Faroe Islander. Icelandic and Faroese are the closest to Old Norse, so they would've had an easier time.
Faroese is clover than the others but it's nowhere near Icelandic in terms of cloeseness to Old Norse.
Icelandic is essentially the same language while a faroe islanders can only guestimate most of the sentances
The vocal fry is killing me
Norwegian here. In my fourties, I might add.
We learned a little bit about old Norse in school. I still almost remember some sayings we learned as examples.
they mention in the description of the original video that it is dr jackson crawford and the sentences are from ecolinguists video
My experience with old norse and futhark is basically from history education in school, I cannot specifically say when but somewhere between 4th and 9th grade. While we didn't go into speaking it, there was some reading exercises and rune-recognition exercises.
I'm only speculating here, but I think that the reason for us not really learning to speak it is due to the fact that it fell out of use where latin evolved and was used in the church for example, and Neo-Latin was used for scientific papers, and a form of it is the official language of the Vatican? Northern countries not only evolved languages away from old norse, and Christianity brought latin.
Hey! didn't know you had a second channel, glad I found it.
In high school I learned just some small details of Old Norse, and even Proto-Norse, small details about the futhark and some words but we did not learn the language. We learned some mostly related to learning about Swedish literature.
Though I truly wished these recordings were better, you can barely hear what is being said. Just based on what you shown so far.
I really wish these three would see the difference between a thorn þ and p.þessum being similar to Swedish dessa. It would be easier for them to connect the dots if they could. The bad sound recording did not help.
I learned about old norse in high school, but that was during a prep year for going to university, so I dont think people doing vocational studies (electricians, carpenters etc) have that in their curriculum.
Our study focused on how different it to modern Norwegian, taking a look at Danish influence, and getting a feel for the writing style of the old sagas.
You are absolutely correct in your guess that Icelandic speakers will understand more Old Norse, according to this video by "Ecolinguist" (with Dr. Jackson Crawford, which you should really watch!) You can see that a native Icelandic speaker's level of understanding of Old Norse is significantly higher than that of speakers of Danish and Norwegian: ruclips.net/video/5MRfVHU9fr0/видео.html
Yeah Swede here, as others have said we did learn about the runic alphabets some runic inscriptons etc, also because I live close to one of the most famous rune stones (Rökstenen, Rök Runestone) we had a school trip there, learned about Snorri Sturlusons poetic edda. I think there is a huge difference in Latin vs old Norse, there is huge amounts of preserved literature in Latin, while very little old norse is preserved, that is why Snorri Sturluson's poems are such a big source because it's some of few surviving literary works, but that is also just one dialect (icelandic) at one time (1100s) at the tail end of old Norse.. Otherwise it's very fragmented especially from the earlier times with just some rock carvings here and there..
I haven't learned any of the languages yet, but I can usually catch some words and phrases due to my Mennonite Low German background and my on / off studying of High German. Even my Finnish helps a little bit with the vocabulary, since Finland used to be ruled by Sweden and their language picked up a lot of Swedish loan words.
Norwegian here, we study Norwegian and English from first grade and then get a 3rd optional language from grade 10 and onwards (usually we get to pick from German,French and Spanish).
When I went to school in the 90's and ealry 00's we did not learn much about old norse, we learned some basic history around the viking period but most of what I learned about it was through me chosing to have an exam in norse history as my final exam during year 12 of school.
Commenting a third time, in case nobody mentioned it. 😅
I'm not sure about the Scandinavian languags, but at least in High German there are two different verbs for "to live": "leben" and "wohnen" (or "läwen" and "wonen" in my Low German). I think they can sometimes be used interchangeably, but the general rule that "leben" is usually used to say someone or something is alive, and "wohnen" is like saying "reside", so when talking about where you live ("Ich wohne in Kanada" = "I live in Canada", for example). It seems like these three also have a similar thing, since the Danish lady said both "lever" and "bor". Finnish actually had the same difference.
In old norse, the grammatic cases of Dativ and Accusative are used for location or direction. Like in German.
Skoginum is dativ and skogi is either genitiv or accusative (I think)
We don't only say "en" for one in norway. Depending dialect you can have, ein, ei and probably variants, more given how varied our spoken dialects are.
Swede here, we study Swedish from year 1 to year 9 in school then there are Gymnasium 1 year of Swedish and then you can choose advanced Swedish. We start studying English from year 3 to year 9 and then 1 year in Gymnasium and again you can choose to study advanced the remainder 2 years, we then start to study German or French or Spannish from year 6 to 9 and then Gymnasium you can choose to continue to study the third language if you want.
Oh and btw, im related to the man who first translated the runestones, his latin name was Johannes Thomae Agrivillensis Bureus. He also created a very comprehensive family book, which included the womens lines as well as bastards, which is why many swedes can trace their lineage back to him. Oh and im also related to the birka warrior woman. Just in case anyone thought it fun to know.
When I went to secondary school (35 years ago) we were introduced to old norse. We had selected text we had to learn and at least have some grasp of. I've been interested in old norse and icelandic ever since and now I have a fairly good grasp of it. Perhaps B1 or B2 level.
10:56 In Swedish, we use both the word "bo" and "rede" when referring to birds.
Fåglarna har sitt rede högt upp i trädet (The bird has its nest high up in the tree.)
I love Swedish so much, fun language
Skoginum - Skog today, Metatron.
We don't study Latin in France, unless it's a special option, so I'm not surprised they wouldn't study Old Norse either. The furthest we go, with the main teachings, is in reading Montaigne (1500s philosopher) which on a sentence-per-sentence basis is rather easy to understand, but pretty tiring if you keep on going: nearly all the words still exist to this day, but the way sentences are formed, the conjugation employed... all that reads pretty foreign already.
An Icelandic person would have added here. And a Dutch one might help a tiny bit. The "thessum" (with that special not th letter) would be "deze" in Dutch, however we would not use it together with wood/forest today. The problem with "live" in the wood/forest is that it's idiom and this easily changes over time. Birds may "live" there, they might "be" there or "habitate" there.
As to studying, learning our old language, this is a matter of preference and priority.
What comes first, understanding the old language, or being able to communicate with the neighbours?
So we spend the time on learning English and/or German and/or French and/or Spanish and/or Italian. And then many relatively late arrivals in the country still want to learn the language of the family elsewhere in the world.
The bjuggu really bugged me.
I tried to read a reprint of a book from 1880is . the worst thing was that the spelling of many words has changed a lot. so it felt like reading another language. they didn´t have a Islandic girl. because that is the language that has most common with old norse.
Try to hear Huldre. Its a danish folk metal band that sings in old nordic danish ^^
'what did you hear?'
i heard echo and reverb. sounded like a basketball court.
IIRC I believe I read a comment somewhere from an Icelander. He said that they can read and understand old Norse the same way we do Shakespearean english
In Wales, or rather Welsh-medium schools in Wales, we only study Middle Welsh (Cymraeg Canol) Welsh was c1250 as part of the A Level course if you study the Mabinogi (mythology which was written down in C13th) and court poetry from that period - people like Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Goch, Sion Cent etc. But, once you take out the unstandardised spelling (which is true of all European languages at the time) there isn't a huge difference, probably similar to Chaucer in English. But Middle Welsh isn't taught, it's close enough that you can understand it fairly easily though words have evolved and some structures seem old fashioned.
The written version of the first sentence was perfectly understandable as a Norwegian, but the audio quality made it impossible to make out a single word. The other sentence I didn't really understand.
I'm from Sweden, 33. And we made our own runestones in school. We were like maybe 8 or 9. So I don't remember much about it.
YAAAAAAAAAY OLD NORSE video!
A few notes to add:
I am assuming that the participants on this channel are not scholars for the most part.
It should be relatively obvious that “þessum” (or whatever it said) would mean something like “desse” and therefore also could be anything from “denne” to “den”.
The Norwegian “representative” should also make a point out of the fact that most Norwegians (at least geographically speaking) diverge substantially from Danish. At least when asked about the indefinite “einn” she could’ve mentioned that it’s also “ein” in Modern Norwegian. Or the “fuglar” which is also identical in Norwegian today. “Bjuggu” would be a stretch but imagine “å bu” (to live (somewhere)) or “å byggje” (to build) - there could be drawn a line between that and “to live” but I would personally guess “to build” as well.
Also the last (?) sentence was so random and out of context I’d be struggling with guessing the content anyways because it doesn’t make sense. Maybe it’d be better to choose some more regular sentences.
Would be fun to see an Icelandic / Faroese / Rural Norwegian here as well.
For authenticity they used a Viking Age speaker for the Old Norse.
As someone who speaks Dutch it's quite similar to what I know. Forest is really different, we say "bos"which, I just realised at 10:40, is similar to bosco in italian!
Latin was a written language, and survived into modern times. Old Norse wasn't really, it changed enormously. The Runes were so specific, memorials, written by experts. But yes, Icelandic for sure would have a better chance of understanding Old Norse, because they have some of the old way of pronouncing. The Icelandic author Snorri Sturlasson wrote most of it down in the 13th Century. And Actually, in the 13th century even Swedish was seldom written down. Those who could write, wrote in Latin (!).
As a Norwegian I had "old norse" and the runic (futhark) alphabeth in middle school. It was thechnically not old norse but the elder and younger edda, so close enough. We we're supposed to be able to read, somewhat understand spoken, and be able to "translate" to modern norwegian. If they'd pick someone from the west/northwest coast and nortward, they'd probably understand it even better, as they still have many spoken words which are similar, but maybe more different in the written form. This m8ght be true for people in the valley in the east as well, but not familiar enough with their dialect to say either or.. In regards to the birds they were correct in the translation "many birds builds in this forrest". This is the direct translation to modern, and while I'm not sure, I think it's technically the same in old norse, but the meaning behind building we're more in line with settling in a place. This meaning is also used in newer old lierature. So in short, if the bird builds in this forest, it also lives in this firest.
Yeah, I watched this the other day, and afterwards I was thinking where they would really do well is reading Old English.
I watch this video yesterday but had to give it up at the second audio because I could not hear what the sentence in Old Norse was. Like listening under water.
When I went to school in the 90s and into the 00s, we did learn some Old Norse, but it was not very in-depth, and was a little bit comperasions of a few words only, but it was only during 1 year, and a couple of classes locked for it, nothing over time, but we were giving some texts to read to try to see how much we could understand I recall. When reading it was easier to get some context of certain things, but spoken Old Norse is a different beast. Same with Icelandic. Faroese as well, but written Faroese is quiet easy to understand as its somewhat closer than Icelandic and Old Norse.
Norwegian by the way. Also with Norwegian, it also depends on your dialect, as Norway is the land of 5 million people and probably 5 million dialects almost 🤣
I'd say spoken Faroese is easier to understand for a Norwegian (especially from western Norway) than spoken Icelandic. Faroese is linguistically closer to modern Norwegian than Icelandic is, if I'm not mistaken.
@@Onnarashi Faroese is the closest of them, specially to some west coast dialects, and also to the most conservative dialect in Norway, the "Valle" dialect in Setesdalen, that also got a lot more of its norse roots, and still got some of the grammar that is found in Icelandic and Faroese, but that has died out in the continental languages.
We study English as our secondary language generally from 4th grade, sometimes as early as 1st grade and even kindergarten.
I think when Metatron says "at the moment I like norwegian the most" he is not talking about the labguage 😂
In Scandinavia its not mandatory to teach old Norse, but some enthusiastic teachers may teach it a bit if they find the time. One of my Swedish teachers actually had one lesson about it but i remember nothing
You can’t really compare learning old norse to latin. Old Norse have no written text exept for the runstones. So you can study futharken and read a runstone (or runes on an rock outcrop). Those are like giant short sms (most of them in Sweden). The rest is archaeology. While latin was written and the language of the church even here in scandinavia for a while. Historians here also go to other countrys to see what there is written about for ex the Vikings.
forest in Norwegian is skog/skogen. i also understod it when i could read it. almost got the second one too
We study lots of languages just not dead ones. I learned spanish from age 11-15 and german 15-19. And of course english. We start studying english when we are about 8 or 9 and continue throughout the mandatory school years (age 18-19).
Icelandic is the closest to Old Norse since their language is very insular and they can most likely understand a lot of Old Norse. We learn a lot about our history, the different time periods (first settlers, vendel period, viking age, middle ages etc.). I remember learning how to read/write runes to some extent. We knew about Old Norse but we didn't learn about the language itself beside the fact it's the language that all but one Nordic country stems from. I don't know if todays school go as deep into it as my generation did.
Jackson Crawford did a version of this on his channel I believe. It was much more realistic.
As a Dane i can tell you that when i was in school we were all taught on Norse mythology
We do learn about Old Norse, at least here in Sweden. Its history, pronunciation, how it relates to modern North Germanic languages and how to read runes. But we don't really learn how to understand or speak it. People generally don't feel any need to learn it since it isn't super useful. Icelanders seem to understand it pretty well though.
In Norwegian high school we have to learn both bokmål and nynorsk (one as the main the other as the secondary). In addition, we do have to learn about some sagas which are translated but also display some of the original. We are not taught the language but we are exposed a bit to it.
On the other hand schools are more preoccupied with teaching kids how to knit, and as of late, how to make meh food, while things such as mathematics are put on hold (last time I worked with a kid they said that they were only introduced to calculating areas in like 6th or 7th grade which is about 3 years later than some other countries). So, them not knowing Old Norse when they already have a bad language system with two languages and a poor school career, shouldn’t come as a surprise.
As a former teacher, also in mathematics, I can say that Norwegian schools are extremely concerned that everyone should go through the same syllabus at all times. The legislation gives the opportunity to do things differently, but there cannot be fixed level groups that work over a long period of time. This can be solved by having a fluid transition between the groups, and by having different groups in different subjects.
I have tested level division at grade 4. - 6. over three years, and had very good results with it. The students in all three level groups benefited from it. The brightest students in Norway are held back because one teacher does not have the capacity to teach several different levels at the same time in a class of 20 students or more. The reason I was able to test it out was that I worked at a school with two teachers who shared the entire grade, approx. 40 students. Therefore, we had greater flexibility, but I was the only one who tried it out. There is a consensus in Norway that students lift each other up when they work together at different levels. The only problem is that the brightest don't get the challenges they need.
In my class, they were only divided when teaching was going on. They went back to their desks and worked on assignments with the whole class, so they had the chance to work across the level groups while working independently on the subject.
To my knowledge in Sweden, English is a required subject from the very first grade, then German Spanish or French from seventh grade, if a school offers other languages for a trinary they can offer those like mandarin Chinese. We learn of Norwegian and Danish and the protocol requires some ability to understand them but otherwise there's no old norse studying in the slightest. I see more value in learning latin than old norse.
As Norwegian (of the older type) we did not learn old norse, we learned about the vikings and all that ofcourse, learned what runes are and in some cases typed our names. That said . we learn from early age 3 languages at school, we have norwegian ofcourse like bokmål that is the main language you learn, then you have classes in New Norwegian (Nynorsk) both spoken and written, and ofcourse we learn English... some even takes German or french or some other languages as "Valgfag"... also if you are of other etnicity like Italian you have the right to have some classes with italian ... and if you are sami you ofcourse have the right to learn Sami as well, we call it "Morsmål" as in mothers tounge.
All this while we speak our own dialects...
With all this said, the trick with old norse is to read it with nynorsk, many older nynorsk words are similar ... at 4:35 in Norwegian you say Snøen in norse its Snjór, fell(norse) falle (norwegian nynorsk) einn (norse) einn and in norwegian you would use "en" or in nynorsk "Ein"
Dag is pretty much the same now as then, Skóginum ... well Skog in norwegian, or Skogen ... that goes to both nynorsk and norwegian.
"bo" for nest was probably considered cute because its the verb "to reside/live in" in Norwegian and Danish
As as swede, having listened to old Norse. I could kind of understand that "Oh that word is probably bird, stone, forest, ect." But I didn't understand what the point was.
Icelandic people can actually understand old norse but they will think they speak funny and some words here and there doesn't work.
Swedish word for forest is "Skog"
Yes, scandinavia has a good spot to learn both german and english. Listening to german or english without knowing it only knowing Swedish can actually a very similar experience to listening to old Norse. Like you kind of recognize some words and put them together to make sense.
I'd say they represent the average person well.
The word bygge/byggja still means to inhabit/'live somewhere' in Norwegian. But it's rarely used in that way, it usually means to build, so I'm not surprised a native speaker might not recognise that meaning
Quite surprising, yes.
Hello, I am Danish. We learn more often Latin in Danish schools than Old Norse. I had Latin in public school in school when I was 13 years old, and I also had it (all over again) in the gymnasium/high school.
Old Norse is not considered as a direct predecessor of Danish. Old Norse is in reality Old Icelandic. That might explain it. But of course Old Danish from the 9th Century and Old Norse would be very related. In Denmark we miss old litterature as the Icelandic sagas.
As a Norwegian speaker, I find it really weird that they couldn't understand "Skóginum" at first. The modern word is "Skog", which is pronounced very differently, but it's very easy to see the connection.
I mean it depends from where you live (speaking from a Norwegian perspective). I lived in a more rural area in Norway as a child, and I was taught the songs and about Håvamål in detail, but I heard that kids in the bigger cities don't learn much about other than history wise. The education system isn't equal across the country even though we love to brag about it.
Teachers in Norwegian schools have quite a lot of freedom to focus on what they themselves have expertise in. The goals in the subject plan are general, but due to time pressure, most choose to follow the textbooks in the subjects, but spend different amounts of time on the various subjects. As a former teacher, I think that boasting that education is the same for everyone shows little understanding that all people are different. We should differentiate much more than we do. I have tried it myself, and have very good experiences doing it.
@@ahkkariq7406 The problem is that that the standards are way too different. Some kids don't know how to read properly and others have no problem with it. Same with maths and IT skills... Rural areas lack resources, and has lacked resources for quite a while, yet it's still underprioritized. Student that would want to study IT would be so far behind depending on where they live. Public schools from the age of 6 to 15 should have the same standards for education so that every students has a fair shot at choosing their own futures and education from age 16 onward, but that is not what we have today.
Old norse being more similar to Icelandic means that those countries would have a very hard time understand the spoken words, but quite possibly understanding the writing. It's much easier to understand written old Norse for a modern Nordic person. You also get more time to think when reading then when listening.
Maybe it's just me, but their English is amazing. The Danish lady would probably fool me had she introduced herself as American. I haven't visited Scandinavia yet, but if most of the people speak like them, then their level of English something I envy. Their diction and the way of enunciating makes them easier to understand than some native English speakers.
Students in Nordic countries start learning English from first grade, and have already gained some familiarity with the language in kindergarten (at least in Norway). English is taught throughout the course of education up to and including the first stage of upper secondary school. Only then can you opt out.
In addition to the focus on English in school, it is not usual to dub programs on TV (this only happens for the youngest children), instead all programs are subtitled. Nordic children bathe in the English language from the time they can read. Much of the popular music is also in English, and they are on the internet and communicate with people from all over the world as soon as they have a good command of the language. No normally developed adults in the Nordics like dubbed programs on TV. We prefer the original language, and that also applies to languages other than English.
I grew up in Sweden and you are right my dear metatron we have in highschool and primary school small "history" about old norse but we never study it like you study latin in school in Italy, however we do have some days in the subject of swedish were we study or have a small test of norwegian and danish .... Icelandic is the most conservative of the scandinavian languagues...
Swede here, and i caught the "Thessum" meaning "this" since it is so similar to english rather than modern scandinavian (we would use the word "denna" instead), There is still some similarities between olde english and norse that modern scandinavian has lost,
11:50 I don't know what's the case with Nordic languages but for example in Dutch we have two different verbs for the English "live":
- "wonen" which means to live somewhere as in to have your home there
- "leven", meaning to live in the sense of being a living creature
Still, both are quite basic words but I wondered if you were referring to the "being alive" kind of live, while they might have meant the "inhabiting" one. Or who knows it's even more complicated in those languages 😅
Hi there !! We do indeed have 2 different words to describe what you are asking. "Leve" (infinitiv) for your "Leven", and "Bo"(also infinitiv) for your "wonen". 🙂
in swedish
bo/bodde/bor is like live in/lived in/living in, maybe second one could sound similar to the word they used in the video.
and leva is more like living as in being alive
It would have been a lot better if they could afford proper sound quality on the recording, as well as someone who knew their own language (and maybe know something aboyt grammatical endings).
Professor Crawford did a similar video for ecolinguist. also, Eco has one with old English.
This morning he released "could a viking understand modern Norwegian? "
I agree with you about Icelandic.
Modern word for forest is "skog" in all three I believe.
They needed someone from iceland. From what i heard Icelandic is currently the closest major language to old norse
Today Jackson Crawford released "Could a viking understand modern Norwegian?"😅
The biggest reason for many words being hard to recognise is because old Norse had more grammatical forms. Which icelandic kept and the others got rid of.
We studied runes in elementary, but we didn't really delve deep into it.
You've done the Prof. Jackson Crawford one, right? Same concept. No cute girls though. The the Icelander nailing it. Of course.
The old Norse in this video is Prof. Jackson Crawford, from the video you are talking about on the Ecolinguist channel.
To cut a long story short; we don't learn about it, because noone knows what it sounded like and old Norse as we know it, is based on medieval Icelandic (west Norse). The written record of contemporary east Norse and west Norse are too simple and too often nearly the same sentence (i.e. "This rock was raised by the sons of Halfdan who died at so-and-so...") so it doesn't really make sense to even try on a general public basis.
We learn about runes, how to write with them and so on, that is write modern Danish with them, but we don't learn the language which is contemporary with the use of runes (although runes were in some form of usage for much longer than their "official" use as a written language, f.ex. it was used to basically encode messages during war time for a very long time after our languages had evolved).
Also because Latin very quickly became the administrative language because of the church, even the medieval old Danish f.ex. is not exactly numerous, but it's actually not that difficult to understand and likely not incredibly different from contemporary east Norse. There's a song in old Danish from a Scanian lawbook ca. 13th century which says "Drømdæ mik æn drøm i nat um silki ok ærlik pæl" in old Danish, if just read out phonetically it sounds a lot like the modern Danish equivalent "Drømte mig en drøm i nat om silke og ærlig pæl" just with more hard consonants.
Tl;Dr we do learn about it, but nothing like Latin because there's just not enough of a written source for it, especially east Norse. I think you may have a bit of a Latin bias perhaps, or blind side maybe., as to the fact that contemporary languages with Latin in Europe wasn't written down, except in rocks which doesn't lend itself to a manuscript.
Like, i know all of this just by paying attention in folkeskole and gymnasium (primary and secondary school, i guess) i'm not an academic lol
A huge difference when comparing old norse / modern scandinavian and latin / italian is that old norse haven't been used by anyone for a very long time, while latin have been used by the church. So the only reason ever to learn old norse is for the fun of it. And how often did someone go to school for the fun of it 100-200 years ago?
I have to say I'm really impressed with those girls, particularly with how bad the recording sounds!
I couldn't imagine not only listening to an ancient form of my language but listening to it on such horrible quality. I don't think I would have guessed anything correctly! Lol.
As a Swede, I can say that I can't understand either Icelandic or Finnish, but Danish and Norwegian are so closely related to each other that I can understand almost every word, but sometimes I can find it a bit complicated. Luckely most Swedish, Danish and Norwegians can speak English, so that make it easier for most people in scandinavia to comunicate.
I think that the geographic position of Iceland and Finland have made their base language shift to much during history.
The fact that Finland is on the other side of the Baltic Sea has made it so that their language seems to have developed from those neighboring countries. And Icelandic has probably kept the root "Norse" so long because of their "issolation" from the "mainland".
I hate it when people here in Scandinavia switch over to English as soon as they encounter someone who speaks one of the other languages. We understand each other just fine when we speak our native languages, so stop switching to English!
When it comes to Finnish being noticeably different, that's not because Finnish has changed more from Old Norse over time than the other Nordic languages. Finnish has no relationship to Old Norse. It's a Finno-Ugric language; Finnish is closer to Hungarian than it is to Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, German or English. The Finns are not the only Finno-Ugric speakers in the Nordics either; the Sami people also speak languages in the same language family.
@@KayJay01
I can agree a liitle that it can be anoying when some people switch over to english by default. I did default to english when I was younger to when I was talking to danish and norwegian speaking people because I couldn't understand them not because they couldn't understand me. But now, after gettintg more experience, I do understand more and have gotten more comfortable speaking swedish with them. I don't default to it now!
@@KayJay01 i can't agree, i'm not at all familiar with norwegian or danish, maybe it wouldn't be to bad if i was more familiar with it.
norwegian can be understandable but there seem to be plenty of potential mistakes, and oslo is probably easier than some places.
and limited experiences with danish was very challenging, pretty much didn't understand anything.
I am a Swede and a polyglot +5 (I speak all the above languages fluently) and I would say that I understand about 50-60% of the old norse if I get to read it and think about it a bit... Islandic people will understand around 90% or more of old Norse
Margir fuglar bjuggu i thessum skogi.
Many Birds live in these forests.
margir and bjuggu are words that don't exist in the modern Nordic languages, however the other form of margir mangir exists until today as mange, and a form of bjuggu exists as bo in Swedish.