this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

As a Dutch person I never realized I might be able to make sense of Icelandic! This sentence is quite decipherable

[–] olafurp 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I speak both, there is plenty of vocabulary differences but the sentence structure is almost identical and most germanic vocab is shared. Dutch has a lot of Latin vocab which is non-existent in Icelandic (introductie for example).

Icelandic also comes with a grammar DLC with declined nouns and 3 genders that also apply to definite articles that are suffixes instead of standalone words.

"Ég hef ekki gert neitt" Is translated as "Ik heb niets gedaan"

"Hann kann að tala eins og faðir minn" Is "Hij weet hoe to spreken zoals m'n vader."

But then you get "Stjórnmálamenn eru krabbamein samfélagsins" which is harder. Stjórn-mála-menn is rooted in "Steering", mál has the same root as "meal" but here means a case such as legal case "mealtime" in Icelandic has it's counterpart "máltíð". Menn is English "men". Eru is same as "are". Krabba-mein is "crab" and "mean" which means cancer. Sam-félag is Dutch "samen" and English "fellowship" which means society.

It's weird how pretty much every word can be separated into pieces and looked up to see where the shared between other germanic languages. The usage has obviously changed a lot in the last 1500 years but the connection is still there. :)

I'm autistic btw, this is one of my special interests, sorry if it's too long.

Sorry for bad Dutch spelling, I never learned to spell Dutch.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 23 hours ago

Cool, thanks for explaining!