🚀 go-pugleaf

simmonds@olympus.net writes:
>in branch A alone will be perceived as "archaic" by speakers of branch
>>B, and vice versa. Taken as wholes, however, both branches are equally
>>modern, since they are spoken contemporaneously.
>
>Would you say that icelandic is not more archaic than Swedish?  My 
>understanding is that an icelander can read the sagas as easily as the daily 
>paper, and I doubt if a modern swede could handle them without extensive help.

Nevertheless both Modern Icelandic and Modern Swedish are just
that, modern, which somehow sounds like the opposite to "archaic"
to me.

A better word seems to be "conservative". Icelandic is more conser-
vative than Swedish in some senses since it retains four cases while
Swedish only has two. On the other hand Swedish retains initial vr-,
whereas this has become r- only in Icelandic. The book I have on the
history of the Swedish langauge gives the example "vrether" in Old
Swedish paired with "reidhr" in Icelandic (don't know if it's Old
or Modern). In Modern Swedish it is "vred" (angry).

As pointed out in another posting Icelandic is a sort of a special
case, since one has deliberately gone back to an older spelling.
Nevertheless the modern language is modern and not archaic. How-
ever when you speak or write Swedish with different forms of the
verbs in plural and singular, you are indeed being archaic since
these forms are not in use in the modern language, but alive as
precisely archaic forms. (Where as old case inflexions are almost
completely dead. Some pronoun forms remains in dialects; however,
whether the distinction remains, or whether a different choice
of common object pronoun has been made, I don't know.)
-- 
Erland Sommarskog, sommar@enea.se, Stockholm
Au meme instant, une voiture s'arretait devant la porte; Trois ans
plus tard - le 5 mai 1821 - l'empereur mourait.