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Icelandic is an Indo-European language and belongs to the North Germanic group of the Germanic languages. Icelandic is further classified as a West Scandinavian language. [8] Icelandic is derived from an earlier language Old Norse, which later became Old Icelandic and currently Modern Icelandic. The division between old and modern Icelandic is ...
A telephone poll in 2011 indicates that 88% of Icelandic people hear English every day, and 65% hear English more than one hour a day. [ 4 ] Temporary visitors and residents often make up a large portion of the population, especially in the capital Reykjavík .
Among the top 100 words in the English language, which make up more than 50% of all written English, the average word has more than 15 senses, [134] which makes the odds against a correct translation about 15 to 1 if each sense maps to a different word in the target language. Most common English words have at least two senses, which produces 50 ...
Like other Germanic languages, Icelandic words have a tendency to be compounded. This means that many small component words can be connected together to create a word with a new meaning. Take the example to right, hlutabréfamarkaður (‘stock market’), which is made from the words hluti (‘share’), bréf (‘paper’) and markaður ...
There is one count that puts the English vocabulary at about 1 million words—but that count presumably includes words such as Latin species names, prefixed and suffixed words, scientific terminology, jargon, foreign words of extremely limited English use and technical acronyms. [43] [44] [45] Urdu: 264,000
Sapir and Zuckermann (2008) demonstrate how Icelandic "camouflages" many English words by means of phono-semantic matching. [3] For example, the Icelandic-looking word eyðni, meaning "AIDS", is a phonosemantic match of the English acronym AIDS, using the existing Icelandic verb eyða ("to destroy") and the Icelandic nominal suffix -ni.
Icelandic grammar is the set of structural rules that describe the use of the Icelandic language.. Icelandic is a heavily inflected language.Icelandic nouns are assigned to one of three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, or neuter), and are declined into four cases (nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive).
A 2005 survey of words used by speakers of the Scandinavian languages showed that the number of English loanwords used in the languages has doubled during the last 30 years and is now 1.2%. Icelandic has imported fewer English words than the other North Germanic languages, despite the fact that it is the country that uses English most. [26]