Not nearly as unnerving as doing your daily English-language blog browsing, and suddenly seeing a phrase in your native language crop up onscreen.

(Bad) Translation: "They were going to walk over the bridge between life and death, but they got shot at. There's a discussion about the article over at Making Light. The news from NOLA just keeps getting prettier and prettier."

This probably comes as no surprise, but while the disaster itself has garnered a lot of media attention abroad, the horrible mistakes and human-created problems in its aftermath tend to come up more often in general conversation.

Posted September 8, 2005 1:43 PM by Hjalti

Thanks for the translation, Hjalti. The hurricane was dreadful, but the human-created aftermath is much, much worse.

You probably know this, but I'll explain it anyway: To Anglophone medievalists, your native language looks like millennium-old English (okay, Anglo-Saxon) literature. I've occasionally been linked to by Icelandic weblogs and gone to have a look at them, and it's always been a little dizzying to see orthography I associate with Beowulf being used to discuss football matches and Buffy.

I'm sure that if I were exposed to enough modern Icelandic, the effect would wear off; but for now, it's still startling.

Posted September 8, 2005 2:07 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

I'm from a part of England which was part of the Danelaw, and once you get past the orthography a lot of it is recognisable.

Stories I've heard, the Geordie dialect is pretty close to Icelandic.

Posted September 8, 2005 2:33 PM by Dave Bell

Dang, I thought by the headline I was being talked about.. I suppose with all the kids I have we could be called a thicket of Thorns...

Posted September 8, 2005 3:06 PM by Steve Thorn

Icelandic is Old Norse kept alive - very close relative to Old English. It's just infuriatingly _almost_ readable to me, a Norwegian from the west country.

Posted September 8, 2005 6:44 PM by Roy G. Ovrebo

I lived within the coverage area of Geordie TV for a good many years, and saw one or two stories about Newcastle-upon-Tyne being a popular weekend break destination with Icelanders, because they'd discovered that Geordie and Icelandic are more or less mutually intelligible.

Posted September 8, 2005 6:52 PM by Julia Jones

That might explain why I've never been able to make heads or tails of spoken Geordie.

Posted September 8, 2005 7:16 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

What Teresa isn't saying is that the two days we spent in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on our TAFF trip in 1985 were perhaps the most terrifying of our life. I've had significantly less difficulty understanding what was being said to me in Mexico, France, and Glasgow taxicabs.

Posted September 8, 2005 9:47 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

But everyone was very kind! It was just that our understanding lagged a sentence or two behind everyone else's -- and that was when we understood the sentences at all. We didn't realize how stressful that was until suddenly we were exhausted.

Posted September 8, 2005 10:15 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Try Shetland. I don't know what they're speaking up there. Supposedly it's English but I can't understand a word of it. It's not lowland Scots, it's not Doric, it's not Gaelic, it's not standard English - it sounds like some awful mixture of Norwegian and Afrikaans spoken by a stoned Yorkshireman.
And every January they all dress up as Vikings and set a longship on fire. Mad as stoats, the lot of them. It's the long winters.

Posted September 9, 2005 4:57 AM by ajay