Nordic Countries

Perun said:
You're not a philologist, I take it?
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Get surprised, dazed and confused: I am a language scholar as my mom was.
I can call modern Russian "purebred" as no language has ever influenced it's grammar as much as Anglo-Normandic did to Old and Middle English.
 
1. A linguist preferring languages not to evolve... wow.
2. *Anglo-Norman
3. *its grammar
4. Old English existed way before 1066.
 
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Freeyyaa said:
Get surprised, dazed and confused: I am a language scholar as my mom was.
I can call modern Russian "purebred" as no language has ever influenced it's grammar as much as Anglo-Normandic did to Old and Middle English.
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Then please enlighten a fellow language scholar - in my case, a philologist - how it is justified to use Biological terminology such as "purebred" in reference to a language, how a language can only evolve if it is secluded from outside influence, and how Russian can be purebred if the very name of its language is of foreign origin...
 
And I Wonder why Icelandic still exists if it have always been secluded.
P.S. and un peu d'offtop...
Mister Perun what is your ethnic adherence and your mother tongue?
The thread is for all aspects of Nordic countries not only the languages. What about daily life?
 
I'm not answering your question before you answer mine.
 
Ariana said:
Really? How do you call the Internet, the telephones and the automobiles in Russia?
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I might get her point simply because Croatian belongs to same language family, and absolutely does not tolerate any invented new words for these. They sound stupid and nobody uses them. So we use - Internet, telefon, automobil.
From my layman perspective they're conservative languages. My Polish colleague told me that he could fluently read 17th century works.
 
Zare said:
I might get her point simply because Croatian belongs to same language family, and absolutely does not tolerate any invented new words for these. They sound stupid and nobody uses them. So we use - Internet, telefon, automobil.
From my layman perspective they're conservative languages. My Polish colleague told me that he could fluently read 17th century works.
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But that's the thing, isn't it? If you freely adopt loan words and smoothly integrate them in your language, with the relevant grammatical changes that govern all other vocabulary items (cases, gender, etc.), how can the language be conservative, let alone "purebred"?
 
How reliable are Russian scholars when they (while having endured state control and media, for decades, if not centuries) teach what they are told to teach, rather than teach what is correctly researched.
 
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Ariana said:
But that's the thing, isn't it? If you freely adopt loan words and smoothly integrate them in your language, with the relevant grammatical changes that govern all other vocabulary items (cases, gender, etc.), how can the language be conservative, let alone "purebred"?
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As Perun said it's a term from biology and I don't know what's the context behind it either.
 
There have been several famous historical "experiments" where newborn children were never spoken to, in order to see what "natural" language they would come up with. Amazingly, all such experiments resulted in the local national language declared as the "natural" tongue (except for one where the kid supposedly started speaking Hebrew spontaneously, thanks Jehovah).

People will go to cruel lengths to prove their language is "pure".
 
That story is age-old. And I literally mean, thousands of years. Herodotus reports it, and I think there are earlier versions of the story as well.
 
On topic.

A Finnish man was caught by cannibals somewhere in the world. They put him in a big pot, put it over a fire and left him there for an hour or so. After an hour, they decided to take off the lid and check if their dinner was properly cooked.

A smiling face looked up from the pot. The Finnish guy was very much alive and kicking, and said to the cannibals:

- Thank you for the lovely sauna. Now can I have a towel please?
 
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