Language
See also: Icelandic language and Linguistic purism in IcelandicThe principal language of Iceland is Icelandic, a highly inflected North Germanic language. Danish and English are also taught in schools. Linguistic purism is strongly supported in Iceland in an attempt to prevent loanwords from entering the language. Instead, neologisms are coined from Icelandic roots, creating a compound word to describe new concepts. It is often the case that old words which are no longer used are recycled with a new meaning. It should be noted, however, that some loanwords persist in Icelandic, and many more, the majority anglicisms, are used in everyday speech.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Iceland
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“He had not failed to observe how harmoniously gigantic language and a microscopic topic go together.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)