Comment by masklinn
5 hours ago
> I don't know how similar Icelandic is to other Nordic/Scandinavian languages so maybe a speaker of these languages would have been able to identify the lyrics
Not likely, Icelandic has kept much closer to old norse in grammar and phonology so sounds nothing like continental scandinavian (also much prefers neologisms to loanwords, but that’s maybe less of an issue for song lyrics). You’d have had to ask specifically icelanders, maybe faroe islanders as a last recourse, but there’s a lot less of the latter than the former.
Yeah, as a Norwegian, I can sometimes somewhat read Icelandic, but it takes a lot of effort, and it sounds familiar but not enough for me to remotely reliably transcribe.
As a Swede, Icelandic is a foreign to me as Finnish, meaning I don't understand it at all, in any way. Some words could be guessed, but that's the same for German too for most of us. Danish and Norwegian people I have no problem talking with though.
I might be biased with some exposure to Norse and Old English too, so I don't know whether Norwegians without that would recognise nearly as much (or little) Icelandic given how much Icelandic still takes from Norse.
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