BBC reports on all-Elfdalian preschool

John Cowan cowan at mercury.ccil.org
Mon Mar 21 23:31:33 CET 2016


Kent Karlsson scripsit:

> My understanding is that modern Icelandic is much closer to Old Norse,
> going back a millennia. 

Indeed.  However, Elfdalian probably split off from the rest of Old
Norse *before* it assumed its written form.  See this slide deck:
<http://inss.ku.dk/ansatte/?pure=files/35220983/elfdalian.pdf>.
I'll quote the conclusion:

    Conclusion: since the rounding before assimilated nasals is
    specifically a Elfdalian development, the predecessor of the language
    must have started diverging from the other Scandinavian dialects
    during the earliest stage of Old Norse.

To be sure, Elfdalian has experienced convergence as well as divergence,
as is typical.  When English English split from American English about
1700, all English was at least partly rhotic, but there are non-rhotic
American varieties today in the East, the South, and among African
Americans that are the result of later convergence with English English
forms.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Tautology is something that is tautological.  --Francois-Rene Rideau


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