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Warning sign

Warning sign at the start of the path to the Reykjanes eruption
Icelandic and English are to be expected but the third language shows just how many Poles there are working in Iceland!
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21 comments

Keith Burton said:

All common sense for most people, I would have thought..............but I suppose the authorities have to be seen to be trying to keep people safe and well.

They've missed out telling people not to swim in the lava :-))
19 months ago

Gudrun replied to Keith Burton:

Haha, some people recently nearly did- they went on lava that was still fluid and hot underneath and were accidentally filmed by a drone. Rescue services said if something happened in such cases they wouldn't be able to help as it would endanger their own lives...
There are always idiots that are even more stupid than anyone can imagine;-)
19 months ago

slgwv said:

In this country the lawyers make you put up warnings, to shield you from liability. I guess the legal theory is that there's no such thing as common sense--and they may have a point! ;)

And yes, I would not have expected Polish in Iceland!
19 months ago

Gudrun replied to slgwv:

Thanks, Steve! I suspect Icelanders have started putting up such signs because of tourists from countries like the U.S.
There are lots of Poles in the hospitality sector, we stayed at a farm hotel where only young Poles worked. Our Icelandic guide was at first a bit put off that nobody understood Icelandic;-) We got by with English though even their English wasn't too great.
19 months ago

slgwv said:

And, looking at the Icelandic reminds me that Icelandic, the most conservative of the Germanic languages, and English, the most innovative, alone preserve the sounds of þ and đ. (Both spelled, indifferently, "th" in Modern English, due to those historical reasons. Thank the Normans, largely! Although thorn did linger into early Modern English--the "y" in "ye old shoppe" is actually a thorn(!) )

An interesting irony, I guess--
19 months ago

Gudrun replied to slgwv:

Ah yes, English also has these sounds! Icelandic is pretty much unchanged from old Norse- whereas modern Norwegian (bokmal) is heavily influenced by Danish....
I have always been intrigued by the Norse origins of some English place names.
Fun fact- genetic sequencing in Iceland has found lots of celtic genes in females, Vikings used to raid Ireland and Britain and brought back women.
19 months ago

Marta Wojtkowska said:

Fantastic :D
Almost like the Rosetta Stone :D
19 months ago

Boarischa Krautmo replied to Marta Wojtkowska:

;-)))))))))))))))))))))))))))
19 months ago ( translate )

Gudrun replied to Marta Wojtkowska:

Thanks a lot, Marta! Lol, plenty of Polish workers, many in hotels and in tourism! As Icelandic is very hard to learn they usually get by with English but not all of them speak it well...
19 months ago

Gudrun replied to Boarischa Krautmo:

:-) Die hätten's noch in Spanisch und Italienisch draufschreiben sollen, denn diese Nationalitäten waren meistens die in Jeans und Turnschuhen und mit kleinen Kindern....
Dabei hat jeder, sobald er nur in der Nähe war, automatisch eine Warnmeldung aufs Handy bekommen, aber halt auf Englisch (Kinder unter 12 sollen nicht mit, weil sich die Gase am Boden ansammeln...)
19 months ago ( translate )

Gillian Everett said:

How interesting to have this in Polish as well. Glad that there is a warning sign. Volcanoes might be relatively safe at times, but there is always the unexpected eruption, for example, New Zealand just a couple of years ago...
www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-27/new-zealand-white-island-volcano-disaster-four-corners/12150706
19 months ago

Gudrun replied to Gillian Everett:

Thanks a lot, Gillian! Oh, I read about White Island at the time. I have always been aware that there was a risk going there, and that the alert level had been raised! So I thought it totally irresponsible to offer such a tour to cruise passengers.
Icelandic authorities are very good and well prepared, every smartphone entering the area gets an automatic warning text! The problem are the idiots who choose to ignore the warnings....
19 months ago

Keith Burton replied to Gudrun:

Unbelievable..!!
19 months ago ( translate )

slgwv replied to Gudrun:

Yeah, thank the Norse settlements in England (the “Danelaw”) for all the old Norse forms in modern English. Apparently Old English and Old Norse were still so close that in a largely pre-literate culture people lost track of which word came from where. (It’s also said that the Vikings and the English in battle could understand each others’ insults!) Hence you can find North Germanic instead of West Germanic roots in modern English; cf. “knife” vs. “Messer.” There are even some pairs, e.g., draw/drag, shirt/skirt, tow/tug, where the first comes from the native English root, the second from the Old Norse form.

Not surprising, I guess, about the DNA. Presumably they’re looking at mitochondrial DNA, which is strictly matrilineal.

The late science-fiction writer Poul Anderson, who was of Scandinavian extraction, wrote a time-travel story (“The Man Who Came Early”) about an Icelandic-speaking US soldier who found himself kicked back in time on Iceland and could still understand the local speech.
19 months ago

Gudrun replied to slgwv:

The development of languages is highly interesting, words derived from Old English/ Norse still being in use today alongside others that came with the Norman conquest. The latter are the words everyone with a knowledge of Latin languages can understand without knowing English.
And btw- in northern Germany they have a language (bit more than a dialect) called Plattdeutsch which has similarities to Dutch (Frisian) and English and which people from other German regions can hardly understand;-)
19 months ago