#Faroese

[folkfashion]

Faroese woman and girls, Faroe Islands, by Visit Faroe Islands

[yvanspijk]

Dear means 'valued; precious; beloved'. However, in certain expressions it also means 'expensive', such as in to cost dear. This meaning, inherited from Proto-Germanic, became dominant in cognates of dear, such as Dutch duur, German teuer, and Swedish dyr. The infographic tells you the whole story.

[ihavegotnotimeforfeelingsorry]

Eivør - UPP ÚR ØSKUNI / RISE FROM THE ASHES

[nofatclips]

Erc'h by Yann Tiersen (featuring Ólavur Jákupsson) from the album All

[holidaysincambodia]

Traditional dress of the Faroe Islands

[salvadorbonaparte]

Nordic Languages 101

[hatari-translations]

Is Faroese intelligible to Icelandic speakers? If so, how much can be understood?

When spoken, it sort of straddles a line where it alternates between sounding like someone speaking Danish or Norwegian and someone speaking eccentrically worded Icelandic with a Danish or Norwegian accent. You'll get entire sentences that are perfectly intelligible sometimes, and then something unintelligible in between.

Reading Faroese as an Icelander is a somewhat surreal experience because it's basically entirely intelligible; it just reads like Icelandic written by a tipsy eccentric who either likes to invent their own words for things or else doesn't quite remember a lot of words and makes quirky but logical substitutions in the vein of like, calling a stool a butt-table.

For example, if I go to the front page of the Faroese Wikipedia right now, it has a featured article about North America. The section is titled "Mánaðargreinin". In Icelandic people would conventionally use "grein mánaðarins" for "article of the month", but "mánaðargreinin" wouldn't be wrong so much as just a little quirky.

The first sentence of the article is "Norðuramerika er ein heimspartur." In Icelandic we'd hyphenate it as "Norður-Ameríka", but Norðuramerika just sounds like, you know, what someone not super concerned about correct orthography might write in a casual Facebook comment. We call continents "heimsálfa", but "heimspartur" is literally just "world part", so that'd be like, a logical spontaneous compound for your brain to pull up instead if you forgot that word. In Icelandic that would be masculine so you'd write "einn" rather than the feminine "ein", and for us that's the word one rather than an article so it's a bit quirky to write that in an introductory sentence for a Wikipedia article (as if you'd written "North America is one continent" instead of "North America is a continent"). But it all still makes sense if you treat it as quirky Icelandic!

It goes on like that, words that are either identical or near-identical with a slightly different spelling that parses as if it could be a typo or mistake, grammar that's a little funky but still perfectly understandable, compounds made of parts that are identical or almost identical to Icelandic but just happen to have chosen different words to smush together than we did (they use ístíð ("ice time") rather than the Icelandic ísöld ("ice age"), for instance, and hjáland ("side country") instead of "nýlenda" ("new country") for a colony). The occasional ø gives the game away, but it's basically completely understandable - a word here and there that I'd have to look up, but I can read it just fine, deduce the meaning of almost all the compounds from their constituent parts and the context.

It often reads somewhat humorously casual or slangy, though, because the Faroese uses words or component words that in Icelandic have more formal equivalents that would generally be used in something like an encyclopedia - "partur" is a word people absolutely use in modern Icelandic all the time but in formal Icelandic writing you'd rather see "hluti".

I imagine Icelandic probably reads similarly eccentric/weird/humorous to a Faroese speaker, of course! Close resemblance but not quite is a fun relationship for languages to have with each other.

[stripkycasu]

faroe islands on film . summer 2023

[nonenglishsongs]

Eivør - Trøllabundin (Faroese)

[folkfashion]

Faroese boy, Faroe Islands, Sibéal Turraoin

[yvanspijk]

The words right and rectum have a common origin. Right comes from Proto-Germanic *rehtaz ('straight; right; just'). This word shared a common Proto-Indo-European ancestor with Latin rēctus ('straight; right; just'), from which the medical term rectum ('straight terminal part of the large intestine') was derived. The infographic shows more.

[elizatungusnakur]

‘ *~Forest witch~* ’ by XXXenoKun on Twitter

 “Eyga mítt festist har ið galdramaðurin stóð --”

[oilpaints-and-cats]

[unsung-tragedy]

[fantasyandmylife]

@ any faroese speakers— what is a term of endearment that would be used by a parent for a child???

[victusinveritas]

Possible ways of saying "I" - in Northern Germanic languages.