GREEK? PSHAW...:

IT IS hardly surprising that Icelanders have names for the many different fish that abound in their surrounding waters--the various types of cod, herring and so on which they have been catching for centuries. It is rather more surprising that they have not just one word for the coelacanth, but three. After all, the living fossils of the Indian Ocean's depths hardly impinge on their Atlantic way of life--and if an Icelander found a pressing need to talk about them, why not just use the Greek word, as other nations do? But Icelanders are keen namers of things--and would never dream of simply adopting a transliterated version of someone else's word. So they call the coelacanth skúfur, which means "tassel". Or skúfuggi: tassel-fin. Or sometimes forniskúfur: "ancient tassel" [listen to a spoken pronunciation here].

Icelanders are fiercely proud of their tongue and stay actively involved in its maintenance. On Icelandic Language Day they celebrate those among the population of 340,000 who have done the most for it. They love the links it gives them to their past. Ordinary Icelanders revel in their ability to use phrases from the sagas--written around eight centuries ago--in daily life. The commentator who says that a football team is bíta í skjaldarrendur ("biting its shield-end") [spoken] as it fights on in the face of great odds, is behaving quite normally in borrowing an image from ancient tales of Viking derring-do (one of the castles in the British Museum's 12th-century Lewis chess-set records the metaphor in walrus ivory).

Tweet   @brothersjudd