For this series, we reach out to a member of the department who has a very particular obsession and ask them to share it with the world. In this edition, Associate Professor Merrill Kaplan dives into her passion and practice of Icelandic.

Speaking Icelandic is like swimming the butterfly stroke. There are many easier, more efficient ways to get to the other end of the pool, but this one makes the person able to do it feel slightly superhuman.

I learned to speak Icelandic in my thirties as a present to myself. I had already learned Old Norse to study the medieval literature of Iceland, and I had worked up reading competence in Modern Icelandic for the purpose of reading articles and editions. As anyone in higher ed knows, however, academic prose is a particular kind of language with a vocabulary of its own and a limited set of grammatical forms: there are not a lot of verbs conjugated in the first or second person. Nor will being able to fight through a sentence about differing schools of thought on the provenance of a given manuscript help you much in trying to order lunch. But one does not need to order lunch in Icelandic to be a competent scholar of Old Norse literature. UC Berkeley’s Scandinavian program was making me into such a scholar, but it did not require me to learn to speak Icelandic the way it had required I speak Norwegian. But several years into my program, I was reading Auden’s Letters from Iceland on the plane headed for Keflavík. I had a fellowship for dissertation research on a 14^th-century manuscript held at the Árni Magnússon Institute in Reykjavík.

Fly Icelandair and you will be told that Icelanders still speak the language of the Vikings. This is nonsense. Icelandic has changed considerably from the Viking Age to the present, but Modern Icelandic is only as different from the 13^th-century form of the language as modern English is from Shakespeare’s English. Which is different enough. My first dog-paddle sentences sounded like Prithee, good sir: couldst thou sell me a hotdog? The locals thought this was hilarious. I had an Old Norse lexicon in a modern world, but the Icelanders happen to like to coin words instead of borrowing them, building modern architecture with reclaimed timber. Faced with a business whose sign read Aðalskrifstofa Fasteignasala I could see the elements of which the compounds were constructed (aðal-skrif-stofa-fast-eign-sala) and assign them the meanings they had had circa 1250 (noble-writing-farmhouse-common-room of permanence-ownership-exchange), but then I would experience a kind of semantic freefall until the meaning rushed up at me: Main Office, Realtor. I am not now nor was then particularly excited by realty, but I still find the sensation of pushing unfamiliar words through a space of uncanny familiarity to where they become clear viscerally pleasurable, like crunching a barely iced-over puddle with my winter boots. Icelandic also crackles satisfyingly in places where its grammar comes close to older forms of English, wherever one says þú ert and feels a spark jump to thou art, or the short circuit between mér þykir and methinks. Some sentences are as staticky as a housecat on a dry day.

The pleasure of Icelandic is not just in its lexicon but in its grammar. It has a lot of moving parts. Nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and the first four cardinal numbers all decline in four cases, and there are three grammatical genders. Making a phrase like “the gray horse” grammatical means knowing whether it is the subject, direct object, or indirect object of the sentence and making sure all the endings agree with each other. Doing this on the fly, in natural-sounding speech, is hard, but allows the speaker to exert fine control over the workings of each sentence. English is an automatic transmission language: put the words in the right order, and you will get where you are going. Icelandic has a manual transmission: you have to select the right gears and engage them at the right time, but if you do, you can pull some impressive tricks on the way to point B from point A. The verbs are similarly full of potential. Some sentences have no grammatical subjects. If you had a dream, you might say mig dreymdi draum, in which both you and the dream are objects of the verb “to dream.” Who is the agent? Do you dream the dream or does the dream dream you? Who knows? Gloriously, Icelandic poses the question but refuses to answer it. There is also a thing called middle voice, which is neither active nor passive but something else. Sjá – to see, but middle voice sjást – to see one another. Sýna – to show, but middle voice sýnast – to seem. Anda – to breathe, but middle voice andast – to breathe one’s last. There is a lot of poetry to be had in middle voice.

The sounds of Icelandic are also delightful. They are the sounds of cats: purring, meowing, trilling. The r is emphatically trilled, like in Spanish. The intervocalic g is softer than German ch and not so garglingly far back in the throat, more like the hiss of a cat that wasn’t so annoyed after all. The letter á, pronounced as the dipthong in “how,” is liberally sprinkled throughout the language; so is é, the diphthong in “yet.” There is an infamous devoiced l that involves releasing the breath around both sides of the tongue while its tip is held against the hard palate. I have a friend whose name sounds like a big tom sneezing mid-purr. I greet cats in Icelandic and ask them Er gott að vera köttur?—Is it good to be a cat?. They always say mau—too close to Icelandic já, yes, to be coincidence.

I have probably mixed too many metaphors, but my relationship to the Icelandic language is the closest I get to synæsthesia. For the overall experience of speaking it, however, it’s swimming I come back to. Perhaps that makes the most sense. I learned so much of the modern language at the neighborhood pool. After a day with the manuscripts, I would go swim laps, and afterwards I would soak in the hot pot amid the regulars, chattering about politics, weather, their grandchildren, their parents, everything. The next day I’d do it again.

I stayed for two years. When I left, I was fluent. But pools full of nattering Icelandic speakers, literal or metaphorical, are thin upon the ground here in Ohio. To get my laps in, I have to go back. Every summer I throw myself into the sub-arctic water and surface gasping, barely able to form sentences. Every time it is a shock to flounder anew in the chop, waves of words hitting me in the face. I find my lips numb, tongue unable to trill the r, the muscles literally atrophied after 10 months of lying near-flaccid cradled in the soft bed of my lower jaw. There is nothing for it but to strike out into it, kick and kick again, and catch breath where I can. By the end of the summer, I am flying again.