Wish everyone a Merry Christmas or Happy Holiday in a foreign language. You can use Google. Don't forget the country it

[DFW]

68. Actually, from a linguistic point of view, Icelandic is "the original," like Latin is to Italian

Latin has a pretty convoluted grammar, too. Modern Scandinavian languages simplified their grammar considerably. Swedish was so simple, I went from speaking not a single word of it before my first year of college to returning there a year later fully conversational, after just one year of three times a week Swedish classes. Icelandic, on the other hand, seems to have retained the cumbersome declensions and conjugations of old. I'll bet it would take more than just one year of classes to get fully conversational in Icelandic. But maybe with a background in Swedish or Norwegian, maybe not. I've not been there in over half a century, and never saw it as a priority to learn. I'm in the Netherlands once a week, so learning Dutch was a BIG priority. Luckily, if you know English and German, you already know 90% of Dutch. You just have to sort their oddball vowels and their gutteral "G" and the slightly altered word order, and you'll be speaking like a native in no time. Although....I was once told that I had almost lost my accent, but that someone from Holland could still hear from the way I spoke Dutch that I was a native speaker of Afrikaans, and had grown up in South Africa--a place I have never been to. For that matter, some Swedes have told me that they can tell from my Swedish that I originally was from Norway, so go figure.