Note: my information comes from research I did when I was writing my book Letters to Icelanders: Exploring the Northern Soul (Key Porter Books, 1995). See Chapter NIne.
Maybe it’s a race thing but two characteristics of Icelanders and Western Icelanders (the title bestowed on them by their home country forbears) are either a fierce interest in genealogy or/and an obsession with language. I’m a word freak. Icelandic is a great language for nuts like me, maddening for its grammar (it still conjugates and declines) fascinating for its poetry and purity. Because the Icelanders have been so isolated over the centuries and therefore not subject to the influences of other languages, Icelandic has remained very pure. That’s why Icelanders today can read Old Norse without a translation They are very proud of this and work at maintaining the language. The Icelandic Language Institute is a watchdog, and tries to avoid Anglicisms slipping in and even eschews the use of Greek and Roman roots to describe modern concepts and inventions. They don’t need English, preferring to seek legitimate Icelandic words with impeccable history.
Television is sjónvarp, from sjón, meaning view, and varp, from a verb root meaning cast or throw, thus, a thrown view or picture. Computer reikna, a word that sounds like reckon means computer, but that´s only accounting or calculating and a computer does much more than that. The word in Icelandic is tölva and its roots are marvellous: tá, meaning finger or digit, and völva, meaning sybil. Remember Voluspa (“The Song of the Sybil”), the Völva of all Völvas? Could anything be more fitting than that the Völva, the seer who had a direct line with Oðin, be invoked for a modern miracle? And so Iceland gives us a finger-wizard, a digital sibyl, pointing the way to a future in cyberspace.
Icelandic uses kennings in its poetry as well as everyday language. [(kenning | noun a compound expression in Old English and Old Norse poetry with metaphorical meaning, e.g. oar-steed = ship. ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from Old Norse, from kenna ‘know, perceive’; related to ken.]
Well, geoscience isn’t exactly everyday language, but this Icelandic characteristic of naming things with compound phrases results in fascinating and poetic words. Iceland’s geothermal system of heat distribution is hitaveita, simply hot water. Terminal moraine, the detritus of a glacier, is jökiulgarður which translates literally into glacier garden--much prettier. And here is a nice one (my favourite): a meteorite is a loftsteinn, a sky stone.
I could go on and on.