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Comment by actually_a_dog | Hacker News Reader

Mine as well! Icelandic is an interesting language. Icelandic (at least in written form) is mutually intelligible with Old Norse, which means that knowing Icelandic can allow you to read 1000 year old Norse sagas. Super cool, if you ask me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_language

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An interesting tidbit (hinted at in the article) is that there’s an active effort to reuse old (no longer used) words for new meanings. An example is sími (telephone), an old word for cord/rope. I wonder how well GPT-4 copes with the issue of loanword vs coining new/reusing old terms.

That’s really interesting as the as the word ’sim’ in modern farsi (persian) also mean cord or line. It seems according to wiktionary (https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/s%C3%ADma#Icelandic) that the Word has Proto-Indo-European roots which is the common ancestor of farsi and European languages.

I wonder if it’s possible to introspect or query the model and find out about the etymologi of words. I suspect more context like the phonetic version of each word is needed to make that final connection not just the semantic embedding.

I suspect (though I may be wrong) that GPT-4 wouldn't provide more insight than what's in the text it was trained on. If prompted by examples of regular sound change or reconstruction of proto-indo-european (PIE) roots, it may be able deduce other PIE word forms.

Keep in mind that the similarity to old Norse was intentional. It was a form of linguistic nationalism to revert some of the dialect changes that had built up over the centuries during icelandic independence. They started teaching kids using the old books and used them to standardize the orthography. The vocal changes were a bit more sticky though.

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