How come you tag your old Norse words as Icelandic, too? Is there a correlation between the two?

fjorn-the-skald:

Góða kvöldið, nafnlaus,

I actually should not have used the tag for that word, so I have corrected myself by removing it (the reason for this is explain below). However, Icelandic, especially in a grammatical sense, has not changed very much from its Old Norse past-self. In fact, the standard for Old Norse is based off of Old Icelandic, which was still Old Norse, but only one out of a handful of dialects. There were four major dialects, split into two categories (West Old Norse and East Old Norse, which both stem from North Germanic, or Proto Old Norse):

West Old Norse
Old Icelandic
Old Norwegian

East Old Norse
Old Danish
Old Swedish

For this week’s word, which is vápn, the modern Icelandic version is vopn. They are very similar, which is why I sometimes use the tag Icelandic as well. Yet, they are not the exact same in this case, and so it probably is misleading to leave the tag. 

Other words are the exact same in both Old Norse and modern Icelandic. Some examples are: mikill (great), dóttir (daughter), ferð (journey), skip (ship), and fyrir (before; for). Furthermore, a vast majority of word are only different by a single letter of variation, as is the case for this week’s word. Others like this are maðr (maður, man; person), sterkr (sterkur, strong), and góðr (góður, good).

I honestly should be a bit more careful and restrict my usage of that tag for only when both words are exactly the same. Although, I have used this tag so often to demonstrate the similarities that exist between Old Norse and modern Icelandic. Either way, there is a justification to using the Icelandic tag when discussing Old Norse, but it is better to be cautious and not mislead anyone into thinking that they are still the same language, because they definitely aren’t. In the end, Icelandic is simply a language that has uniquely held onto its older roots, which reside in Old Norse.

Nonetheless, I do thank you for bringing attention to this so that I can improve myself in only using such a tag to indicate when the words are not just similar, but identical. I hope this discussion was helpful to you and others!

Þakka þér fyrir, vinur.
Skál og ferð vel.