Skip: A Strong Icelandic Noun

I

IN the modest commodity of blessings with which I was endowed at birth, I have never been able to discover one that might be mistaken for the philological faculty. I have never been lifted, even for a moment, to the regions mild of calm and serene air where the true scholar, of whatever kind, lives, surveying some broad fair province of human knowledge that he has made his own. Even the foothills to those distant heights are untrod by me. I can only gaze upon them from afar, from a dike-protected plain of hopeless ignorance even below the sea level of common human experience.

There was a time when I should have hesitated to make such a confession; but upon growing older I have been convinced of the folly of making pretenses. An honest man is something, at least, even though his candor must concern itself chiefly with confessing his pathetic lack of everything but that. Let him live in his own house, I say, however crazily built; however poor the showing it makes in comparison with the stately palaces on the lofty peaks above him. Some bit of ground he may call his own, though it be nothing but a sand bar or a mud flat. Let his dwelling be erected there; and, if it defies the law of gravity, the more reason for smiling with gentle resignation as he paces its uneven floors, climbs the attic stairs to reach the basement, mistakes the kitchen for the bathroom, and searches for his toilet articles under what passes for the front porch.

To return to the matter of philology, I once believed that I had a gift for languages. I had no reason for holding such a belief; it was merely one of those stubborn fixed ideas that await the dismemberment of the atom for the energy sufficient to blast them from the mind of youth. Both at school and at college I was offered sufficient proof of my lack of any gift for languages. Latin, French, German, Spanish — whatever speech I studied, the result was the same. And yet I struggled doggedly on, laying the blame for my lack of success on the wrongness of methods of teaching, never upon my imperviousness to all method.

Even in English it was so: grammar I could never master. ‘Shall’ and ‘will,’ ‘should’ and ‘would,’ remain, for me, the stumblingblocks they have always been. In the sea of uncertainty in which I still flounder, I should (would?) have gone under long since had it not been for the example of the man who went down near me, shrieking: ‘I will drown! No one shall save me!’ His last bubbling cry made so deep an impression upon me that I have since been able to keep afloat, after a fashion, with my nose, at least, above the surface of future and conditional statements. But I am by no means safe or comfortable, and often, in the course of a single statement, as I draw in the breath to make it, I draw in with it the broken water of ineradicable error.

As for the comparatively simple matter of pronunciation, I am as much of a duffer at that as at grammar. Often, when reading aloud, I have been halted in the midst of a sentence, even by children, and had my absurd mistakes pointed out to me. I have consulted my dictionary at least fifty times for the pronunciation of the word ‘automaton,’ and I now consult it for the fifty-first time to inform anyone who may not know that the word is not pronounced ‘automā’ton.’ But although I say this with such confidence now, should you ask me tomorrow, doubt would again seize me. I should have to open my dictionary for the fifty-second time.

II

But to proceed. Recently, while sorting over a box of old papers, the accumulation of the past ten years and more, I came upon some verses I had written in Iceland, in the winter of 1922. Being by profession a journalist, old manuscripts, or the fragments of manuscripts, have for me a peculiar evocative value. Bearing as they do my own inkshed, no matter how ancient they may be they call to mind at once, and vividly, the circumstances under which the words got themselves spread out on sheets of paper. So it was with this particular page, for it was no more than that. It lay at the bottom of the box, and upon unfolding it I found myself in a moment of time beyond the farthest Hebrides; walking, in fact, along one of the principal streets of Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, and once more trying to realize that I had at last reached the country I had come so far to see.

Not that I lacked reminders of strangeness. On the contrary, everything was strange, and mind and spirit could not receive and classify the unaccustomed influences floating in from every side. Every word spoken by passers-by brought home to me the fact that I was indeed far from home; that I had passed the borders into a new world — at least, new to me.

‘If only I understood this language!’ I mused, ruefully. By a curious chance I had in my pocket a copy of Bacon’s Essays, and these words, from his essay ‘Of Travel,’ were running through my head: ‘Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that traveleth into a country, before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.’ There was wisdom, met with all too tardily. Children should be brought up on Bacon’s Essays. They are written with that crystal-like clarity which children love in books, and if they were to be used as reading lessons in the primary grades it is to be supposed that the children would imbibe, by the way, some of the virtue they contain. Had I been introduced earlier to the Essays, it is possible that I might not have been walking the streets of Reykjavik so light in the luggage of language equipment.

‘But perhaps Bacon is not wholly right here?’ I thought. ‘Or he may have wished to exaggerate a little for the sake of emphasis. What is to prevent me from going to school and traveling at the same time?’ The healthy ghost of my old conviction with respect to my philological gifts returned to comfort me. Surely, by diligence and application, I should be able to learn a great deal of the language before the winter had passed. The wind of self-confidence blew with increasing freshness as I considered the matter, fanning enthusiasm into a blaze. As I walked along the street, words vaguely familiar struck my ear; at moments it seemed that I could all but understand what people around me were saying.

Presently I found myself in front of a bookshop window and I examined the contents with interest. A great variety of books were displayed there, not only in Icelandic—in Danish and French and German and English as well. Among the latter I saw belles-lettres, poetry, fiction, and many scholarly works, all of them speaking well for the taste, in our literature, of the Icelanders. They seemed to choose of our best and of little but that.

In one corner of the window I spied a conversation manual — The Englishman on Iceland it was called. Precisely what I wanted for the start. I entered the bookshop at once, and it was a relief to find that the shop mistress spoke excellent English. I bought the conversation manual, published by a German firm. ‘Useful Phrases Only,’ the subtitle read. ‘Contains all that is necessary in intercourse with the public. Correct pronunciation by means of which you will be able to speak the language IMMEDIATELY.’

This was encouragement indeed, but the shop mistress was not so sanguine about immediate results as the compiler of the manual.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it may be useful, but you will need other books if you really wish to learn something of our speech. Shall you be long in Iceland?’

‘All the winter through,’ I replied, and I went on to tell her of my love for the country, and of the curious feeling I had as of coming home, to my own people. I explained that I had come all the way from Tahiti.

‘Tahiti? Where is that?’ she asked.

‘It is an island in the tropical Pacific,’ I said; ‘in French Oceania.’

‘Well! You have come a long way!’ she replied. ‘And now that you are here, you are not disappointed?’

‘Far from it!’ I replied. ‘Iceland is all and more than I expected or hoped it would be.’

This was nothing more than the barest truth. For beauty of landscape, for healthful and invigorating climate, for old-fashioned simplicity and homeliness of living, I can think of no country that excels Iceland. And what a pleasure it was to visit a land almost untouched by the industrial revolution that has all but ruined the rest of the world. No factories, no slums, no street cars, no motor cars, — or almost none at that time, — no roads, in our meaning of the word, no chain drug stores, no real-estate agents and subdividers, no stock exchange, no elevated or subway trains, no Sunday newspapers or news stands loaded with accumulations of trash, no quick-lunch rooms with people standing four-deep behind the stools, waiting for a chance to gobble a sandwich and rush back to their offices. All these abominations were notable for their absence. To me Iceland seemed a paradise, and in the years that have passed since I was there I have been afraid to make inquiries concerning the country lest the people should have been seized, meanwhile, with the disease we Americans call Progress. God forbid!

III

I had a pleasant chat with the shop mistress, and presently she supplied me with an English-Icelandic dictionary and a grammar. I sat down with the enthusiasm of the novice to glance through my purchases.

‘You appear to be enjoying yourself,’ the shop mistress said, a few moments later.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘It is encouraging to find so many familiar words here; I can recognize them at sight. I had no idea that English derived from the Icelandic to such an extent. I don’t think I shall have much difficulty in mastering the language. But this dictionary, I see, is of old Icelandic. Will it serve my purpose?’

‘Very well,’ she replied; ‘almost as well as a modern one. Our speech has changed very little since the saga period of our history, a thousand years ago. The grammar, unfortunately, is an English grammar for Icelandic students. We have little call for an Icelandic grammar for English students. Not many English-speaking people take the trouble to learn our language.’

‘Is it so difficult?’

‘Not at all. If you have even a small gift for languages, you will be speaking Icelandic fluently in a year’s time. I have known Germans to do so in less than a year, but, of course, they are more patient and industrious than most people.’

‘Could you give me a few hints about the grammar? ’ I asked. ‘ Merely something to show me what I have in store?’

She reflected for a moment. ‘Yes, I think I can. Perhaps it would be best to speak of the nouns; foreigners seem to have difficulty with them, although I don’t understand why. There are two classes of nouns: the strong and the weak. Each noun, whether strong or weak, has, of course, the same number of cases: the nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive — or possessive, as I believe you call it in English. If you know the ending of the accusative plural you can usually tell to which class a noun belongs. Shall I give you an example?’

‘I wish you would,’ I replied.

‘Very well. Consider the word skip — in English, “ship.” That is a strong neuter noun of the first group. It is declined as follows: skip, skip, skipi, skips; plural: skip, skip, skipum, skipa. This is the declension of a ship — any ship; but if you are speaking of the ship, a particular one, the declension is: skipid, skipid, skipinu, skipsins; plural: skipin, skipin, skipunum, skipanna. This last has the definite article incorporated with the word itself. With the definite article as a separate word, followed by an adjective, we have: hid skip, hid skip, hinu skipi, hins skips; plural: hin skip, hin skip, hinum skipum, hinna skipa. The article, of course, as you see, is declined as well, and agrees in gender with its noun. As to the agreement of adjectives . . .’

A little dazed, I interrupted at this point. ‘I’m afraid I’m not quite following,’ I said. ‘Is n’t a ship, in Iceland, always a ship, as it is with us? And must I learn the declension of every noun before I can hope to speak Icelandic?’

‘To be sure you must; but you will not find it at all difficult once you are fairly started. Now let me tell you something of the prepositions and the cases they govern.’

I was given an excellent lesson which cost me only the trouble of following it, which, I admit, was considerable. In fact, it was more than considerable. I was ashamed of my stupidity, and of the pretense I was making of following intelligently when, in reality, I was merely splashing along through prepositions, nouns, verbs, adjectives, declensions, and conjugations in the same muddled way I remembered so well from my school days. I got more and more mixed up, and when I left the shop the effect upon what I call my brain was as though I had been riding for hours on a merry-go-round, first in one direction, then in the other.

IV

Nevertheless, I went back to my lodgings determined not to be overcome by a mere noun, however strong it was. After an excellent supper — and for those who wish to know hunger at its keenest, and the deep pleasure of satisfying it, I can recommend Iceland and the Icelandic cuisine — I went up to my room determined not only to board hid skip, but to do some intelligent navigating as well.

One thing that has always helped me to memorize, from the days of boyhood to the present, is a jingle of some sort. More than likely I should not know, even now, how many days there are in each month had I not learned

To be quite frank, there are few things I can learn unless I can put them into a rhyme; so I decided to write a jingle as a first aid to the conquest of a strong Icelandic noun. No sooner had the decision been made than I found the words of the old song,

running through my head. That was the suggestion I wanted. First, I marshaled out of my grammar, on a sheet of clean fresh paper, all the various forms of skip, whether a skip in general or a definite one. Then I proceeded to the verses which were to help me to remember the various forms and endings.

I did not leave off at this point. I proceeded to work in earnest, with the grammar open before me. Perhaps it was the intensity of the mental effort, or perhaps it was the hearty dinner I had eaten. However this may be, my eyes grew heavier and heavier, and presently I found myself far out at sea in command of Hid Skip (or Skipid), manned by a crew of landsmen as panic-stricken as myself. Many other skip were about us, as badly managed as our own, and together we were drifting on a lee shore. One after another the vessels came to grief. Some drove like things possessed on the submerged rocks of the possessive case; others heeled over, broke up, and sank on a shoal of datives. We met ends as various as the endings of skip itself. As my own ship struck, I awoke with a start to find that I was sleeping with head and arms on the table. What a familiar attitude that was to find myself in, with an open grammar on the table before me!

Later, being unwilling to acknowledge myself beaten, I attacked the weak nouns, but I found them weak in name only.

I hope that no Icelandic scholar reads this melancholy narrative, for I am by no means certain that I saw hid skip (or skipid), or approached skipsins, or boarded kins skips, or left hid skip, as correctly as I thought at the time. More than likely I should borrow a title for my jingle from Browning, and call it ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral.’