Letter from Iceland #2 - by Alda Sigmundsdttir
Hello friend!
Today in my Letter I thought I’d run through some common greetings and partings in Icelandic, for those of you who are not familiar with them.
If you would prefer to listen to this post, you can do so by clicking on the audio below. Bonus: this will give you the way these greetings and partings are pronounced. 😁
Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.In Icelandic, the proper way to greet a woman is komdu sæl, and for a man komdu sæll. This literally means: Come happy.
Similarly, when taking leave of someone we say vertu sæll, or vertu sæl. Which literally means: Be happy.
These also come with variants, such as komdu sæll og blessaður and vertu sæl og blessuð, which translates as “come happy and blessed” and “go happy and blessed”, respectively. In that first instance I am addressing a man (sæll) and in the second, a woman (sæl).
If I walk into a room where there are several people gathered and want to say hello to everyone at the same time, I might say sælt veri fólkið, which means “happy be [you] the people”.
The most common Icelandic way of saying goodbye, meanwhile, is bless, or sometimes bless bless. The word “bless” means the same thing in Icelandic and English, so bless as a parting essentially means, “be blessed”.
Just so we’re clear: even though in many ways these phrases may sound archaic, they are still very much alive in the language today, and are the default expressions used for greetings and partings. I should say, though, that the English “hi” and “bye” are also commonly used, though much more informally, and show up in the language as “hæ” and “bæ”—the phonetic spellings of those two words using the Icelandic alphabet.
‘Till next time!
Bless for now.
A
PS. I would be grateful and happy (and blessed!) if you would share this publication, or this post, with anyone who might like it, and/or via social media. Takk!
This post was excerpted and slightly modified from my Little Book of Icelandic, which you can purchase from any Amazon marketplace, or directly from me via my website.
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