{"id":33865,"date":"2025-02-18T07:25:40","date_gmt":"2025-02-18T07:25:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/?p=33865"},"modified":"2025-03-14T11:08:03","modified_gmt":"2025-03-14T11:08:03","slug":"leonardo-piccione-insegnare-a-nuotare-a-una-foca-viaggio-insolito-nella-lingua-islandese-milano-utet-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/volume-20-no-1-2025\/book-review-editor-review\/leonardo-piccione-insegnare-a-nuotare-a-una-foca-viaggio-insolito-nella-lingua-islandese-milano-utet-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Leonardo Piccione, Insegnare a nuotare a una foca. Viaggio insolito nella lingua islandese (Milano: UTET, 2024)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\t
\n\n\t\t<\/i><\/span> <\/a>\n\n\t<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n

This book is titled after an Icelandic proverb, \u201ca\u00f0 kenna selnum a\u00f0 synda\u201d (teaching a seal how to swim), and is labelled as an \u201cunusual journey in the Icelandic language\u201d. The main bookshop in my native town has placed it on the shelves of the Linguistics section. Actually, it is far from being a book of linguistics. It is, rather, a collection of charming tales, encounters, personal experiences, and other digressions that depart from rhapsodically selected expressions or rules of the Icelandic language. The author is an Italian who has been living in Iceland for seven years, and for sure, is a brilliant storyteller of his own experience of Icelandizing himself. I would love to meet Leonardo in a pub and listen to his stories.<\/p>\n

Of course, for an Italian, the language is a main source of difficulty in “Icelandizing” oneself. Many years ago, when I was doing my first trips to Iceland and looking for academic collaboration, I believed that I needed to learn Icelandic, but I soon realized that this was both hopeless and unnecessary because, first, Icelanders speak so fast, and second, they all are fluent in English. So eventually I gave up. Only once, somewhere in the North, when I needed to catch on time a bus and did not know where the stop was, I asked an old man who only spoke Icelandic. I got from him a useful explanation, and I was so proud that I could pronounce \u201cstr\u00e6tisvagn\u201d clearly enough for him to understand, and in turn, understand his answer. So, I can empathize with Leonardo\u2019s initial difficulties. These are reported in the book\u2019s prologue, properly titled \u201cForm\u00e1li\u201d (the book is written in Italian, but each chapter\u2019s title is an Icelandic word).<\/p>\n

Each word that is the title of one of the following ten chapters is the starting point of various sorts of mental and narrative wanderings. For instance, the word \u00e1 attracts the author\u2019s attention because it is so short and has four meanings (at, have, river, and the accusative case of \u00e6r, ewe); then the author tells us of his curiosity about a river called somewhere Litla\u00e1 (Small River) and somewhere else St\u00f3r\u00e1 (Large River), his encounter with a lady who told him the story of this river, and the artic terns that live by there. The chapter on f\u00e9 provides some examples of sheep nomenclature before moving to its main topic, the amazing skills of the Forystuf\u00e9 (herd leader) breed of sheep and the author\u2019s conversations with experts of this wonderful breed. The kaffisopi chapter swings between quotations of Laxness on coffee and tales on the lucky fate of energy drink companies. The killing of the Basks that took place in the 17th century thrills the reader of the sj\u00e1vargj\u00f6f chapter. The word heyr\u00f0u evokes free associations with the swimming pool culture, the evacuation of Grindav\u00edk because of an eruption, a conversation with Sigga Bj\u00f6rnsd\u00f3ttir on Icelandic feminism, and a poem by Bubbi Mortens \u2013 yes, all this in a single chapter. Indeed, free association is the logic that governs this book. I believe that any psychoanalyst would be truly enthusiastic about the author\u2019s fluency and skill in free association.<\/p>\n

However, some chapters also offer some linguistic ideas. The chapter \u00edsb\u00edlt\u00far deals with composite words before expanding on the phenomenology of Icelandic ice creams, and also the chapter appels\u00ednugulur concerns composite words and the colour lexicon (as well as the vegetation in \u00c1sbyrgi). The author\u2019s conversations with expert linguists such as J\u00f3hannes Bjarni Sygtryggsson and Gu\u00f0r\u00fan Kvaran, and with the famous writer J\u00f3n Kalman Stef\u00e1nsson, are also reported. The linguistic ideas presented in this book are rather simple but could be interesting for the novice reader.<\/p>\n

In sum, whom should I advise to read this book? Linguists and scholars with an interdisciplinary interest in language would hardly learn too much from reading it. Instead, Italian laypersons who love Iceland would surely enjoy reading the varied and fascinating tales that, like the tiles of a mosaic, make up the book. I am not sure of what fate awaits this book, but overall, I believe that everything will go well \u2013 \u03f8etta reddast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This book is titled after an Icelandic proverb, \u201ca\u00f0 kenna selnum a\u00f0 synda\u201d (teaching a seal how to swim), and is labelled as an \u201cunusual journey in the Icelandic language\u201d. The main bookshop in my native town has placed it on the shelves of the Linguistics section. Actually, it is far from being a book … Continue reading Leonardo Piccione, Insegnare a nuotare a una foca. Viaggio insolito nella lingua islandese (Milano: UTET, 2024)<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":492,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2590],"tags":[1286,905,2648,2647],"coauthors":[1033],"class_list":["post-33865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review-editor-review","tag-icelandic","tag-identity","tag-italian-literature","tag-sociolinguistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/492"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33865"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33867,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33865\/revisions\/33867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33865"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=33865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}