😄

oft veltir lítil þúfa þungu hlassi
opt kemr ǿðiregn ór dúsi

Ç’të sheh syri, e bën dora

The mythological poem Vǫluspá says that the gods, too, once played board games in the meadow, during the golden age of the gods. The poem predicts that after Ragnarǫk, good fortune will return, beginning with finding the golden playing pieces once again in the meadow.

aga te kù-babbar zà-mí!

“School” is a perfect example. The highly cultured ancient Greeks loved spending their leisure time (skhole) hanging out with Socrates and Plato discussing philosophy, so their word meaning “leisure” gradually came to apply to philosophical discussions and then to the places where they happened. By the time the word got to English via Latin (one of the very few words the Anglo-Saxons borrowed directly from Latin before the Norman Conquest), it was written scol.

In the Middle Ages it was pronounced “skole.” To reflect the long “o” sound, the scribes decided to double the letter “o” in the spelling. When the pronunciation changed to “skule,” the spelling didn’t keep step. Then some know-it-all busybody came along in the Renaissance and said, “Look, it’s got an ‘h’ in Latin and Greek, so it should have an ‘h’ in English!” There it (like many of our other silent letters) has been ever since, never pronounced, serving no good purpose but to make English learners’ lives miserable.

De tarvelige kår, under hvilke han lever, ugunstige og trange, 
tider på landjorden og ofte lidet udbytte af havet lærte ham 
nöjsomhed, som var Færingens bedste skat og höjeste lykke, 
og de lysere og gunstigere forhold, han hørte om i andre 
lande, bragte ham kun til at trøste sig ved, at „lítið er 
gott í frið og náðum“ — han var fornöjet med det lidet, 
han havde i sitt fattige hjem, hvor han kunde nyde det i 
fred og ro, om end i stor sparsommelighed.