# Icelandic: semicolons



## Silver_Biscuit

Hi everyone,

Just something I've been wondering about, since I know punctuation can vary between languages. I often see semicolons used in Icelandic (from reputable sources, academic writing and so forth) where they would be incorrect in English. 

Vísindavefurinn's explanation (link) tallies completely with the rules for English, but I also see semicolons used where it seems like a colon would be correct, e.g.: "Jón fór út í búðina og keypti mat*;* brauð, ost og banana."

Is this correct in Icelandic or is it simply a widespread mistake? You see the same sort of thing very often in English, but it is not correct (people seem to get into a world of bother with semicolons in general). However, this usage appears to be far more widespread in Icelandic, and to appear in more legitimate texts, with authors who could reasonably be expected to know how to write 'good Icelandic'. So... what's the deal here?

The reason I ask is curiosity, because I'm proof-reading some English written by an Icelander who repeatedly uses semicolons incorrectly in this manner, and I was wondering if they have a good excuse


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## Segorian

The basic problem is that, unlike spelling rules, the rules of punctuation are not taught properly in Icelandic schools. As a result, a large percentage of writers, and even many proof-readers, seem unaware of these rules, a situation which leads to inconsistent and sometimes erroneous punctuation in books, in the media, in reports, in school assignments, etc.


However, the mistake of putting a semicolon where a colon is called for seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon (at least it certainly did not become widespread until a few years ago). It should be fought. Its frequent appearance in Icelandic texts these days could well be an influence of the incorrect use of the semicolon in many English texts.


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## Ben Jamin

The use of semicolon instead of colon has become widespread in Norway in the last five years or so. People just don't understand the difference, never got any instruction at school, they hit the keyboard at chance.
By the way, the punctuation varies enormously between languages. In most languages punctuation is a part of grammar. At the same time more people write and publish what they have written then before, without having enough knowlege of, and respect for the writing rules. The SMS generation has destroyed the writing altogether.


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## Silver_Biscuit

Yes, this particular writer also seems to use (or not use) commas basically at random - I know commas are a bit different between Icelandic and English, though. I won't give away any details but considering the nature of the text, you would certainly _expect_ the author to be good with languages, which is why I wondered if they were actually following correct usage for Icelandic. However, it's in English so I am correcting at will!

P.S. I am most definitely part of the 'SMS generation' and I know how to punctuate. I'm not really sure this is a generational thing, I'm certain plenty of people your age can't punctuate properly either. It's probably more that bad writing is simply more visible these days.


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## Ma_linka

Some Norwegians mix up colon with a semicolon because they think these two words sound a bit similar. Grammar isn't taught very thoroughly, plus they don't write enough compositions at schools, so not enough practice explains it all. Moreover, some of them don't really understand what a coordinating conjunction and independent sentence are, which is crucial in deciding what punctuation to use. Overall, språksimplifisering is nowadays observed in almost all languages, which is definitely not good, imho.


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## Alxmrphi

> Overall, språksimplifisering is nowadays observed in almost all languages, which is definitely not good, imho.


When you say _nowadays_, what time frame are you talking about? When did this universal simplification begin? Somewhere around the time just before you were born, where you could adjust to a specific pattern of language use but now it's changing slightly to a way you're less familiar with, which _must_ be the start of this whole process? Just curious.


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## Ma_linka

Alxmrphi, I meant to say that the process has recently started and still progresses. It's nothing about me being used to or familiar with, it's a common practice of simplifying the language because - big imho - the education system degradates; students are not motivated enough; students don't read enough (reading helps to remember grammar, spelling and punctuation); students don't write enough; and people get used to gadgets and are encouraged to simplify the language so they can't give up this dreadful habit in everyday life. Overall, the humanity becomes more and more lazy.


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## Alxmrphi

Ma_linka said:


> Alxmrphi, I meant to say that the process has recently started and still progresses. It's nothing about me being used to or familiar with, it's a common practice of simplifying the language because - big imho - the education system degradates; students are not motivated enough; students don't read enough (reading helps to remember grammar, spelling and punctuation); students don't write enough; and people get used to gadgets and are encouraged to simplify the language so they can't give up this dreadful habit in everyday life. Overall, the humanity becomes more and more lazy.



Can you define what you class as_ reading_ for me? In this age of technology, my feeling is kids read more now than they ever have in the history of humanity. Information is in some cases primarily accessible by reading alone. If you mean _reading_ in the sense of sitting down with a book, then I could totally accept that as fact, but I must put forward that one cannot simply _mean_ that and just say that people read less, without qualifying that specific meaning. Our lives are so intertwined with the digital world that our access to information has never been more reliant on being able to read. The reason I said about being familiar with a specific form is that this is a well-known complaint that can be traced back to centuries, whereby people grow up and idealise a specific linguistic standard, then lament the demise of the form they have internalised when a new generation gets its hands on it and changes it in ways they are unfamiliar with. It's a well known process in linguistics and it is exactly to do with people's dislike of the unfamiliarity of the new, because it jars with what they grew up with.

The language our parents' spoke was probably lamented as a distasteful change in the wrong direction, and the same thing happens every generation. This long-term viewpoint is almost always lost from the context when speaking about how language is going to the dogs, but once you read published letters dating back centuries, with some people complaining about forms that future generations would promote as the fine standard, which then changes, and what it changes to is then lamented as educated speech being broken down, you can see just how ridiculous these arguments are. Languages change and we all accept that, but why, for English's case, does everyone think that by the time we got to the era of Jane Austen the process should just stop? What did we hit then that was perfect? The lament of language decay is just like Groundhog day for every generation. People hardly ever see how weird their complaints are in the larger context of language. You can lead these complainers down a route by taking their arguments and can either lead them to disagree with themselves or get them to admit they should only really be speaking the language of a thousand years ago. It always ends up with them accepting the language they internalised as a child to be the one that is most correct, or maybe from a previous generation or two before that. People in 60 years will complain that what people complain about today, is changing, and should remain the way it is becoming now!


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## Ma_linka

You know, Alxmrphi, being quite young, my attitude to the languge simplification comes not out of my illiteracy in gadgets or hardened beliefs that the elderly are usually stuck to. I am sceptical to the modern education system and the way people have started using the language.
 Let's take pure facts. Earlier our nation was considered one of the most "reading" ones whereas right now this is what is happening: 
libraries get closed; students for the most part read trash (love or detective stories - the poor writings using 3-5 meaningful words - how can one obtain rich vocabulary in this case?); kids prefer computer games to reading a book; students are not motivated to learn poems/material by heart, which helps develop good speech and vocabulary and challenges the brain (use it or lose it, you know).
You can certainly say that libraries get closed because noone needs _real_ books, that is, everything can be found online. However, this is not true. People simply do not read as much as before, and the libraries are not in high demand like before.
The development process first progresses, if one can put it this way, but then we face a point of no return; subsequently, the degradation begins. I think this is what is happening right now.
It's nothing about just "complains" about neologisms or a different way of life. There is nothing wrong with being different since times have changed.


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## Alxmrphi

So, from what source do you draw the comparison that there was once a better time when many more people (proportionally) were literate? You said yourself you are not young, so if you don't have a personal experience of a better time, I find it hard to draw from what you say anything other than an idealised _better-in-the-past_ theme that might not have ever existed. You can't just say that there was once a reputation for a group of people to be good readers, that doesn't qualify anything other than personal opinion. Maybe a few selected people who did learn to read and write, did it well and in were celebrated literary people, but I totally disagree with the point that we have less literate people in the modern era than in the past. Access to education has boomed and we're no longer sending children down mines and limiting the typical working-class person to a life of illiteracy as was the case until the recent past.

It's like when people say the music of the modern era is awful compared to previous decades. They always harken back to the golden age of the 70s or 80s, totally missing the point that what we know of that period is the great stuff that stuck around because it was so good. If you put these people back in a time machine, they would soon realise there was a lot of awful music then, it's just this is easily forgotten about while the great classics stick around. Then, we have people today who listen to the radio, complain and say they'd like to live in the 80's when every band was like Led Zeppelin, Queen, Deep Purple or the Beatles. There is a total ignorance of how far we've come regarding literary standards and a turn towards standardisation of spellings etc.. You can't live on such personalised notions and draw from them conclusions about the state of the world in any real measurably true fashion. Seeing someone spell something in a slangy way does not mean they couldn't switch to perfectly standard English conventions when writing an essay. The way we use such technology doesn't require us to be so formal so neither is the language we use there. Why would anyone think we should write text messages like we would write exam papers or novels?


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## Silver_Biscuit

I'd like to add to Alex's excellent arguments that ever since mankind invented writing, we have been using shortened, quick forms of words in order to save time and space. Due to the prohibitively high costs of actually writing something down for much of literate human history, informal writing has only really become a thing in the last few centuries (say, from when personal letters began to be a viable option for the majority of the population), most surviving old texts we have are necessarily of a literary or formal nature. But on the other hand these same high costs still led to a lot of short forms just to save paper/vellum and ink. What we nowadays refer to as 'text speak' did not come along with the invention of sms.


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## Ma_linka

Alxmrphi said:


> I find it hard to draw from what you say anything other than an idealised _better-in-the-past_ theme that might not have ever existed. You can't just say that there was once a reputation for a group of people to be good readers, that doesn't qualify anything other than personal opinion. Maybe a few selected people who did learn to read and write, did it well and in were celebrated literary people, but I totally disagree with the point that we have less literate people in the modern era than in the past. Access to education has boomed and we're no longer sending children down mines and limiting the typical working-class person to a life of illiteracy as was the case until the recent past...


I think my explanation is difficult for you to understand due to the cultural differences, but the fact has always been a fact. Youngsters study less, and the education system deteriorates. I had a chance to compare.
If you take for instance Norway, then certainly right now they are better off with education compared to the 50s before the country discovered the oil reserves. Hardly anyone could get education, people ate mosly potatoes and fish.
However, even now I do think their education system is deteriorating: students hardly write compositions (that is why they cannot remember spelling an punctuation), they don't study anything by heart because "it is difficult", they are not motivated enough, condoms lay in the Dean's office, 6 and 7-year-olds read children books about sex, etc. It's my personal opinion though, perhaps someone thinks children should know about sex as soon as they start going to school.


Alxmrphi said:


> You can't just say that there was once a reputation for a group of  people to be good readers, that doesn't qualify anything other than  personal opinion.


This is not merely _my personal opinion_. It is pure statistics and proven facts (I am talking about my country, in this case).



Alxmrphi said:


> You can't live on such personalised notions and draw from them conclusions about the state of the world in any real measurably true fashion. Seeing someone spell something in a slangy way does not mean they couldn't switch to perfectly standard English conventions when writing an essay.


Their problem is that they do switch this language to their essay writing. This is _my_ personalised notion, _my_ conclusions and _my_ opinion about the world formed out of my life experience, and I think I have the right to hold them. You are willing to think whatever you would like to.


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## Ma_linka

Silver_Biscuit said:


> Due to the prohibitively high costs of actually writing something down for much of literate human history, informal writing has only really become a thing in the last few centuries (say, from when personal letters began to be a viable option for the majority of the population), ...What we nowadays refer to as 'text speak' did not come along with the invention of sms.


I was not talking about the informal writing, but rather about the illiteracy. The original post discussed wrong usage of punctuation in the paper, which is not the informal writing. The informal writing is part of every language; however, it was not the informal writing I was discussing.


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## Daniel20

Ma_linka said:


> However, even now I do think their education system is deteriorating: students hardly write compositions (that is why they cannot remember spelling an punctuation), they don't study anything by heart because "it is difficult", they are not motivated enough, condoms lay in the Dean's office, 6 and 7-year-olds read children books about sex, etc. It's my personal opinion though, perhaps someone thinks children should know about sex as soon as they start going to school.
> 
> This is not merely _my personal opinion_. It is pure statistics and proven facts (I am talking about my country, in this case).
> 
> Their problem is that they do switch this language to their essay writing. This is _my_ personalised notion, _my_ conclusions and _my_ opinion about the world formed out of my life experience, and I think I have the right to hold them. You are willing to think whatever you would like to.



On Norway: I suppose you can argue that students don't write compositions, that could be true. I have no idea. The rest however is purely guesswork, or at best anecdotal. You've assumed students don't study things by heart because it's difficult; you have assumed they're not motivated; you make a crazy assumption that condoms are in the Dean's office (and so what if they are?!) and then - and this could be fact, it is in England - that students get taught about sex early at school. Which has nothing to do with their educational levels, as it happens.

Then, "this is not my personal opinion [...] This is _my _personalised notion, _my _conclusions and _my _opinion."

Well, there you go then.


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## Silver_Biscuit

Ma_linka said:


> I was not talking about the informal writing, but rather about the illiteracy. The original post discussed wrong usage of punctuation in the paper, which is not the informal writing. The informal writing is part of every language; however, it was not the informal writing I was discussing.



Yes, MY original post was about semicolons in Icelandic. Is that what you're talking about? Doesn't seem like it.

We know, we know, everything's deteriorating, just like it has been ever since the  dawn of time. It's surprising we can still speak and write at all. This  thread is hilarious, but should perhaps be closed since it has rather deteriorated into a 'you damn kids get your ball off my lawn' rant.


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## Ma_linka

Daniel20 said:


> You've assumed students don't study things by heart because it's difficult; you have assumed they're not motivated; you make a crazy assumption that condoms are in the Dean's office (and so what if they are?!) and then - and this could be fact, it is in England - that students get taught about sex early at school. Which has nothing to do with their educational levels, as it happens.
> 
> Then, "this is not my personal opinion [...] This is _my _personalised notion, _my _conclusions and _my _opinion."
> 
> Well, there you go then.


I did not _assume._ I was there myself, could _see_ and _compare_. I do not simply _assume_ when discussing such topics.
And yes, regarding illiteracy, this is my personalised notion. Regarding the deteriorating education system in my country, it is a fact, and many will agree with me.

Correction: the last phrase was meant for the topic starter, that is why I cut it out and inserted in the next message.


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## Ma_linka

Silver_Biscuit said:


> a 'you damn kids get your ball off my lawn' rant.


I am sorry you see the problem from this perspective. 
Regarding your initial post, someone has already wrote that grammar was  not taught properly, that is why people confuse punctuation and do not  sometimes understand the rules. So, we merely drilled into the problem;  however, I do agree it went too far, and the thread should be closed.


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