I'm better at languages than I ever thought I might be. Now, you may think that awfully pretentious of me, but one of the experiences that has led me to believe as such could have been experienced by anyone just thinking a little bit logically about language. The first, however, is completely egocentric: I managed to watch an entire episode of futurama in French and - what is more - understood a very large portion of what was going on. So much so, in fact, that I might estimate I got a large percentage of the jokes that were translated directly and a couple of the ones tailored for French audiences.

The next, however, is open for everyone. In discovering Sigur Rós recently, I've gone to the lengths of acquiring their song (Hoppipolla) which I am quite enjoying. I knew they were an Icelandic band, and so naturally [and correctly] assumed that they would sing in Icelandic. I realise they also sing nonsense lyrics based around the phonetic structure of the Icelandic tongue, but a little research later and I found that Hoppipolla is mostly in foreign. I was having a listen to the 'lyrics' and managed to comprehend one of the lines:

Vill springa út úr skel

I'll admit that I didn't know what a 'skel' was, though I had a few ideas after I'd looked at the rest of the sentence. It doesn't even take that much explaining: Will spring out our skel. Granted that Will is the Germanic form (i.e. I want rather than I will) but it still doesn't negate too much from the overall understanding. Based on this, skel might mean shell which, true enough, it does. If you want a listen to check I'm not ranting and dribbling on, give the song a play from around 1:25 onwards and you too should be able to understand it.

Gaz's Blog: teaching you things you didn't know or care about to such an extent that you didn't even know you cared about them.

Gaz out.