For me it was a Bjork song but it was in Icelandic. I had heard it around 2010ish and didn't have the song. Because it was in Icelandic and I didn't know the name of the track I couldn't figure out how to find it - because I had streamed through all of Biorks albums on one of these streaming services and it wasn't on any of them. I don't know how similar Icelandic is to other Nordic/Scandinavian languages so maybe a speaker of these languages would have been able to identify the lyrics, but I couldn't even identify a single word from memory that I could use to search for the lyrics.

After more than a decade The Guardian had an article on Bjork and mentioned something about her fan club on Reddit. So I thought I would ask there.

That hit the jackpot, someone mentioned she had an earlier band called Tappi Tíkarrass (from 1981-1983) and it was a song they performed on some TV show. https://youtu.be/nkuXOtFLMZw

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masklinn 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I don't know how similar Icelandic is to other Nordic/Scandinavian languages so maybe a speaker of these languages would have been able to identify the lyrics

Not likely, Icelandic has kept much closer to old norse in grammar and phonology so sounds nothing like continental scandinavian (also much prefers neologisms to loanwords, but that’s maybe less of an issue for song lyrics). You’d have had to ask specifically icelanders, maybe faroe islanders as a last recourse, but there’s a lot less of the latter than the former.

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vidarh 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, as a Norwegian, I can sometimes somewhat read Icelandic, but it takes a lot of effort, and it sounds familiar but not enough for me to remotely reliably transcribe.

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embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent [-]

As a Swede, Icelandic is a foreign to me as Finnish, meaning I don't understand it at all, in any way. Some words could be guessed, but that's the same for German too for most of us. Danish and Norwegian people I have no problem talking with though.

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vidarh 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I might be biased with some exposure to Norse and Old English too, so I don't know whether Norwegians without that would recognise nearly as much (or little) Icelandic given how much Icelandic still takes from Norse.

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masklinn 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I understand the western Norwegian dialects (/ nynorsk) have a much stronger old / west norse influence so are closer to Icelandic, maybe you are from those regions or are familiar with these dialects?

	▲	vidarh 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm from the east, but Nynorsk is required for all students (each region picks the main written language they want to use in schools, but also need to teach the other one), so we do certainly all get some exposure to Nynorsk as well and it certainly might help.

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sollewitt 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That is amazing. She was already 100% “Bjork” at 17.

	▲	bjoli 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Her interview with Arvo Pärt (composer) is amazing. She starts off being very Björk, and as a viewer I wondered where this would go. Turns out they live on the same planet, speaking the same language.