While this article has surprisingly little of it, there's still some bæd linguistix here. Among others, comparing the utterly conservative Icelandic, spoken on

While this article has surprisingly little of it, there's still some bæd linguistix here. Among others, comparing the utterly conservative Icelandic, spoken on a remote island by (today!) merely 300,000 people, with the language of England, which was invaded from every which way every couple of centuries until the 1400s. That's just ridiculous. To take a much more adequate example: To most Germans, the Nibelungenlied in its original rendition is just about as understandable as Beowulf is to modern English speakers. English is in dire need of a spelling reform (the Celts have you one-upped here, Scottish and Irish have had very successful reforms,) but I don't think it is "weirder" than many other languages of peoples that have had widespread linguistic contact to other societies. French, German, Spanish, all have their oddities, on a similar scale of magnitude as English.