And this country went bankrupt recently. Why is there a need for such a list when you’re friggin broke?
It is an odd quirk of human behavior in the governing elite; when things get tough, they focus on minutia. Type in "California town bans" into Google and you get 6.4 million hits. You see towns banning such items as plastic bags, fake lawns, tsunamis (good luck with that), smoking inside a home, bottled water, Christmas decorations, and even beer pong. This is the same California that is financially imploding at both the State and local level. Instead of focussing on fixing the problems, which their out of control spending and regulations created, they go on to worrying about trivialities and concoct yet more bans on every day activities.
Iceland is a country of 300,000 people -- smaller than many US cities
it's had this law for a long time, way before being broke.
it has a birth rate of approximately 4,000 per year
it has a language that has declinations (see my post above)
So it made logical sense when they put in this law years ago that the accepted list of names, that the name can be declined grammatically
Let me try and explain it this way -- Ive been learning Polish since I got here, so will use it as an example -- if you want to say in English Veronica's book or Jack's book, you put the "'s"
But in Polish and in other Indo-european languages like Icelandic, you have to decline, i.e. change the base word to signify this
so you'd say "book Veronicy" or "book Jacka" -- the declination changes if it is masculine or feminine -- for feminine the word normally in the un-declined form ends in "a" or a softened letter and when you are putting "possession" you change that to "y".
For Male you add an "a"
That's a simplification of the rules, but you get what I mean