All those funny letters

I'm afraid that many of our posts are going to involve things that are somewhat difficult to read for people not accustomed to languages that use "funny letters".  We'll write out place-names in the appropriate language, and when possible, include a pronunciation.

Luckily, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish all basically use the Roman alphabet, so things often don't look TOO strange--not like Russian or Arabic or Japanese.  Swedish and Norwegian each have 3 extra vowels--å, ä, and ö for Swedish, æ, ø, and å, for Norwegian--which are tagged onto the end of the alphabet.  Please note that these are NOT simply decorations...they affect both the sound and meaning of the word!  Example: in Swedish, lat (laht) = lazy, låt (loht) = melody, or sound, lät (let)= sounded.  Leaving the "decorations" off is really not an option.

Icelandic is a bit more complex.  Like Norwegian, Swedish and English, it is basically a Germanic language.  However, while both Swedish and Norwegian have many words very similar to English, and a roughly similar grammatic structure, Icelandic has retained many characteristics of Old Norse, from about 1000 years ago, to the degree that many Icelanders can still read their medieval manuscripts.  The language has never undergone the reforms and simplifications of Norwegian and Swedish, and it strongly resists borrowing words from other languages like English.  In fact, in the 1700s, a group of writers and other educated folks started a movement to purge Icelandic of words borrowed from other languages.  When Icelandic needs a new word to express a new concept, they either re-purpose a word that has fallen into disuse, or they make up a new word based on Icelandic root words:

"For example, the word rafmagn ("electricity"), literally means "amber power" from Greek elektron ("amber"); similarly, the word sími ("telephone") originally meant "cord" and tölva ("computer") is a portmanteau of tala ("digit; number") and völva ("seeress")."
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_language

But back to pronunciation.  Unlike Swedish and Norwegian, with their paltry 3 extra vowels, Icelandic has 8 more vowels than English (á, é, í, ó, ú, ý, æ, and ö), and two consonants that have been dropped from English (Þ þ, pronounced 'thorn', and Ð ð, pronounced 'eth' or 'edh').

There's rather a lot more--I'll stop with the mention of the 'double-l', which is usually pronounced like 'dl' or 'tl'.  For anyone wishing the complete list, I'll refer you here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Icelandic/Alphabet_and_Pronunciation

We'll do our best to provide pronunciation guides whenever we use an Icelandic place-name in our posts, but neither of us actually speaks the language--the grammar proved too complex.  You'll have to accept an approximation!