How do you pronounce "Eyjafjallajkull"?

“I’ve a yacht, La Yeckel

In England its pronounced “Smith”.

(The ‘P’ is silent)

I heard some news channel just give up and call it E15 (for the 15 letters in the name) :slight_smile:

Why don’t we just translate it and call it Island-mountain-glacier?

Here you go. Sing along!

Ey-Ma-Splodey-Mount-N-Getoutta-heyah.

Isn’t the active Hawaiian volcano pronounced “kommayewannalaya”?

Bigfukkinboom.

Ia ia Cthulhu fhtagn!

or alternatively

like this.

How did the superfluous 't’s get there? It’s fell, fjell, fjäll and jökel, respectively, in other Germanic languages with no sight of a ‘t’ in neither spelling nor pronunciation.

I think the process is called Anticipatory dissimilation. In Icelandic, and in some Norwegian dialects, ll is pronounced either dl or tl.

Imafollicle

According to “Morning Joe” today, “Roethlisberger”

A bigger question is where the second and last syllable go in the Wikipedia pronunciation. (I can understand why the /j/ gets palatalized so that I thought it was a /v/ earlier.)

I now hear AYY va DLUH jiK (/ˌeɪj vʲa ˈd͡lœ ɟəq/ for you IPA lovers.)

OK, I’ve just listened to the pronunciation on Wikipedia. It seems to match the transcription I gave very well. I’m not sure how you arrived at yours, except possibly that the speaker was speaking too fast for you to make out all the sounds and syllables. If you play the sound clip in a program which can lower the speed while keeping the pitch the same, you can clearly hear all six syllables. For example, try with MPlayer:


mplayer -af scaletempo -speed 0.33 Eyjafjallajökull.ogg

The first <f> is definitely /f/, not /v/ — voiced consonants in Icelandic are actually quite rare; the distinction between, say, <t> and <d>, or <p> and <b>, is usually one of aspiration rather than voicing. I’ll grant you the first <ll> does sound a bit like /dl/ rather than /tl/. The rest of your transcription is a complete mystery to me. (/q/? Really??) Again, I’d recommend trying again after listening to the clip slowed down.

Shar-day

I say to-may-to, you say Eyjafjallajkull.

Now that we’ve got that settled, can we work on a pronunciation for H1N1?

Heinie?

They make some damn good handgun sights. :smiley: