weberwest wrote:
Thank you flig for looking in on the tour - as it sounds, you have been all along with me on this long trip - I am happy to finally hear from you and that you like the travelogue thus far. Juat another week or so to go and we can lay this trip aside and concentrate on something new.
Spelling the names is quite difficult for me as well, but I try to do enough checking to make the spelling correct. Of course I am spelling with the anglizised version, as it would take too much time to implant all the specific Islandic characters, and anyway, the viewers would not know how to pronounce them. Pronouncing them is actually not to hard, I am of Swiss background and pronouncing the words in the "Germanic" way helps getting most of the sounds right. But some words are just very difficult - for instance that unpronouncable volcano/glacier Eyjafjallajökull ......
I repeat here I response I made about a week ago, which you might have seen, possibly not:
"Pronounciation is tough, but it becomes easier when you break down the compound words and get to know a few of the repetitive words: Gils-fjördur, Bitru-fjördur and Isa-fjördur where fjördur means fjord is actually quite easy, Dranga-jökull where jökull = glacier, Öxna-dalur where dalur means valley and Öx stands for cattle, like ox. How on earth one would break down Vestfjardagöng is beyong me, but I know that göng means tunnel. By the way, I understand that the vowel ö is pronounced like ea in early. Welcome to Icelandic for beginners! It is actually quite a bit more difficult, because they use different "characters" in many of the words which I have anglicized here, like the famous Thingvellir National Park, where the first two letters Th really replace something that looks like a small case letter p. It gets fun when you have to input these characters into a non-Icelandic script GPS, but only see the Icelandic name ..... but that's what makes travelling exciting..."
Have a great day and enjoy the rest of the tour over the coming week - Joe
Thank you flig for looking in on the tour - as it ... (
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Interesting. I've been lurking about these posts. Nice. Beautiful place.