Icelandic -tl-

[Frye, David]

Hello all,



This is very off-topic, but I just heard a report on the volcano in Iceland, Eyjafjallajokull, the one that is causing such aeronautic trouble in Europe, and it sounded to my untrained ears that the Icelandic pronunciation of their "ll" is precisely the same as Nahuatl "tl."



I also noticed that non-Icelandic reporters find it impossible to say.



The New York Times pronunciation guide, http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/iceland-volcano-spews-consonants-and-vowels/, turns the middle "ll" into two sounds, "t" followed by "l" (keeping the "t" with the preceding syllable and annexing the "l" to the following one), and then has this about that tricky final -tl sound:

"the 't' at the end kind of sticks for a second and pulls away with a hint of a glottal 'l.'"

Guess that's the best you can do if you only have American English phonemes to work with.



David


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