Eyjafjallajokull “Hey, ya fergot La Yogurt.”

[Tom Zurinskas]

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/iceland-volcano-spews-consonants-and-vowels/

April 16, 2010, 4:44 pm   NY Times
Iceland Volcano Spews Consonants and Vowels
By ANDY NEWMAN AND BAO ONG

New Yorkers with suddenly dashed European travel plans were not the only ones in town inconvenienced by the eruption of a volcano 2,800 miles away.
All across this fair city, thousands of people, some of them highly paid television and radio newscasters, found themselves tumbling down the vowel-and-liquid-consonant-lubricated slopes of Eyjafjallajokull, the mountain’s 16-letter, six-and-a-half-syllable, 47-Scrabble-point name.
We know this because we went into the Times Square subway station and asked them to say it.
“I, a fiat like, la Joe, cuckle” Shmuel Rosenthal said, slowly, as if reading an entire sentence.
“EE-ya-FEE-ya-la-jo-COOL,” a man named Gael Laincy offered.
Wrong, and wrong.
Judy Boykin, a tourist from Martinsburg, W.Va., in a pink floral print coat with an American flag pinned to her lapel, got it partly right.
“There’s something that’s not pronounced,” she said, adding, “Al Roker couldn’t do it this morning.”
But then she wound up and unleashed, seemingly to her own surprise, “Jaffalakackle!”
Nope.
Here’s the lowdown from a native speaker at the Icelandic consulate, who would give only her first name, spelling unknown but pronounced Becca. Take a deep breath.
EY-ya-fyat-lah-YOH-kuht
The “EY” rhymes with the word “bay.” The “k” is softer than an English “k,” almost like a hard “g.” And the “t” at the end kind of sticks for a second and pulls away with a hint of a glottal “l.”
EY-ya-fyat-lah-YOH-kuht
Say it soft and it’s almost like, “The first problem for Americans is, you see this long word and don’t know where to begin, “ said Joan Maling, a professor emerita of linguistics at Brandeis University. “You don’t know how to divide it up.”
It’s simple. “Eyja” is the Icelandic word for island. “Fjalla” means mountain. “Jokull” is glacier.
Of the 12 people we approached in the subway, only Patrick Gullmarsuik got it nearly right. He is from Sweden.



Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL7+
see truespel.com phonetic spelling












----------------------------------------
> Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2010 20:48:41 -0400
> From: aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM
> Subject: Re: Short take: "multidrug" - WOTD from the OED
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: victor steinbok
> Subject: Re: Short take: "multidrug" - WOTD from the OED
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I am not assuming anything. I have no idea what it means--in fact, I
> could not parse it for some time. To be honest, I do see any
> difference between saying that its multiple drugstores or a chain that
> consists of multiple drugstore--as far as I am concerned, that's the
> same thing. The point is quite different here--why this particular
> split--"multi-drug store". The question for me is more whether it is
> [[multi-drug] store] or [multi-[drug store]], but, if it is the
> latter, why not "drugstore"? And the former makes little sense as most
> drugstores would be selling many drugs in any case. And if I did not
> think there was an ambiguity, I would have pushed the date directly
> back to 1895, not 1915.
>
> VS-)
>
> On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 3:37 PM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
>>
>> Why assume a chain? Why not keep it simple? multi + drug store = many
>> drug stores; multi-drug store owners = owners of many drug stores.
>>
>> DanG
>>
>> On 4/15/2010 2:08 AM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
> ...
>>> http://books.google.com/books?id=aynnAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA157
>>> American druggist and pharmaceutical record, Volume 26:5 (322). New
>>> York: March 11, 1895
>>> General News Notes. p. 157
>>>
>>>> Benfield Bros., the multi-drug store owners, have bought the Euclid
>>>> avenue pharmacy of late operated by Dreber Bros. L. Dreber in return
>>>> purchased Benfield's Florence Pharmacy.
> ...
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
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