[lg policy] Iceland Volcano Spews Consonants and Vowels

[Harold Schiffman]

Iceland Volcano Spews Consonants and Vowels
By ANDY NEWMAN AND BAO ONG

Copyranter

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, “Hey, ya fergot La Yogurt.”

“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.

Most non-Icelandic speakers, of course, just call the thing the
volcano, and, when reading news accounts, let their mind’s narrator
glide silently over those 16 letters. (This may be for the best,
international-respect-wise, since as our colleagues at The Lede noted
Friday, Icelanders find our manglings of the name endlessly amusing.)
Officials at the Icelandic consulate said that most callers worried
about their travel plans did not attempt to bruise their tongues on
the offending word.

These more practical souls were represented in our survey by a woman
named Sophia Williamson, who was shown a flashcard with both the
spelling and the pronunciation guide.

“Sorry, I don’t have time for this,” she said and headed for the
nearest office building.

Emily S. Rueb contributed reporting.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/iceland-volcano-spews-consonants-and-vowels/

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