Volcano Causes Disruption in Speech Flows

When I checked a few minutes ago, the phrase "Eyjafjallajokull pronunciation" was the 79th most popular Google search going. I'm not sure how that compares to the rush for the definition of "transgression" after a certain pro golfer's personal confessions of a few months ago, but clearly, it isn't just air travel that the Icelandic volcano has disrupted.

Patrick Smith, who writes Salon's Ask the Pilot column, wrote last Friday that Eyjafjallajökull "can only be pronounced correctly after consuming at least six cocktails"; not content with that, he came back on Monday opining that it is "a word that looks and sounds like the alphabet exploded".

The New York Times characterized the name of the volcano as a "16-letter, six-and-a-half syllable, 47-Scrabble-point name". Actually, you can't play proper nouns in Scrabble, but the point is taken.

Anglocentric, histrionic, linguistic fright aside, perhaps it's not too much to observe that, in fact, Icelandic is as a written language much more phonetic than English. By that I mean that the relation between script and sound is more consistent in Icelandic than in our notoriously hard-to-spell-and-pronounce language.

The NYT's recommended "EY-ya-fyat-lah-YOH-kuht" is pretty close to the mark, but I also like the BBC's "AY-uh-fyat-luh-YOE-kuutl-uh", mostly because in specifying that that's "oe" as in French coeur, they haven't forgotten that the umlaut over the o in jökull indicates a rounded vowel. The BBC guide also recognizes that the double ll in this last element must be pronounced as [tl], just as in the middle element fjalla. That final l, by the way, should be articulated but not voiced.

If none of that makes much sense, you can hear a recording of the proper pronunciation here.

I was going to come on and pontificate about how eyja is cognate with island and fjall is related to the Yorkshire fell, meaning "hill" or "high moor", but I see that the work's already been done for me here (scroll down to the part in blue, by David Shaw).

So instead I'll just muse randomly about the double-l spellings. My hubby, who teaches Old Icelandic at the local university, tells me that as far as anyone knows, the -ll- in words like fjalla and jökull was pronounced as an extra long [l] — as in, say, pronouncing the name of Mel Lastman (with apologies to Torontonians for the reminder of our former mayor's existence). 

Through a process of dissimilation (defined by David Crystal as "the influence exercised by one sound segment upon another, so that the sounds become less alike"), the first l in the pair became pronounced over time as [t]. 

Something very like this dissimilation is found also in Welsh, where ll is pronounced [chl] (ch pronounced as in loch), as in the place name Llandudno.
 
In French and Spanish, on the other hand, -ll- is pronounced as a glide (as though it were y), as in ville or quesadilla. But I've also heard some Spanish speakers (especially from Latin America) pronounce the double-l as a voiced palatal fricative [ȝ], as in the initial consonant of French jaune.

No grand point to make here — just enjoying the variation!