Dear Årni
>
> But no such luck with Icelandic.
>
> I honestly don't know where to begin! The two letters we use regardless
>of what English speaking peoples are aware of are Þ þ and Ð ð. The former
>produces the same sound as the 'th' in an English 'thorough'. The latter
>produces the same sound as 'th' as heard in an English 'this'. And then
>there are Æ æ and Ö ö. Basically your ae, and ö is like the vowe sound in
>an American word such as 'nerd'.
>
> Speaking the language we always stress the first syllable, no matter how
>long the word is. If it's a compound word, which there are a lot of, each
>new addition to the first word in the combination has a slighter stress.
>Thus 'sparisjóður' [savings bank] stresses the 'spa' of the first
>compound, i.e. 'spari', while there's a slighter stress on the 'sjó' in
>'sjóður'.
>
> The alphabet has no c . And it ends with: x y z þ æ ö .
>
> 'Góðan dag' means literally 'good day', which you would properly
>translate as 'good morning'. And when saying good-bye we say 'bless',
>which is a short form of 'You be blessed'. I'll stop now in the hope that
>this is of some use. Ask me some more, so I can be of further help with
>this. 'Já' means 'yes' and 'nei' means 'no'. I'll be happy to elaborate.
Did your e-mail come back to you looking like this, or does it only happen
to some of us? At any rate, as a method of definititively hiding the
secrets of Icelandic, it certainly works.
But great fun, eh?
Doug
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
There is a secret society of seven men that controls the
finances of the world. This is known to everyone, but the
details are not known. There are those who believe it would
be better if one of the seven were a financier.
R.A. Lafferty
