Icelandic Language Blog

Last week really gave us a proper taste of Icelandic weather at its worst! Starting with a storm on Monday and growing into a snowstorm that began on Wednesday morning, ending up with an ash fall. The snowing was no ordinary kind either. We got so much snow that the schools were closed and guess how common that is in Iceland? Answer is: extremely uncommon. Schools here just don’t close for weather unless we’re expecting a hurricane and even then it has to be a pretty wild hurricane.

I’ll start out by apologizing for failing to make last Wednesday’s blog post, though. I was stupid enough to wander out on Monday evening, right into the storm, with less than suitable amount of clothing and already feeling a bit under the weather, and yes I got very ill. I would say I deserved to! At the moment I’m all better again but I still haven’t got my voice 100% back so alas, the audio post I was planning for this blog post has to wait a bit – I hope to get to it on the next Wednesday, but let’s look at the highlights of last week instead.

Monday

The day started out as any day on Iceland, with nothing out of ordinary, but by afternoon the wind picked up. I had a choir practice in the evening (fun fact: there seems to be a disproportionate amount of choirs in Iceland in comparison to the amount of population, and the general quality of them is quite good!) so I just threw on a sweater, thinking it would suffice like it so often does. Icelandic wool makes for almost water- and windproof clothing.

However, that’s when the weather is normal. What was waiting for me outside was this.

In Breiðholt where I live the wind was still negotiable but the downtown area is near the sea, with wind force considerably worse. I had to lean against it even to stay still and then try to run for it between the gusts. At one point the wind threw me sideways off my feet and I seriously considered just trying to make it for the nearest cover and calling help. Still, as the only thing I hurt falling down was my pride I made up my mind to just head on and eventually I somehow did get to the choir practice, mostly ok but thoroughly frozen.

Wednesday

Eight o´clock a.m.

Noon. It was still snowing outside for several hours after this but by now I didn’t even try climbing over all that snow.

Not surprisingly at all I woke up feeling less than good and sent an sms to a classmate about how I wasn’t going to go to the lecture that morning, to which she replied she was going to skip it herself because of the weather.

What you’ll see in the photos is what was going on outside. Thank goodness our front door opens inwards!

I draped some clothes on because ill or not I wasn’t going to NOT photograph this. This may have been a big mistake because after I came back in I had lost my voice almost completely, but hey, I would not have wanted to miss this chance for the world!*

Around 8.00 a.m. at the front door.

Turned out that not going to the lecture had been a wise choice, and that it would have been so even if I had been in full health. Breiðholt got snowed on so thoroughly that it was near impossible to get out of the house with snow piled at our door all the way to the thighs. The snow cleaning units had to put all their work into keeping the main roads open, and as a result the residential areas were snowed shut for most of the day so there would have been no way of driving through all the snow, let alone walking to and from the bus stop. Had I gone out I would have been lucky to get to the uni and even luckier to manage to return home…

The view from the window.

By nine o’clock the buses had stopped running outside of the  Capital city area and by half past the east Reykjavík as well, some schools were already closing and the police were issuing pleas for people to stay indoors and avoid going out. By midday this changed into a warning to not wander out at any cost, and that the children that were at the schools that had stayed open in the morning would have to wait for the storm to be over: driving over to fetch them was forbidden. This might sound a bit heartless but it was very necessary, because with the roads as they were the last thing anyone wanted was for people to cause accidents, get stuck in the snow etc. The traffic jams were already several hours long and there was a 20 cars collision on one of the roads.

Goodbye grill, I miss you. ;^;

Here are some videos at the webpage of the Morgunblaðið, or Mbl.

Enn víða vonskuveður. (= Still bad weather far and wide) A quick look at the weather in the south and south-west plus recommendations of not attempting to travel by car.

Vandræðin og veðrið kom á óvart. (= The problems and the weather came as a surprise.) Björgunarsveitinn, the voluntary emergency units, had their hands full all day. Keep an eye on the uniforms, it’s helpful to know what your potential saviours look like. Also see the locals just trudging through the weather like it’s no big deal.

Annasamasti dagur frá upphafi. (= Busiest day from the start) Tells about the snowstorm from the point of view of árekstur.is, the people who help those that end up in car accidents.

News of Iceland gives an overview of the storm in English.

And don’t miss this – Mbl has collected all of their storm news on one page! You can go click on the links for amazing photographs and news (all in Icelandic, but translating texts is a wonderful way of learning vocabulary). Who was born in an ambulance during the storm? What happened with air traffic? What about the car that got stuck after it drove off the road and was left on the spot for overnight, it was vandalized but how?

The next day I was in for an even bigger surprise. All that snow of the previous day was now with a filthy-looking, brownish gray layer on top. By asking around I quickly found out that this was all because the storm winds had picked up the ash of the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption and carried it, once again, all over Reykjavík. You heard right, it’s now the year 2013 and the ash is still lying on the ground just waiting to be picked up and carried around by the wind.

The car… 

As the ash very quickly damages the paint on the cars, it has to be washed off ASAP. You can tell when an ash fall has happened by everyone suddenly hosing down their cars. The ash is  made of tiny particles that are very sharp, so scrubbing the car would just result in scratching it.

A close-up of the snow and the mess the ash creates. The only thing to do is to wash it off with lots of water as soon as the weather clears up. Btw if this is not bad enough remember that it’s poisonous.

Previous blog posts on volcanoes and their effect on the daily life in Iceland:

Greetings from the Grímsvatn volcano.

When the volcanoes wake up.

*All photographing of Hulda’s blog entries is done by an idiot with a low regard to her health and safety, do not try this at home.

Like I promised last month, here’s the entry on the length of vowels and what determines whether a vowel is long or short. For example, why is the name Vala pronounced with a long first “a” but the name Valla with a short one? Why do the words gata (= street) and hús (= house) get long vowels, but gatnamót (= intersection) and húss (= house’s) only short ones? And what about Esja vs. espa (= irritate, enrage), why is Esja more like “eesja” when espa only gets to be “espa”?

First step

To begin with, only the stressed syllables can have a long vowel. In Icelandic this means the first syllable of each word and sometimes, with longer words, also the third one. This extra stress can only happen in words of four syllables or longer, such as almanakið (= the almanac). Both monophthongs and diphthongs can be pronounced long or short.

Therefore in words such as fáni (= flag), kaka (= cake) and láta (= to let, allow) only the first syllable is long.

The two first photos are from Látrabjarg, the western-most place of Europe that also hosts the largest seabird community of the whole continent. 440 m drop down, just looking at it made me feel a bit ill.  

Second step

Compound words can also have these extras, but they are at the first syllable of each word used to make the compound word, not necessarily the first and the third. You’ll have to separate the words first to know where the stress goes: bílastæði (= a parking lot) has both a long í and a long æ because it’s made of the words bíll and stæði. In bíll (= car) the í is short, though, and this is because of the

Third step

If the first vowel of the first syllable is followed by either another vowel or just one consonant, the first vowel is long.

Fáir (= few), rós (= rose) and bera (= to carry) each have a long first vowel. Mynd (= picture), fíll (= elephant) and Palli (= nickname for Páll) each have a short first vowel.

Mr. Raven here has a great beard! 

But there are words such as nepja (= chill, bitter cold) and letra (= to write, engrave, carve), which have a long first vowels despite the double consonants following them. How is this in any way logical? The good news is that it indeed is logical, the bad news is that it’ll take some effort to learn the rule of exceptional long vowels:

Fourth step

This one used to confuse the living daylights out of me so I’ll try to write the rule in as simple form as possible.

If the stressed vowel is followed by two consonants, the first of which is either

p, t, k or s

and the latter either

v, j or r

the first vowel is pronounced long.

Examples: tekjur (= income), veikja (= to weaken), vökva (= to water, irrigate) and lepja (= to lap). This one may be difficult to remember at first but don’t worry about it too much, it will eventually grow on as you use the language. It’ll help you a lot to listen to Icelandic music and paying attention to how much time each word gets. One of my favourites is the song Velkomin by Bróðir Svartúlfs; the lyrics can be found online. It may feel a bit too much because the words flood by so fast, but listening to songs like this one is exactly the way of learning the correct rhythm of words in a quick and easy way, and enjoying great music at the same time!

This one didn’t want to be photographed. I think it’s the resident raven of our neighborhood, he gets suspicious if you point him with anything at all, cameras included.

Fifth step

Further exceptions – no don’t run away, I promise these are easy!

Ahem. A word that is of clear foreign origin and has a fixed pronunciation, such as country names, do not get long vowels. Loan words that have become a part of the daily speech, such as kaffi (= coffee) and kanill (= cinnamon), go according to the rules above.

There’s actually one more situation where you may have a stressed syllable in an unusual place, it’s when the speaker is putting a stress on a syllable that otherwise would not have it simply to pull your attention to said syllable. To f.ex. note the gender of a word perhaps, that might be the most common one. Or stressing singular vs. plural. This is, however, so rare it almost doesn’t deserve a mention, but I thought to put it here anyway just to complete your confusion the set of rules.

I also made a short video of the names of typical Icelandic birds and tried to choose ones that could be used to compare the length of the stressed vowels. In compound words I try to pronounce extra carefully both words so that it’s easier to hear what, exactly, the words are.

Previous pronunciation guides:

Sharp consonants (part 1).

Vowels (part 2). Dwarfs, too.

A typical problem, when trying to use Icelandic to speak with the locals, is that for some reason they look at you quizzically and go “ha”* and you end up repeating yourself over and over again. Yet in the classroom or when talking with your teachers you never run into this same problem. Why is that?

It’s because you’re mispronouncing. Other foreigners are in the same position with you – they all have their accent that can come in the way of pronouncing correctly – and your language teachers have a long experience of listening to various foreigners use the language. In short, everyone else except for the usual Icelander is already trained to listen to you. The good news is that the problem is easy to correct. Just pay attention to a couple of crucial points while you speak.

Most importantly, do not try to speak as fast as the locals. It’s tempting because it gives a chance of avoiding too difficult sound clusters and Icelanders themselves mutter, mumble, and cut every word into bite-sized syllables anyway, don’t they? But unlike them, you don’t know what those important bits are that absolutely have to be included. Besides you already have an accent which may make it challenging for the locals to understand you, so it’s best to not make it even harder for them.

However, Icelanders will understand you sooner or later if you keep on trying, and this is a point I wish to stress: your mistakes don’t really matter. You won’t be ridiculed because of them, most likely they’ll be politely ignored. In fact, making mistakes will help you rather than harm you. They should be considered a very important part of learning any new language, getting over your initial fear of using it. When it comes to pronunciation it feels worse to fear the mistake than to make it, trust me on this.

K, p and t

Consonants in Icelandic are pronounced sharply, often with an added “h” which is made by pronouncing the letter and then “blowing” through it. This happens especially at the beginnings of words: the English “k” is in fact pronounced similarly to the Icelandic version, only in Icelandic you would exaggerate the sound, making it into a “kh”. The word kaka (= cake) sounds more like “khaaka”, to name an example. Other consonants that work this was are “t” and “p”, so imagine you’re saying “th” and “ph” instead. However, there letters lose the “h” sound if they’re not the first letter of the word – (að) tapa (= to lose) has a sharp “t” and a softer “p”, “thaapa”.

B, d, g and f

The sharpness is carried out to letters “b”, “d” and “g”, which are almost always pronounced like “p”, “t” and “k” with no “h”-sound. A good example of this difference is gata (= street) vs. Kata (= a female name), “kaata” vs. “Khaata”.

“F” is a consonant that’s rarely pronounced as it is in English, unless it begins the word. Most often an “f” within a word is pronounced as “v” like in kafald, or even dropped entirely, with the exception of “fl” combinations, f.ex. fífl (= fool, idiot) where it becomes like the aforementioned “b”, sounding more like “fipl”.

The only exception to these rules can be new, foreign loan words, but with a little bit of time they tend to become sharp enough for easy use because using two different sets of pronunciation rules can be tricky**.

Hveragerði from above – more about Hveragerði in a moment.

Kk, pp and tt

Note that with double consonants the “h” sound jumps in front of the consonants instead. I’ll write more about this in the next pronunciation guide, but it may be best to learn this rule of pre-aspiration in this context. Happ (= luck) is pronounced “hahp”: the other “p” falls off and the pre-aspiration “h” gets wedged inside the word before the “p”.

And here’s what inspired me to make this post, a little video of me trying my best at pronouncing different names of snow in Icelandic for some examples. Now this reminds me of a story -

Right before the New Year’s Eve we packed our jeep to head for the countryside for a cabin party. The weather looked bad and we were a little bit unsure of how the road conditions in the south would be, there were warnings of a snow storm and we would have to pass over Hellisheiði, driving over mountains. Regardless we decided to trust the jeep and the Ring Road.

The weather turned out to be even worse than we could have imagined. The snowflakes were indeed the “dog’s paw size” -variety and the sun had already gone down. Need I tell you there are no street lights on the way? The visibility was maybe ten metres at best and the snow was piling deep on the road, making it slippery. Soon things took a turn for the worse when the headlights of our car began to dim! We did not realize this at the moment, but the protective grate in front of them was getting caked with wet, sticky snow, covering them up almost completely.

Like this, only worse: this was the jeep before we cleaned it and headed out.

There was no way to safely stop the car as there was no telling exactly where the road ended and the drop on the side began, or how deep a drop that would be for that matter. Everything was blueish white, there was no shape or form to our surroundings what so ever. We even contemplated turning the car around and heading back to Reykjavík but in the end we made the decision to drive at least to Hveragerði (it would have been dangerous to turn the car around in the middle of nowhere, in thick snow and by now almost zero visibility) because we could still see the reflectors that marked the sides of the road.

The amount of snow at the cabin once we got there…

Getting there we quickly located the problem with the lights and cleaned them, and then had a coffee at the local gas station. I asked a lady who was working there how she thought the weather would be from there to Selfoss and she shrugged and told me it was “not very bad”. By the way, I do recommend always trusting the locals on this. If they say driving to place A is a bad idea, don’t do it. If they think it’s safe it probably is, and this time was no exception. Soon after Hveragerði the snow storm died out, turned first to sleet and then to rain… at the cabin there was no snow what so ever.

A sign reminding you to wear the seat belt.

This really is Icelandic weather in a nutshell, it’s all about extremes. When it snows in Reykjavík there may be a storm 20 minutes drive away, and there may be a mildly rainy and warm area just as near the storm. Goes to show that you can never know. Read the weather forecasts and listen to them on the radio, always have a shovel and a bag of sand with you when driving during the winter and most importantly… always take the locals’ advice. Stay safe.

* “Ha” translates as “excuse me, would you mind saying that again?”

** A good example are Japanese loan words used in English, f.ex. karate or kimono. They mean the same thing in both languages, yet the English user is likely to use English pronunciation rules. The same tends to happen with Icelanders who like to use English loan words in spoken language.