Flying over the volcano in Iceland

[wildrover]

Not trilled. More like the not quite silent English "ah(r)".

I'd say more in the middle of the mouth. Many times, "s" has an almost "sh" sound - not quite, and that's more a mid-mouth kind of sound. As in Jonasson, which would be more like Jonass(h)on. And "fl" in Icelandic is pronounced "bl", so the airport Keflavik is pronounced KEB' la veek (which again, is more a midmouth kind of sound that Keflavik (with an "f') would be. And most words have a stress on the first syllable - so an American's inclination to pronounced the airport Kuh FLAH vik is doubly wrong.

Icelandic is a very complicated language, but the pronunciation rules (while not entirely intuitive) are very regularly applied.

Interesting...I could probably learn it very quickly. I read Keflavik as "KEH-fla-vik"...the accent on the first syllable is probably a result of fluency in Norwegian, which is also fairly regular (more so than English, I thought).

Norwegian has the same tendency to pronounce 's' as 'sh' and drop the 'r'..."Norsk" comes out "Nawshk" rather than "Nor(rolled)sk", though as I sit here saying it (talking to myself is the first sign of insanity, I think), it's right behind my teeth. Pulled back to the middle of my mouth, it's more "NOHshk". Would that be about correct, if you were to say it Icelandic, purely based on the written form?

Which of the modern Scandinavian languages does it resemble most...or maybe the question is, which of the modern Scandinavian dialects most resembles Old Norse?

[GMan]

Magnificent!