At long, long last, we come to the end of the A-Z of Iceland! Some of these letters have been really hard (you may have noticed I’ve cheated a bit on a few) but some of them – far more of them than the hard ones – have been sitting in my imagination since late last year when I first dreamed up this year-long epic.
Z, the deleted letter is among them.
If you’ve been to Iceland, or read much about them, you’ll have noticed that their alphabet is different to ours. It includes three letters that don’t exist in English and one letter that kind of isn’t a letter in English.
First up is thorn, Þ in capitals or þ in lower case. You may recognise thorn from Þingvellir or Þórsmörk. This was a perfectly common letter in the days of the Vikings. It’s pronounced th as in thick or thin. In case you’ve never noticed, and there’s no reason why you would for most people, we have two ways of pronouncing th in English.
The next one is eth, Ð or ð. This is the other th and it’s the lighter one used in this, the and other. You might recognise eth from Bláa lónið, the Blue Lagoon in Icelandic, or Bárðarbungar, the 2014-15 volcanic eruption, or from Hveragerði.
When Iceland was settled around the eighth century, the Norwegians of the time of course took their language with them – Old Norse, or thereabouts. And then, due partly to the Danish trade monopoly, Iceland lay fairly isolated for a few centuries. Back in mainland Europe, modern Norwegian, Swedish, Danish & English developed, all showing roots in that old Norse language but all becoming codified languages in their own rights.
You can still see eth in those languages. In English we kept the sound but not the shape – we’ve only fairly recently given up thee and thou and it’s eth at the beginning of words like them and that. In modern Icelandic, you can’t put eth at the beginning of a word but you used to be able to.
Other languages kept eth‘s shape but not its sound, hence variants on du for “you” that I know definitely exist in Norwegian and German. Norwegian also has dem which is “them” in English and has clearly done the same splitting into shape vs sound. If you know your northern Germanic languages better than me, you’ll see plenty more examples.
The third special letter is ash, Æ or æ. As in Garðabær or Snæfellsnes. This letter also existed in English until fairly recently and you may have noticed its presence before in færie maybe, or in encyclopædia. It’s not an English letter and it’s non-standard to use it these days. Just for the æsthetic. But it’s the letter at the beginning of names of old like Æthelred the Unready or even Ælfred the Great. In Icelandic it’s pronounced a bit like the letter I in English. Sny-fellsnes, not Snay-fellsnes. Garða-byer, not Garða-bayer.
The kind-of letter is ö. To me, that’s a normal o with an accent on top but in Icelandic that’s a separate letter that sits at the end of the alphabet. Why ö is a letter in its own right but ó isn’t is a mystery to me. One place you’ll find ö is in case changes. I don’t know a lot about cases. They’re a delightful grammatical complication that doesn’t exist in English, French or Spanish. Basically, the beginnings or endings of words change depending on how they’re being used. If you say “to Reykjavík,” Reykjavík takes a different case than if you’d said “in Reykjavik”. In certain cases in Icelandic, words beginning with A change to Ö. Askja’s lake becomes Öskjuvatn and things relating to Amma (grandma) become Ömmu.
But what does this have to do with Z and why is it deleted? Well, just as Icelandic has letters English doesn’t have, it works the other way round. Icelandic doesn’t have C, Q, W or Z. The first three have survived, mostly through loan words – you’ll see them in words borrowed from other languages, like centimetre or city centre. No idea how Q survived. We hardly use Q in English. Where English uses W, most Northern European languages use V. It was an entertaining evening in Tromsø when an Irish friend of mine tried to teach a Norwegian how to pronounce “Viking” while poor Stien sat there repeating “Wiking. Viking. Wiking. Wiking. Viking. Village. Willage. Village. Willage.” and concluding that he couldn’t hear the difference between the two letters.
But they survived. Z didn’t. In 1973, it was decided to remove Z from the Icelandic language. Wherever it had previously clung to life, it was replaced by s, except in pizza. They removed an entire letter from the alphabet! Imagine English abolishing Q! There would be a civil war over it! But Icelandic did it. It deleted a letter from existence.
By and large, Icelandic doesn’t do loan words. When it needs new words, it looks back to the Settlement. Greek gave most of us “telephone” or some variant thereupon. If Icelandic refused to have it, maybe I’d have expected a literal translation of tele+phone, far+sound. But no, they went for sími, a “long thread” with connotations of communication, a word forgotten for many centuries. Or they use a kenning – a tank, the heavy tracked military vehicle is skriðdreki, a crawling dragon.
Let’s finish there, on this amateur examination of the oddities of the Icelandic language by someone who has a language degree and learns languages for fun but has never actually found a way to study Icelandic properly. I’m kind of glad to have finished this series – a year is a long time for a project that came about so I could talk about bananas and deleted letters.