DEMYSTIFYING THOSE ICELANDIC NAMES

You might be under the impression that Icelandic is a "complicated" and "unintuitive" language after hearing about it a few times. Apparently, they like to name their places with super-long, impossible-to-pronounce words. I suggest you take a look at a map of Iceland for a few minutes and see for yourself: lots of random, unpronounceable letter combinations like Eyjufjällajökull and Kirkjubæjarklaustur.

*waits for the reader to return*

What a mess, right? How do these people manage to even get around in their own country?

Well, in reality it's very simple. Almost all of their place names are actually combinations of a relatively small number of common nouns describing the geography of the area. If you're in the mood, take 10 to 15 minutes to study the following list of icelandic to english translations. Hint: several words share a distant root with English. It's not super obvious, but the similarities are there. For example, the work "kirk" can be translated to "kerk" in Dutch, to "kirch" in German and then to "church" in English.

Baer : farm

Dal/ur : valley

Eyja : island

Eyri : sandbank

Fjälla : mountain

Fjörður : Fjord

Haf/höf : sea, ocean

Jökull : glacier

Kirk/ju : church

Klaust : monastery

Nes : cape, promontory, headland

Reyk : smoke

Stað/ir/ur : place, location

Vatna : water

Vik : bay, cove, or inlet

*comes back 15 minutes later*

Now go browse around the same map one more time. It's not so mysterious at all now is it? With only a very limited number of key words, you can translate basically 90% of the place names. Reykjavik is just a smokey bay. That legendary Eyjufjällajökull is just a glacier on a mountain on an island. If I gave you another list of 15, you'd be pretty much at 100%. Here's a bonus 16th word : Hval = whale. Maybe you had already guessed that right?

Not only are Icelandic names not mystical, they are almost boring :D

Note: if the skeptic in you ever decides to verify some of the translations I propose here, remember that Google Translate is not a very good tool for minor nordic languages. I used https://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/IcelOnline/ as my main source.