Eyjafjallajökull - the Street Cred of the Umlaut

I think that, after something like 10-20 times reading it over, I can now pronounce the volcano's name.

Thanks for the comedy central links!

Talking of umlauts, is there the same kind of equivalence between "ö" and "oe" in Icelandic as there is in German? I've seen the name of the geological feature written as Eyjafjallajoekull a few times...

Tim the Enchanter!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZJZK6rzjns&feature=fvw

By the way, how does Eyjafjallajökull literally translate into English? Eyja-fjalla-jökull = "island-mountain-glacier"?

Nah, ö is considered a separate vowel in Icelandic, and "oe" is not a legal double vowel - those are au, ei, ey
Single vowels are: a, á, e, é, i, Ã, o, ó, u, ú, y, ý, æ, ö
The oe is I think just a conventional transliteration for the ö for foreign keyboards...

Eyja-Fjalla-Jökull is the Glacier of the Island Mountains.
It is the plural for the mountains.
Coming from the west it goes with the "LandEyjar" - isolated peaks in the sands, with the sands not infrequently flooded.

Thanks! If I know what a word means, I can usually (eventually) figure out how to say it properly.

Is there any of the jökull left, or did it all turn into the sticky ash-particle-carrying steam that's causing problems for the jets? (By the way, propeller planes apparently don't have problems with the ash cloud; a UK transport service that had been trying to sell off its 200 short-hop prop planes now has all of them pressed into service -- some of them at $300,000 a flight for really impatient corporate travelling groups willing to pay extra rather than cancel a meeting -- while its jets sit on the tarmac.)

There is plenty of ice left on the mountain - I'd guesstimate less than half is gone.
One of the glacial tongues collapsed, mostly, and about a km of ice at the cap melted into the crater - rest of the ice is either below the crater on the sides of the mountain, or up on other peaks which don't drain into the crater peak.

It will come in play if new fissures or craters open, or the current set extends spatially.