radogost replied to your post “Why is it pronounced like spiT-ling-gar-dans? Where does the T sound...”
The thing is that people generally aren’t aware that sounds we produce while speaking (phonemes) aren’t the same thing as the graphic signs we use to represent them in writing (letters), in any language. The number of phonemes used in any given language is multiple times higher than there are letters in its alphabet, so the languages are bound to use combinations of letters to be able to...
It looks like this got cut off somehow and I can’t seem to view the rest, but yes, this. At least in languages using the Latin alphabet, we’re all just adapting the letters to represent our sounds according to certain rules and patterns, and sometimes even that isn’t quite sufficient. And then sometimes after the letters are imported the pronunciation evolves! We still use y and ý, which today are pronounced exactly like i and í - convenient for foreign learners learning to pronounce a word based on the spelling, but a curse for Icelandic children learning to spell words from pronunciation (you basically have to either memorize which words have which, or see if there are related words with o, ó, u or ú in that spot, which’ll mean it should be y/ý - for example, the plural of sonur (son) is written synir (sons) rather than sinir). We used to use the letter z, where something used to be pronounced ds, ðs or ts even though it’d come to just be pronounced as an s even when speaking slowly and clearly, and there were pretty complex rules about that, but in 1974 it was officially eliminated from the language and now appears exclusively in:
a couple of names where it’s traditional (e.g. Zophonías)
the word pizza, which people have tried to properly localize as “pítsa” but pretty much literally nobody actually spells it that way, least of all pizza restaurants
I’m not sure (I’ve actually now put in a question about this at the University of Iceland’s Q&A site where people with degrees answer questions from the public about their subjects, so watch this space for an eventual clarification on this from an actual Icelandic linguist), but I suspect the -tl pronunciation of the double l is original - that is, that an l sound preceded by a short vowel, which is usually denoted by doubling the consonant, would always turn into the tl - and that the other pronunciation came about later, probably from Danish influences, and thus now awkwardly coexists with the original pronunciation in one of the language’s only ambiguities. Thus, now we have galli (suit, in the tracksuit/snowsuit sense but not the suit and tie sense) and galli (flaw), which are written the same, but the former is pronounced with just an l sound and the latter with the tl sound.
A similar thing occurs with the letter combination gæ, which traditionally in Icelandic is always pronounced like gyai, rather than just gai; however, then we imported the word “guy” from English, and now we have gæi (pronounced gai-ih), which doesn’t follow traditional Icelandic phonetics, and now this renders all the other words with gæ awkward because they’ve got this extra sound in the middle that isn’t technically unambiguously implied by the spelling anymore even though it used to be.
So. Language is messy! All languages are at least a bit messy, and the translation from phonetics to spelling is always going to have its quirks.
(English pronunciation really is especially obnoxious, though.)
