# Icelandic: London/Lundúnir



## Alxmrphi

Hi all,

Nice easy question for you all, I hope.
I see both these words used for "London", and I am beginning to get the feeling that more often than not I just see/hear the English word than the Icelandic one.
Actually, even while just writing this message I am listening to Stöð 2 and heard "London" on the weather report_ and_ in an Icelandair advert. Is it ever advisable to use Lundúnir? Is that word just on its way out of the language in your opinion?

Alex


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## sindridah

No definitely not out of the language, And yeah It's definitely advisable to use Lundúnir. It's Advisable to use Kaupmannahöfn, Kænugarður? , Óðinsvé and so on....


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## Alxmrphi

sindridah said:


> No definitely not out of the language, And yeah It's definitely advisable to use Lundúnir. It's Advisable to use Kaupmannahöfn, Kænugarður? , Óðinsvé and so on....


Okay! 
I'll bear that in mind, but everybody uses _London_ really, don't they? Do I just hear the bad examples? 
I had no idea where/what Óðinsvé was! Odense! It seems so simple when you put them next to each other, thanks for introducing that to me.


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## Gavril

sindridah said:


> No definitely not out of the language, And yeah It's definitely advisable to use Lundúnir. It's Advisable to use Kaupmannahöfn, Kænugarður? , Óðinsvé and so on....



As long as we're talking about _h__öfuðborgir heimsins_, which name do Icelanders normally use for the capital of Finland: _Helsinki _or _Helsingfors_? Based on Wikipedia, Danish and Icelandic seem to prefer _Helsinki, _where Norwegian (along with Swedish, of course) prefers _Helsingfors._


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## sindridah

Yeah we use Helsinki, And I'm pretty sure that Helsinki and many many other capitals haven't got an Icelandic translation


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## Donnerstag

Modern Icelandic is in general quite relaxed about whether to use the Icelandic exonyms or local endonyms. I'd say that the more formal the situation, the more likely you are to hear the Icelandic exonym.

Some exonyms are so rooted in the language that to use the endonym would simply be considered wrong. Example of this is e.g. Kaupmannahöfn - you never hear it called København (though some people call the city Köben from time to time).

The Icelandic exonyms for places in Scandinavia aren't really exonyms per se, but rather older Nordic versions of the names.

Helsinki is always called just Helsinki in Icelandic.

Some other exonyms:

London - Lundúnir
Wien - Vín
Aalborg - Álaborg
Århus - Árósar
Roskilde - Hróarskelda
Venezia - Feneyjar
Trondheim - Niðarós/Þrándheimar
Göteborg - Gautaborg
Kiev - Kænugarður
Canterbury - Kantaraborg
Edinburgh - Edinborg
York - Jórvík

But there are many more, obviously.


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## Alxmrphi

That's really interesting DS 
I knew about the history of York and how it became to be named that, being Jórvík after the Danish moved in around a thousand years ago, but I didn't think it'd still have that name in Icelandic. For Venice and Kiev as well, didn't know they had their own. There's also Þórshöfn (Tórshavn), but that's fairly obvious


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## hanne

Donnerstag said:


> The Icelandic exonyms for places in Scandinavia aren't really exonyms per se, but rather older Nordic versions of the names.


I don't think they're all really older versions. I doubt that Kaupmannahöfn ever had the -au- in Danish (the name isn't _that_ old), so that sounds more like an Icelandic translation/reconstruction, than an original name. So I think that at least that one is in fact an exonym.


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## Alxmrphi

hanne said:


> I don't think they're all really older versions. I doubt that Kaupmannahöfn ever had the -au- in Danish (the name isn't _that_ old), so that sounds more like an Icelandic translation/reconstruction, than an original name. So I think that at least that one is in fact an exonym.


Ah, I understood "older versions" as sort, of versions based on the same idea but possibly reconstructed, either that as well as later versions of an earlier Old Norse word.
Like for Copenhagen, you can see it's "Merchant harbour" (buy-man = merchant) in the original(?) Danish, but the idea has been the same to call it by those earlier parts, but in Icelandic that just happens to be from *kaup* (kaupa, buy) *manna* (maður, man)* höfn* (harbour).

Maybe we could change the thread title to Icelandic (All Nordic Languages?): names of foreign cities so we can keep this in line with the title?
It's an interesting discussion and would be good to see about the shared Norse roots and how they're rendered amongst the Nordic world.


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## Donnerstag

With regards to Copenhagen, the original Danish version was Køpmannæhafn. This has since been mangled into København in modern Danish.

When I said older versions I didn't mean the Old Norse versions only, but also reconstructed versions which resemble the original name.

But we do have the original old Norse names for many places, e.g. Århus (Árósar), Odense (Óðinsvé), etc.


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## Marforn

I found this thread while googling "Lundúnir", because I like how the Icelandic language has many of their own names for cities in other countries. I am in favour of all languages having their own names for foreign cities, and the more history there is behind that name, the more interesting it becomes. Like Icelandic names for British cities, that obviously go back to the Viking age and thus make them more special. Albeit rarely used today, some other I've found are:

 Oxford - Öxnafurða

 Scarborough - Skarðaborg

 Southampton - Suðurhamtún

 And of course in Ireland we have

 Dublin - Dýflinn

 It seems however that many placenames from Old Norse were lost on the way, becase many cities in England have the modern English name also in Icelandic.

I have a complete list of Icelandic exonyms (which I'm not allowed to post yet), with several interesting names found in Britain, Germany, Scandinavia and France. Others, mostly non-European cities, are quite uninteresting here because they just have some Icelandic letters replacing more common letters (like Tokyo -> Tókýó) which has only been changed to make it easier for Icelanders to prronounce, and have no historical meaning.


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## Gavril

Marforn said:


> Others, mostly non-European cities, are quite uninteresting here because they just have some Icelandic letters replacing more common letters (like Tokyo -> Tókýó) which has only been changed to make it easier for Icelanders to prronounce, and have no historical meaning.



Do you happen to know why Icelandic chose the form _Tókýó _and not _*Tókjó_? The Japanese pronunciation of the last syllable is more or less [kjo:], and I would expect this to be rendered in Icelandic with palatal -_kj-,_ rather than a separate syllable _-ký-_.


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## Marforn

Gavril said:


> Do you happen to know why Icelandic chose the form _Tókýó _and not _*Tókjó_? The Japanese pronunciation of the last syllable is more or less [kjo:], and I would expect this to be rendered in Icelandic with palatal -_kj-,_ rather than a separate syllable _-ký-_.



Now I don't speak Icelandic, but from Wikipedia it seems the letter Ýý is ponounced the same as the letter "e" in _we_. To me it seems _Tokeo, Tokyo _or _Tokio _are almost identical to _Tokjo _(if pronounced as [kjo:])in pronounciation, especially if you say the word quite fast. So that might be the reason they just stayed with it, or perhaps it was so that the Icelandic word for Tokyo would be more recognizeable for non-Icelandic speakers.


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