A Note on the Icelandic Alphabet

Modern Icelandic orthography uses the Latin alphabet with the addition of several special diacritics and two additional letters. The diacritics include acute accents (over the vowels a, e, i, o, u, y) to mark length or to indicate distinct phonemes, and the diaresis (umlaut) combined with o to create the separate letter ö. The letters þ ("thorn") and ð ("eth") derive from the Anglo-Saxon/Latin alphabet and mark respectively the unvoiced and voiced "th" common to English and Icelandic. The letter æ ("ash") is common to several European languages.

Web browsers represent these special characters, particularly þ (thorn) and ð (eth), with varying degrees of success. (The special Icelandic characters are described in the ISO 8859-1 standard, and any font adhering to this standard ought to include these characters.) In these pages we have used the most commonly accepted coding for the characters. We anticipate that most people using Web browsers in Windows, DOS, or UNIX will see the correct characters without making any adjustments. Mac users may need to install an additional font to read the characters correctly. The following sites contain useful information on the capabilities of different platforms, as well as advice, downloadable fonts, etc.:

Old English Pages - http://www.georgetown.edu/cball/oe/oe-chars.html
The Yamada Language Center non-English Font Archive - http://babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/fonts.html

It is also possible to puchase commercial packages which provide these fonts. Adobe PostScript typefaces include the Icelandic special characters, as does Euroscript TransROMAN (a product of Linguist's Software Inc., POB 580, Edmonds, WA 98020-0580) for the Macintosh. (We provide this information without making any representation as to which of these options is most desirable for any user.)

We would like to thank the people who have responded to our requests for information on these characters, and especially Guðbjörn Freyr Jónsson, John Johanneson, Ian Wyatt, and Róbert J. Ásgeirsson, who were of very great assistance.

Return to the Index Page.	Fiske Icelandic Collection Cornell University Library Reference queries welcome through: fiskeref@cornell.edu http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/fiske