This is another of those articles that might not make much sense in English, but oh well ! Here is my best effort to translate it
Hello friends, today I return with another linguistic adventure. I know that I have focused the last instalments on my discoveries while learning Icelandic, but this has been part of my months before, during and after the coronavirus contingency. Finally, I am on a break and, wanting to catch up with the site, I came across a text that was not finished. I don’t know, perhaps this is already part of "Advanced Spanish", because I do not know how much this is known, but there is a common error in Spanish, which we all have sinned when writing a text: the cacophony.
According to Wikipedia, cacophony is defined as "the dissonance produced by the inharmonious combination of sounds in a phrase or word". An example of cacophony, as the site explains well, are tongue twisters. After years of practice to write in the most appropriate way, I have tried to avoid some linguistic vices, and for that reason, I see with horror every time that I stumble upon the same stone. Oh well!, to err is human.
However, when learning a language (especially one that is far from my mother tongue) the rules change. There are times when it seems that I am "unlearning" Spanish in order to learn Icelandic. And that's what happens to me with the cacophonies. I had already had this little problem with Swedish. In an effort to make the sentences "sound" more harmonious, I looked up synonyms in the dictionary, which in the end was counterproductive, to the degree that a teacher told me "in Swedish, less is more". In the end, I managed to write much more... articulated texts? by making my ideas a sort of clean á la Kondo. Nordic minimalism I suppose.
Now with Icelandic, I find myself in the same situation, but at maximum exponent. As I (already) explained, the Icelandic has a system of declines. These declinations make sentences a series of repeated sounds that seem like infinite tongue twisters. And there is no way of escaping from it. I remember in one class, the teacher gave us some images to describe what we saw (specifically the clothes that the people in the photographs were wearing). Mine was from a girl in a swimsuit, with a red top with white polka dots, at the moment I wanted to say "the polka dot top" I was stunned because I didn't know if I was right ... Doppóttur toppur? the horror! The teacher started laughing, repeating it over and over, until she ended up saying "dottopur pottur." I have noticed, that this is not only a problem of mine, it is enough to see the faces of my classmates when they say manninum minum or some other combination of repetitive sounds. But still, you have to make the effort to let the cacophony become a daily norm.
