Rule of Thumb

A goodly number of substantive nouns in Icelandic are cognate with English nouns, like house-hús, horse-hestur, mouse-mús. This has confused my son a bit, at first he was sure I was just mispronouncing things. Now he's caught on, though his mother is still a tad slow. After weeks of singing him a song about the fingers on the hands, I realized last night I was mispronouncing the name of the thumb, misreading a p for the þ, a totally amateur mistake. Thus the cognate þumalfingur (pronounced thumalfinger) came out instead pumalfingur. Poor kid.  

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