Word Of The Issue: Tone-Play-Travel-Song

Iceland Airwaves is just behind us, so you either caught a weekend of great music or you missed out (in which case, read about everything you missed here).

While one of the festival’s main purposes has historically been to platform the local music scene for an international crowd and industry bigwigs with local artists hoping for a label deal or a tour outside Iceland, it also tends to attract touring international acts. Which brings us to the word of this issue, the Icelandic term for musical artist hitting the road: going on tour, tónleikaferðalag.

It is a feature of our language to splice together a word or two when needed. The kings of this game are the Germans, who have coined such famed terms as Schadenfreude, combining the words damage (schaden) and joy (freude), creating a word that essentially means taking pleasure in seeing someone else’s misfortune, and Backpfeifengesicht, a term that combines the words for slap and face, meaning a face that begs to be slapped. And so on.

The Icelandic word, while having that same compound element, is lacking in dark humour. For that it makes up in sheer silliness. The former part of the word, tónleika, simply means musical concert, but directly translates to the words tone and play. The latter word, ferðalag or journey, is then a combination of the words travel and song. This gives us the strange fusion of tone-play-travel-song or tónleikaferðalag. So who goes on a “tone-play-travel-song”? Well of course a “sound-group”, or hljómveit, meaning a band, and in most cases, they will bring with them some “sound equipment”, that is, not the PA system but hljóðfæri, the Icelandic for instrument. In some rare cases those might include harmónikka, which for some lost-in-translation reasons, is the Icelandic for accordion, while the Icelandic for harmonica is munnharpa, or mouth harp. We’ve even heard stories of an Icelandic harmónikka player going to America to compete in a harmonica competition. That didn’t go well.

Learn more Icelandic words hér.