Hi Keth,

>One thing that I have difficulty with, for example, is that the modern
>Icelandic pronounciation of "æ" (= a-e ligature) no longer corresponds
>to the way this letter was pronounced in Medieval Latin, where it was
>known from such words as "Cæsar" etc. I am sure the monks who first
>used the Latin letters to describe the sounds of Old Norse, did pick
>the Latin letters that corresponded most closely to the actual sounds
>used!
>
>Thus we can expect that the Old Norse "æ" was prononced in approximately
>the same way as the "æ" in Cæsar was pronounced.

I can only speak for Old English, :-) but it used "æ" the same way Old
Norse does, to represent the vowel in "ash", not the vowel in "ice", which
is what it represented in Latin. What Old English scholars think is that
the Old English monks realised that Old English didn't have the Latin "æ"
sound, so they put this useless symbol to work, to represent a sound that
Latin didn't have.

When I was studying Old English and history of English, my question was,
how do we know that? Like Oskar said, nobody can be 100% sure, but when
you start doing historical reconstruction, eventually you do get convinced
that there are some things we can be at least 90% sure of, and a lot of
other things that we're approximating to various degrees of accuracy. :-)

For instance, we're 100% sure that at some time during Old English, the "c"
sounds in changed to "ch" before "i" and "e" (and in a few other places
too), even though they're always spelled just "c" until 1066. We know they
were "c" originally because that's the Latin letter which Old English
scribes chose for this sound, and that's the letter which they used to
spell the words that they borrowed from Latin, and that's the sound which
appears in the Old Norse words (mjök for much, bekkr for bench). We know
some "c"s became "ch" because we say the words that way now, and as soon as
the Normans invaded England the Norman scribes spelled the "ch" words
differently from the "c" words, and also because late Old English poets
didn't alliterate "c" words with "ch" words. What we really can't answer
properly is, when did the change take place? It's very likely that for a
long time, the Old English poets went on alliterating "c" and "ch" though
they were saying them differently. Like nowadays we would alliterate
"tummy" and "train" although they don't have quite the same sound. Most
Old English teachers will make you learn to pronounce the two "c"s
differently so that you know there can be a difference; luckily Old Norse
doesn't seem to have this kind of exception built into the system.

I'm sorry I didn't know how to talk about this in terms of Old Norse, :-)
my training is all in Old English.

E-Ching