Keth wrote:

>>>Thus we can expect that the Old Norse "æ" was prononced in approximately
>>>the same way as the "æ" in Cæsar was pronounced.

and then elaborated:

>Here I meant, of course, that I think the Old Norse "æ" was pronounced
>the way monks used to pronounce "cæsar" in the 12th century, when Old
>Norse was first represented in writing by means of Latin letters.

I'm glad you added this, as otherwise I was simply not following the logic
of why the phoneme represented by "æ" in Old Norse would necessarily have
been the same as the phoneme represented by "æ" in Latin - but once you
specify that you mean how the character was pronounced in the 10th-12th
century Medieval Latin used by the monks who would have been the source of
learning how the Latin script was pronounced, yes, that makes complete
sense that "æ" would then be used to represent the most similar phoneme
present in Old Norse words to the one represented in Medieval Latin by
"æ". Further, the effect of writing on speech is such that literate Norse
and Icelanders would then likely pronounce the Old Norse and Icelandic "æ"
phoneme more similarly to the corresponding Medieval Latin one with which
it was now associated.

However, I still don't follow how we have any idea how those monks
pronounced the "æ" phoneme in Medieval Latin. And when you make comments like:

>A difficulty with my example is that we now know that at Cæsar's time
>the Romans raher DID pronounce the æ (=ae) as a diphtong.

then I'm just lost - I certainly have far more background in the
etymology-philology side of linguistics than with the phonetics side, and
have only seen stuff on phonetic reconstruction when it's included in other
works, but everything I've seen has just led me to think it's educated
guesswork.

Are there any good introductions to this topic, which will explain how
"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"? I mean, just from being fairly
well-travelled in the U.S., I've heard the vowel-sound in the same words
consistently pronounced with at least three distincly different phonetic
values, simply by travelling far enough - and this is within a society with
mass-communication which supposedly "normalises" many differences such as
this. From this and similar experiences, I just don't follow how we have
any idea what phonetic values were used a thousand years ago.

thanks,

-Selv

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