Thank you for your answer. I have not studied Old Norse at any university so I have not learned etymology. Is there any short and simple rule when to use the nasal "a" when writing runes? Since the vikings themselves mixed between these two sounds I guess it´s not an important question,but I´m interested anyway.
But why are the Old Norse long nasal vowel phonemes not
marked in the normalized orthography? Are they not considered "important" enough,or is it just too uncertain when they were used?
Greetings
Thomas
> I have never really understood the difference between the pronounciation
> of the runes "ár" and "áss". Could you please tell me what the real
> difference is.
The theory goes that "ár" represented non-nasal 'a'
whereas "áss" represented nasal 'a'. The sources,
however, don't show this as clearly as one might
have wished.
The most thorough treatment I've read of this
is "A-rúnir í frumnorrænum rúnaáletrunum",
a 1998 B.A. treatise by one Embla Ýr Bárudóttir
(as an aside, "Bárudóttir" is a matronym,
a relatively rare thing).
> There don´t seem to be any difference between these two
> sounds in the normalized language we are using.
Old Norse had long nasal vowel phonemes which are not
marked in the normalized orthography. The best source
on this is the First Grammatical Treatise.
Kveðja,
Haukur
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