Heil Konráð ok Meghan,

One other advantage of a reconstructed pronunciation based on a 12th
century norm is that that is the one stage in the medieval language
that we have a detailed description of from the time. It also avoids
the problems of deciding when exactly certain later changes happened,
relative to each other, so as to get a consistent early 13th c.
reconstruction.

Konrad wrote:

> Linguists aside, most folk
> learning ON are interested in ON proper, and especially the culture
> stage represented by the Viking Age.

Yes, that's certainly an attraction, to get a feeling for the actual
sound of the language of the Vikings, the old poems, and so on.

The advantage of using an early 13th c. pronunciation is that, given
the textbooks that are currently used, it allows beginners to start
reading the texts as they find them with a pronunciation that's
reasonably consistent to a particular time without having to keep
stopping and wondering about the etymology. Of course, modern
Icelandic pronunciation would also satisfy that need, albeit taking us
that much further from the pronunciation of both the Viking Age and
the time when the classical sagas were written, and requiring further
study in itself.

Meghan wrote: "My questions for ye all: What do you do? Why? How
happy are you with this approach? What would you do if you could?"

When I began, and wanting to get as far back as possible without
running into inconsistencies due to my ignorance of the etymology, I
settled on trying to recreate the sound of c. 1200 as best I could
manage. As I went on, I met more texts written according to a later
spelling, and shifted my pronunciation to what I imagined would be
appropriate to the late 13th c. -- blurring ø and hooked o, for
example. Again this was a matter of convenience based on the texts
(of sagas) that I was reading. As I learnt more vocabulary and
started to get a clearer idea of the history of the language, and the
historical origins of the various mutated vowels, it became possible
for me to read texts printed according to a late medieval or modern
norm and back-engineer the vowels in my head if I wanted to sound them
out, no doubt far from perfectly, but hopefully impriving a bit as I
went along. I wanted to get back to earlier forms, for the reasons
Konrad has mentioned: both for its own sake and because this helps
with learning about the history of the language.

As I started learning a bit about Modern Icelandic, I would alternate
when reading old texts, sometimes attempting modern pronunciation for
practice, sometimes using this early 13th c. norm as best I understood
it. The modern pronunciation is more complicated in lost of ways,
whereas an early medieval pronunciation matches much closer to how the
texts are written; on the other hand, it's easier to find samples of
modern Icelandic pronunciation to listen to and try to immitate.
Since these are two quite dictinctive poles -- now that I was making a
difference between /oe/ and /ae/, and between hooked o and ø -- it was
easier not to get them mixed up. Recently I've been trying to get the
hang of switching between these two norms, c. 1200 and modern, when
reciting old poems from memory. The tricky thing was that I'd
memorised things at different times, with different pronunciations!
So I sometimes have to stop and think, but really this is just and
matter practice.

In the light of this discussion though, I'd like to going to make an
effort to familiarise myself with the earier, 12th c., pronunciation.
At the moment when I try to recreate it, I have to go very very
slowly and constantly have to go back and correct myself over the
nasals the open and close e, etc. There are also some words, e.g.
obscure names, where I'm just not in a position to know how to
back-engineer an earlier pronunciation since I don't know the
etymology. If I was starting from scratch learning Old Norse and
hadn't studies other early Germanic languages, I wouldn't have a clue
even about the basic vocabulary and would probably still settle on
Snorri's language as the norm, just because that's how so much of the
material is printed.

But wouldn't it be great to learn some poems in true Viking Age
pronunciation!

Llama Nom