--- In norse_course@egroups.com, "Ray Bell" <98059912@...> wrote:

> Is the pronounciation similar to modern Icelandic? (I know the

written language is pretty similar considering the time)

Standard reconstructed ON (i.e. theoretical) is not similar to modern
Icelandic pronunciation, no. Though a modern Icelander can understand
well enough 13th century texts (though the fully abbreviated Gothic
scripts are all but illegible), he/she would have a hard time
communicating with a 13th century Icelander in person.

However, most ON scholars actually just ignore the reconstructed
model, and pronounce it the modern Icelandic way. This has the great
advantage that, given practice, you might manage to speak
ON "normally", which might get hard with reconstructed (since there's
no knowledge of intonation and such). The bad thing is that some
pairs of vowels, which were distinct in ON, have merged in modern
Icelandic. That creates some spelling problems.

But generally, if you have good access to Icelandic (from where on
Earth are you catching Icelandic radio???), I would certainly not
advice against you speaking ON the "modern way".

Óskar