Heill Ketill,

We pretty much agree then, as tends to happen in arguments.

> What you have to remember, though, is that it may seem like quite a

task

> for someone ignorant of the phonetic alphabet, to learn a whole new
> alphabet in addition to learning the ins and outs of a difficult
> language like Old Norse!

That is true. However, we have tried to explain that learning to read
SAMPA is totally optional in this course. The pronunciation guide I
have provided first introduces the SAMPA transcription of basic
English sounds, for reference, and then presents the standard
reconstructed pronunciation of Old Norse, using SAMPA. The article is
for students who are interested enough in accurate pronunciation to
acquaint themselves with SAMPA/IPA.

Again, I recommend for anyone interested in languages to learn some
basic IPA; it quickly pays in terms of time spent learning it.

> < "h" as in Hat + "w" as in With + "ä" as in fAther + "n" as in No

and

> suddeN >.
>
> What do you make of that? And how would you explain the proper
> pronounciation of "Juan" to an Icelander?

<"g" as in "sagt" + "w" as in English "with" + "ann" as in "hann">

> Thank you for the references!
> I will try to find some descriptions of both IPA as well as SAMPA.
> But I cannot guarantee you that I will immediately be fluent.
> The way you describe it, it sounds like a big task!

Oh, don't worry. There's lots of sounds in the IPA that I don't know
by heart, mostly because I never encounter them in any of the
languages I deal with. It doesn't take much time to learn basic IPA
useful for typical Western languages; in fact, I don't think it'd
take much more time than learning the Webster's transcription, given
a good source.

> Probably very very true.
> One important concept Odd Einar Haugen uses in his book
> is the concept of the PHONEME. That seems to me like an
> important concept! With it, we may sum up what we have been saying
> in the statement that the set of PHONEMES valid for the main modern
> Anglo/American dialects, cannot be mapped in a unique manner onto
> the set of PHONEMES that one theorizes was once valid for OLd Norse.
>
> So perhaps we could next turn our conversation to PHONEME systems?
> (or maybe you already did mention it?)

Phonemes are indeed a most fascinating concept. I admit I fell
totally in love with the whole idea when I learnt to understand it.

A quick briefing on phonemes:

By definition, a phoneme represent one or more sounds that are only
meaningful as one; "smallest meaningful unit of sound" - it's like
cells and atoms. When two sounds are both representations of the same
phoneme, they are called allophones; they are identified as the same
by the language's speakers, their difference not being considered
important. Another language may, however, have the exact same two
sounds as two independent phonemes, so its speakers would consider
their difference as important.

An example: The English phoneme /p/ (phonemes are marked with //) has
two allophones: [p^h] (aspirated p) and [p] (non-aspirated p). This
difference is completely non-important to English-speakers - they
don't even realize its existence until they read of it in phonetics.
Ancient Greek, however, has a phoneme /p/ and another /p^h/, in
addition to /b/. The difference was very meaningful to its speakers.
There are plenty of languages that would make this difference, or
some other difference we could think of that is not meaningful in
English. At the same time, English differentiates /v/ ~ /w/, which is
meaningless to Icelanders, who tend to pronounce the two sounds the
same (with a kind of intermediate sound).

> Thank you for the encouragement!
> I hope you don't mind, though, if I attempt (no, not quite yet)
> to produce a "mapping" from the OLd Norse PHONEME system
> to the system given in AmHer and Webster's.
> I know you are probably against this.

Well, the ON phoneme system is already pretty well mapped by its
orthography; there are a few graphs in excess of the phonemes, but
otherwise the writing is pretty much phonemic. The graph 'ð' is
aphonemic, because its sound, [D], is an allophone of /d/, or
sometimes of /T/ (þ). The same could be said of 'f' inside words,
whose underlying phoneme would in many cases be /b/.

> Kveðju!
> Keth

> P.S. Don't recall if the above is correct any more.
> It would help my long term memory, if I knew whether
> to read the -u in kveðju as a dative or genitive ending.
> I thereby assume the folowing to be the correct scheme:

"Kveðju!" would probably be archaic even in ON; you need a
preposition to clarify: "Með kveðju!"

> N. kveðja (f.) | kveðjur
> G. kveðju (sing.) | kveðna (j falls away?) (plur.)
> D. kveðju | kveðjum
> A. kveðju | kveðjur

G. pl. kveðja

> Ketill sendir Óskari kveðju guðs ok sína!
>
> (was that correct? why is it "sína"?
> It might be instructive if you explained the sentence.
> I think guðs = Gen. & sína = Acc.)

"kveðju" = acc sg
"guðs" = gen sg
"sína" = acc sg ('his own')

"sína" is a form of the genitive pronoun; in today's Norwegian, you
have 'sin', but there you'd need to elaborate with 'sin egen'. ON
doesn't need to, so it just let's the genitive pronoun do.

Óskar þakkar Katli kveðju hans ok Guðs, ok sendir þeim báðum sína! :)

("Ketill" is irregular: Ketill-Ketil-Katli-Ketils (N-A-D-G))

Óskar