I wrote:

>>From this and similar experiences, I just don't follow how we have
>>any idea what phonetic values were used a thousand years ago.

Eysteinn replied:

>I commend your decision to doubt whatever is said here.

Well, no more or less than I doubt anything which is said anywhere, really
- but I had actually been expressing more confusion by the whole thing than
disagreement. Like I mentioned, my linguistic background concentrates more
on philology and etymology than phonetics, which has more just been a
matter of learning how to pronounce sounds than studying why we pronounce
certain phonemes in one way, rather than another. As such, when someone
who has studied phonetics in particular more than I have makes such strong
comments about having an idea how things were pronounced a thousand years
ago, I'm asking for more information on how I can improve my understanding,
rather than specifically questioning the accuracy of what is said.

Further, while my linguistic skill is very impressive to some, I'm a
complete novice compared to someone such as a professor of mine from the
University of Washington.... when I was taking the final in her course in
Old Icelandic, and struggling with trying to identify the gender, case,
number and person of every noun in a passage from Njáls saga, I looked up
to see her reading a book entitled _An Introduction to Latvian Grammatical
Structures_. I don't know if she was just trying to make our heads hurt...

>There is
>a tendency for "face values" being accepted. Our teachers are
>extremely brilliant and well-read young Icelanders, but that is
>no guarantee that all their opinions are correct. Keth is simply
>a well-meaning Norwegian, whose Old Norse is pretty bad. I myself
>am simply a well-meaning Icelander, whose Old Norse is good enough
>for me to sigh loudly whenever Keth writes a sentence in Old Norse.

and once I have the time to get caught up, I'm an usually-well-meaning
American with a background in Swedish, Danish and German, in addition to my
Old Icelandic course - being that I'll always consider myself a student
when it comes to languages, though, the best measure I have of how good my
Old Icelandic is, would simply be the grades I received ;->

>A mixed bag, if there ever was one.

it was rather similar in that Old Icelandic course, as more than half the
class were post-grad students in Scandinavian or Baltic studies, and
between all of the students present, there was fluency in Norwegian,
Swedish, Danish, both Modern and Old High German, Finnish, Estonian,
Russian and Dutch. Every day I looked forward to a class where every
linguistic question which was ever raised, could be answered by at least
*one* of the people present... sometimes insights were added from other
languages which wouldn't even have come up in another environment, because
no one would have thought of asking a pertinent question which led to the
insight.

-Selv

--
Selvårv Stigård
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