Birgit wrote:

>I greatly respect Sveinbjoern, and I wake up with his singing of the Eddas
>every day (the tape is in my alarm clock). At the same time, I strongly
>disagree with your statement, and I rather stick to my more "German"
>pronunciation of Old Norse. There is a stubborn Northern German for you...

Hi Birgit!

I don't know if I mentioned that I spent quite a bit of time in Austria,
and learned to converse in German there. But when my Austrian friends
characterized my speech, they said: "Aber du sprichst Hochdeutsch!"

It cannot have been that I had tried so hard -- I don't think.
I just think it means that the natural way for me to pronounce
German is such that it sounds "Hochdeutsch" to Austrians.

Of course there áre differences -- yes, even within Norway there
are differences between how the vowels are pronounced. But I
don't think that is the issue here. It is more a question of
the whole tonal quality of the speech. That does not mean -
of course - that the "tonal" quality of "Hochdeutsch" is the
same as Norwegian - to that I'd answer no. But I do think the
realationship is such that it is easy and comes natural to
people from Scandinavia to learn to pronounce German that
way.

That does not mean that I think I speak "accent free" either.
And I am sure that the people from Northern Germany could
pick me out rather easily. And so the statement is actually
merely a relative one, that it appears a little bit like that
to South Germans and Austrians.

(although in Austria there are also big differences, such as
between Vienna, Steiermark, and Tyrol: it's real easy to hear the
difference, even for someone like me)


I'd love to hear you sing, Birgit!

Keth



PS I am however, unable to say very much about Icelandic in these
regards. For that I've known far too few Icelanders in my life.
(but the ones I did meet were all nice people)