Hello, all!

> There was also a separate home page, on a server in Iceland which
> had more than just the lessons. It included, among other things,
> a pronunciation guide.

That is my University of Iceland homepage;
http://www.hi.is/~haukurth/

> However, the original course authors have been busy with real life,
> and removed their original instuctions (to contact them with questions,
> etc.).

Yes I've been busy, but I don't know with how real a life.
I've been working at Iceland Telecom for the past two months;
it's been a lot of fun and I've learnt very much. Maybe we
should redo the homepage with PHP and MySQL? :)

I haven't been working on the course, though it's always in
the back of my mind. I look forward to resuming work as soon
as I have time to. The most language related thing I've worked
on lately is translating a morsel of KDE to Icelandic.
Maybe it should be translated to Old Norse? :) I'm rather
surprised no-one is working on a Latin translation.
There is one to Esperanto, though.

> It looks like they've also removed the pointer to the original
> home page.

Oops. Not intentionally.

>>Also, I'm having trouble with the pronunciation. Learning ON is
>>something I'm doing as a personal challenge and it will be my first
>>non-native language. I get confused when a pronunciation example is
>>given, but the sound that is referenced is German or French. I don't
>>know those sounds so I have no frame of reference. Any advice on how
>>I can learn the sounds correctly? Thanks.

Good old Anthanarik seems to be having similar
problems, considering his live365 station I
listened to yesterday. "As in French 'eau'"
doesn't seem to tell him much (though of course
he doesn't let that get in the way:).

Óskar and I always intended to make recordings
to go with the pronunciation guide, but we haven't
done so yet. Maybe .wav or .au files would be suitable
for shorter files. We've used .mp3 for longer recordings
because of the small size of the files.

You can try the recordings in the files directory
of this yahoogroup. I recommend downloading the
zip file with the corrected volume files. I just
did so now and they play fine in KDE 2.1.1 using
gtv (a GPL program). You can also find mp3 players
for Macintosh and Windows.

egill1.mp3 - Modern Icelandic pronunciation of the following stanza.
egill2.mp3 - Attempted reconstructed ON pronunciation of the same.

Svá skyldi goð gjalda
gram reki bönd af löndum
reið sé rögn ok Óðinn
rán míns féar hánum
fólkmýgi lát flýja
Freyr ok Njörðr af jörðum
leiðisk lofða stríði
landáss þanns vé grandar.

Its meaning is something like:

May the gods and Óðinn be angry.
May the bonds chase the king
from the land. In such a way they
should pay him back for robbing my money.
May Freyr and Njörðr let the oppressor
of the people run away from the lands.
May the áss of the land be hateful to
the one who defiles sanctuaries.

Then there's mikrak1.mp3 and rpkrak1.mp3
which are MI and attempted RP readings
of this stanza, from the Krákumál:

Hjuggum vér með hjörvi
hitt var æ fyr löngu
er á Gautlandi gengum
at grafvitnis morði.
Þá fengum vér Þóru
þaðan hétu mik fyrðar
er lyngölun lagðak
Loðbrók at því vígi.
Stakk á storðar lykkju
stáli bjartra mála.

A detailed translation can be found at
the course's homepage.

Try listening to the files while reading
the stanzas - see if you can follow.

Questions and comments are welcome
(but may well go unanswered;)

Best regards,
Haukur

P.S. Óskar is back from China and is now
writing a course in Cantonese - go figure:)