Arlie inquired:
>>There's something wrong with your html... you have letters like o
>>with tilde, which don't exist in Old Norse, and I'm unclear what
>>letter you actually<BR> intended (would it be o with acute accent)?
>><BR>
Steven replied:
>Actually Gordon has a bar over the 'o'. I believe that is from the
>Proto-Germanic. Gordon took his stem categories from the Proto-
>Germanic. I couldn't find the 'o-bar' so I used the 'õ'. Same with
>the 'ï' for 'i-bar'.
You are correct. It is customary to mark the
long vowel in Proto-Germanic with a macron.
The macron is the norm for long vowels in
scholarly treatments of old languages; it is
also used, for example, in Latin and Old English.
One even sometimes sees individual words quoted from
ON using macrons. I think my Webster does that.
Personally I hate it :) I write even Old English
with acute accents - Sir William Craigie used to
do that so I'm following in noble footsteps :)
Regards,
Haukur