Dear David,

> An embarrassingly simple question: just how DO you pronounce ON ae and ei?

There is certainly nothing embarrassing about it.
You can find a lot of conflicting information on
the pronunciation of ON - and it isn't known to
a very high degree of precision.

> I understand there are two systems around--one that pronounces things much
> as modern Icelandic does (long a, for instance, coming out like 'ow' in Eng
> 'how') and another, 'reconstructed' that sounds more like German (and has a
> long a that's more like 'a' in Eng 'father').

Correct.

> It's the 'reconstructed'
> pronunciation I'm after.
>
> I read somewhere that ae was like 'ai' in Eng 'air'--but I've heard people
> pronounce 'air' with a long (IPA) e, like Eng 'ay' in 'say', a short e (as
> in 'said') and an ash (as in--what else?--'ash'). Besides, the r in 'air'
> is sure to affect the vowel. Bah.

Hmm... It's like the 'air'-vowel in Received Pronunciation.
Try listening to Her Majesty the Queen :-)

In IPA it is a long epsilon; in SAMPA it is [E:].

> Someone recently told me the ae should be like English 'ash' (OE 'asc') and
> ei should be like the sound in Eng 'hail'; is this true?

The ON /ei/ is close enough to the vowel in 'hail'.
At any rate the ON greeting 'Heil!' is pronounced
much more like the English 'Hail!' than the German 'Heil!'.
I remember that the pronunciation of this particular word
was an important point to a member of this list in its
early days. You can try searching the archives - and by
all means look at Óskar's article if you haven't done so already:

http://www.hi.is/~haukurth/norse/articles/pronunc.html

You can also try my recordings - two stanzas read with
both (attempted) reconstructed pronunciation and normal
Icelandic pronunciation. They can be seen from the main site.

I would be very interested in hearing someone not Icelandic
read the same stanzas. Any volunteers? Keth? :-)

> (Long ago I missed out on a great chance to learn ON; signed up for a course
> from Konstantin Reichardt at Yale, but a scheduling change forced me to drop
> it; had to take something more in my supposed 'field'.

If you don't mind me asking; what is your supposed field?

Kveðja,
Haukur