This is an old thread, but I feel that I should give an example of a
dialect in Scandinavia that still has the nasalized vowels alive and
kicking. That dialect is called 'dalska', and is one of the so
called 'dalecarlian' dialects spoken in western Svealand in central
Sweden.
E.g. english 'thursday' and german 'Donnerstag' is called 'tuosdag'
with the dipthong 'uo' nasalized (in dalska, 'uo' is cognate with
ON 'ó').
Other examples:
The preposition in dalska that means the same as english 'on'
(ON 'á') is a nasalized 'o', and the prefix 'un-' in has the
equivalent 'uo-' in dalska, and it is of course nasalized.

For more about dalska, look at the site:
http://www.geocities.com/jepe2503/temp_subdir/dalska.html

Another funny thing in dalska: the differentiation between ON 'v'
(like in the pronoun 'vit') and "soft" 'f' (like in the verb 'hafa')
is kept in dalska. The ON examples have the dalska equivalents 'widh'
(nasalized 'i' and the 'dh' meaning a fricative d) and 'åvå'.


/Arnie

--- In norse_course@..., "Óskar Guðlaugsson" <hr_oskar@...> wrote:
> --- In norse_course@..., Haukur Thorgeirsson <haukurth@...> wrote:
>
> > Old Norse had nasal vowels (as French does) but they were not
marked
> > in writing so we don't know where they were. No descendant of ON
has
> > preserved those nasals. This is one of the things that make it
> impossible
> > for us to obtain a precise reconstructed pronunciation of the
> language.
> >
> > It is, for example, quite possible that the ó in Þórr was a nasal
> vowel.
>
> Yes... this deserves more explanation than you give it :)
>
> The old nasal vowels are not quite as hard to guess as you say.
>
> "Þórr", for example, almost certainly had a nasal vowel at some
point;
> cf German version "Donner", and English "thunder" (a cognate to the
> name); the "n" there disappeared and left a nasal quality to the
> vowel.
>
> The best examples are the prepositions "í" and "á"; their English
> cognates are "in" and "on". Since the English cognates have "n", it
is
> very likely that "í" and "á" were originally nasalized, transcribed
> [i~:] and [a~:].
>
> The Runic alphabet did, NB, have a special rune for the
nasalized "a".
>
> I should warn students that nasalized vowels is not anything they
> should worry about; it requires a great amount of etymological
> knowledge to be able to pronounce ON with nasalization in the right
> places, which is not anything we intend for you to learn here.
Don't
> worry about it :)
>
> Óskar