In my ongoing endeavor to represent West Norse vowels, I recently
examined some of the earliest surviving handwritten manuscripts in
Latin characters. Technically, most of the 'new' characters were
invented in England, whose old tongue is closely related to Norse -
thus some prefer to call them 'Anglo-Saxon-Jutish' characters. Since
Angeln and Jutland are in Denmark and Saxony is right next door, it
is not too difficult to figure out why these new characters somehow
'worked' to express Norroena as well. But how well exactly did they
work? Were there any problems? 'Problems'? No, of cource not, right?
Wrong. There were huge problems involved in representing the complex
vowel-system of Norroena. If we look at any of the earlier preserved
manusripts, we see the same vowels spelled in many different ways by
the same writer - that´s right, in 'many' different ways. It appears
that the monks had no fixed system for representing vowels beyond a
few rules-of-thumb and examples from other manuscripts. How bad was
this situation? Bad enough for the writer(s) of the '1st Grammatical
Treatise' to raise hell. If a complaint of this nature survives on
skin, then we can safely conclude that 'many were those whose voices
of complaint went unheard'. This means that 1) they were never given
the chance to read and write 2) their manuscripts do not survive -
like 'most' manuscripts, in fact 3) the clergy objected to the 'con-
tents' of their manuscripts 4) it never occured to them to actually
'write' about improving the system of vowel representation 5) they
were not interested in reading and writing 6) none of the above.
For more about how West Norse vowels *should* be represented using
the 'Latin' or 'Anglo-Saxon-Jutish' characters, see my next post.
For more about the 'wild' spellings of monks, see old manuscripts.
Monks were definitely *not* linguists in the modern sense - nowhere
in the Old Judeo-Roman Catholic world, at least not that I know of.