Greetings.

> And I've yet to actually know two major things from
> these messages; 1. What would I use to say Swiftaxe in
> Icelandic as a byname? 2. How do I pronounce it?

...

> So can someone please help me with just a simple
> spelling and BASIC pronounciation thereof of the name
> Swiftaxe.

I answered both to the best of my abilities in my original
reply to you. There is no good way to describe sounds that
are not found in English to people who know no other language
and are not familiar with linguistics. There isn't any
"BASIC" way to describe to you a sound that you haven't heard.

The Swede did the best thing and made a recording. His pronunciation
of the word is quite similar to mine. Try making your own recording
and sending it to the list and we'll tell you if you've got it.

> You see I speak no other language but English and that
> badly. I speak American which any will tell you is not
> by any means a language of its own and a rip off of
> nearly every other!

English is a language like any other. It's neither exceptionally
"simple" nor exceptionally "complex" nor particularly "rich" or
"expressive" or any of the mostly meaningless attributes often
used to describe languages. It has, perhaps, a somewhat unusually
large amount of separate word-roots but its greatest peculiarity
(although you might say it is not inherent in the language itself)
is probably its horribly convoluted spelling. The American dialects
no less represent a real language than the other varieties.

From the point of view of most linguists you can't possibly be "bad"
at your own native language. The way you speak is correct for your
dialect/idiolect by definition.

And from your letters there is very little indication that you
speak English badly in a more conventional sense.

> I would like to learn to speak Old
> Norse, of this I have no doubt. But I must learn from
> the very beginning. Starting with the absolute basics.
> It truly is unfair to start someone in the middle of a
> language and expect them to know how the Spanish trill
> their R!

I honestly thought that Spanish was the language Americans
are most likely to be familiar with. It is surely not too
far out of reach. You must have, at some point in your life,
_heard_ Spanish, even if only in a movie or a song. If that
isn't enough then the next person who knows Spanish pronunciation
can't be too far away. And failing even that there are surely
many more learning resources available for Spanish than for
Old Norse - in bookstores, libraries and on the Internet.

If you want to learn an archaic language you're going to have
to do work like that. A lot of it. Many of us here are trying
to make it easier for people to get started but we can only do so much.

Regards,
Haukur