Hello, you lot!

I've often heard, and there are some excellent
recent examples on this list, a view towards
reconstructing an Old Norse pronunciation that
goes something like this:

"Since we don't know exactly how Old Norse was
pronounced any old pronunciation will do."

or

"English is pronounced any number of ways! Some
of its dialects are not even mutually intelligible.
Surely that shows that any criticism of a particular
attempt of pronouncing Old Norse is ill founded."

To serve as a sort of counterexample to this theory
I've recorded the beginning of an old propoganda
speech that I think is familiar to many English speakers.

I read the text as if I knew absolutely no English and
with Icelandic pronunciation of the words. Sort of like
I might have tried reading it when I was 6 years old
(I remember pronouncing 'you' in three syllables).

http://www.hi.is/~haukurth/speech.wav

Sure there are many valid ways of pronouncing English
but I think we can agree: THIS ISN'T ONE OF THEM!

Similarly, even though many different pronunciation
schemes for Old Norse could be presented it is nevertheless
possible to criticize any given performance for basic
errors such as running together two distinct phonemes.

As for reconstructing music the same probably holds.
Even if we don't know exactly how it was performed
that doesn't mean that one guess is as good as the next.

- - -

But let me state for the record (as I did in my
original review).

* I reviewed the accuracy of Sequentia's pronunciation
because I was asked to do so. I think Sequentia should
be judged by their music, not their pronunciation.

* I don't know enough about music to have a very educated
opinion on Sequentia's performance. To me their work didn't
sound like it was influenced much by Nordic folk music.
That's all I can say.

Regards,
Haukur