Haukur wrote:

--------------------------------------------------------
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 propaganda
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
<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!

--------------------------------------------------------

I have, finally, listened to this little bit of propaganda
and find that I simply must respond, even though I not be
qualified to do so.

I'm thinking back to a little squabble that arose over the
silent-r idea in ON. Remember that? Naturally, we all know
that people, being extremely rational beings, do not, as
a rule, include silent letters into the initial efforts
to write down their spoken language. Therefore, we guess
that the written form of a language, to a fair degree,
reflects the speech at the time of codification
(fossilization). However, we also know that there
are a great many more subtle aspects of speech that
are not generally included within that codification.
I have heard several such aspect spoken of by Konrad and
his kin - such as nasalization. A distinct nasal quality is,
incidentally, one of the features of some Southern varieties
of U.S. English that make them difficult to understand for we
more mainstream speakers. However, the largest obstacle to
understanding regional varieties of English are the sounds
omitted in speech like:
Question: "j'ít?"
Reply: "nah" (ah is nasal)
Question: "j'aun tu?" (au and u are nasal)
Which is, of course:
'did you eat?'
'no'
'do you want to?'

Now, for you to take written English - a codification
that is phonetically accurate less than half the time -
and read each and every letter as if it were Icelandic
is not remotely a good example of what other people have
been talking about. I have never heard anyone suggest that
leaving some of the written sounds out of ON would be a good
idea. It is, therefore, everyone's assumption that the
codification involved with ON is a reasonable first
approximation. The discussion is obviously about the
details not included within the codification and thus
not made explicit. Is it not also these little things that
we can count on to change most rapidly and radically from
place to place and from time to time? It is the FIXING of
the "facts" of reconstructed pronunciation that is pissing
everyone off here.

Raymond