Heill, Raymond.

> 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).

A reasonable assumption. Of course other things must be taken
into account; such as influence from a language that was used
as a model for the orthography of the one recently codified
- Latin for example.

> 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.

My point is that the Sequentia pronunciation is ALSO not
remotely a good example of what other people have been
talking about. Randomly pronouncing what should be the
same phone in different ways is not some "difference of
opinion" or "dialect variation". It's just plain wrong;
much like my recording of the warmonger's speech.

> It is the FIXING of
> the "facts" of reconstructed pronunciation that is pissing
> everyone off here.

Weewee or not the truth is that no-one here is being dogmatic.
There certainly is more than one way to pronounce Old Norse,
just as there are many ways of pronouncing English. There are,
however, some ways of pronouncing both languages that make no
sense of all - like my recording.

Kveðja,
Haukur

P.S. Once more for the record: I'm not saying Sequentia are
bad artists or that their Edda album is bad music.