I forgot the unvoiced resonants, thank you Berglaug for reminding me
about them! But, unvoiced r, l exist before p, t and k in many
Mainland Scandinavian dialects, so the actual phonemes are not
specifically Icelandic. The clusters hr-, hl-, hm- (?) and hn- are of
course unique, though.
Dalecarlian examples of unvoiced 'l':

http://www.unilang2.org/courses/dalecarlian/slik_.wav ('slík' = such)
http://www.unilang2.org/courses/dalecarlian/litlkripp_.wav
('lítlkripp' = child, literally "little lump/nugget", or "lillklimp,
liten klimp" in Standard Swedish)

Old Norse 'sl' and 'tl' have become assimilated into an unvoiced 'l'
in most Northern Scandinavian dialects.

Icelandic has preserved 'ð', so have several other Norse dialects
(especially Dalecarlian ones. Hence, 'ð' is not - as I formulated in
my posting - a "sound which Icelandic has preserved better than all
other Scandinavian dialects". Please, take a look at:

http://www.unilang2.org/wiki2/wiki.phtml?
title=Dalecarlian_sound_samples

As you can see and hear, the orthography used on this site has
Norse 'þ' instead of Latin 'ð' to denote this voiced sound. Of
course, this convention is based on the fact that Dalecarlians used
the "dors" rune - 'þ' - into modern time. The soundvalue of the
Dalecarlian dors
rune was both a usual 'd' and the fricative 'ð'.

/Sjúrþr [sIu:r´DE]

(Slightly arcane Dalecarlian version of the name Berglaug
Ásmundardóttir: Bjargloug Ásmunderdóttir [bI{rr`l\o:G
o:s`mun'dEr`dUO`tter] - not that Bjargloug or Ásmundr are that very
usual names in those forests)



--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, Berglaug Ásmundardóttir
<berglauga@...> wrote:

> Sjuler wrote: "As far as I know, the only sound which Icelandic has
> preserved better than all other Scandinavian dialects is the þ-

sound (like

> 'th' in English 'thing')."
>
> -
>
> Don't forget our lovely unvoiced resonants, which all you

scandinavians seem

> to have lost in some freak accident! ;)
>
> unvoiced r, l, m, n are fun to say!
>
> and wouldn't ð also be a 'preserved sound'?
>
> i'm well aware that icelandic isn't anything like old norse was,

but really,

> it's mostly in the vowels and their surroundings (that would be

lenght of

> syllables), the consonant changes are minimal. (hmm.. same as with

english,

> really, their vowels are all messy nowadays.. compared to a

thousand years

> ago, at least)
>
> Berglaug