--- 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!

Lovely, I might add ;)

> and wouldn't ð also be a 'preserved sound'?

Yes, no doubt.

> 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.

I agree. ll, nn, g between vowels(segir), maybe final d/b(land/lamb)
and a few others. Not much of a change at all. However, as you point
out, the vowel-system is changed. I would say quite radically so. If
we had a living speaker, however, I think we could learn it without
having to learn the whole language over again.

(hmm.. same as with english,

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

thousand years ago, at least)

English is nowhere near the same tongue it was a thousand years ago.
The price of an empire, I suppose.

I think what students need to understand about old pronunciation is
this: there were many 'old norse' languages and just as many ways of
pronouncing them. In Sweden, for instance, we had the Gautlandic of
east and west, Swedish proper, Gutnish and others. In my opinion, it
was the Old Gutnish that was the 'jewel of the east' - conservative
like the oldest West Norse, but with a radically differing phonology
and even usage. Danish was also markedly different in pronunciation,
and to some extent in usage and vocabulary, from West Norse. The way
I see it, one of the main advantages of old West Norse is that it is
considered to have been very uniform (einsleit). Because Faroese and
Icelandic were once the same language as West Norwegian, matching on
vocabulary and usage as well, we can get a fairly good idea of how
it was pronounced by comparing the how these tongues are pronounced
today and doing the math. Although it had the most complicated vowel-
system (through more mutations) and the least speakers of any nordic
tongue from the 9-10 centuries, West Norse is now by far the easiest
tongue to reconstruct, as there is a firm basis for comparison. This
is ironic, perhaps, given the numerical inferiority ;) Fortunately,
West Norse was the most conservative branch, often markedly so. Only
Gutnish equals its antiquity. Shamefully, Gutnish was neglected, set
out to die and never used as a literary tongue. Our only book in the
tongue was written in the early 14th century. Fortunately, it is old
enough to give us some idea of the tongue in its golden age. I think
we are very lucky, on the other hand, that Old Icelandic was used as
a literary tongue in the west as early as 1100-1130, when the tongue
was only slightly changed from its golden age.

Vesið ér heil (pronun.: uesið êr hæil (short æ+i - between ei & ai ;)

Konrad

Regards,
Konrad

> Berglaug