> Heil Konráð ok Meghan,

<Snip>

> Meghan wrote: "My questions for ye all: What do you do? Why? How
> happy are you with this approach? What would you do if you could?"
>
> When I began, and wanting to get as far back as possible without
> running into inconsistencies due to my ignorance of the etymology, I
> settled on trying to recreate the sound of c. 1200 as best I could
> manage.

Which is approximately where I'm at.

<snip>

> As I learnt more vocabulary and
> started to get a clearer idea of the history of the language, and the
> historical origins of the various mutated vowels, it became possible
> for me to read texts printed according to a late medieval or modern
> norm and back-engineer the vowels in my head if I wanted to sound them
> out, no doubt far from perfectly, but hopefully impriving a bit as I
> went along. I wanted to get back to earlier forms, for the reasons
> Konrad has mentioned: both for its own sake and because this helps
> with learning about the history of the language.

I'm managing this for some things. But VERY few. And I'm sure with
many many errors.

> Recently I've been trying to get the
> hang of switching between these two norms, c. 1200 and modern, when
> reciting old poems from memory. The tricky thing was that I'd
> memorised things at different times, with different pronunciations!
> So I sometimes have to stop and think, but really this is just and
> matter practice.

Un-hunh. Same here. And when I'm learning new stuff, I sometimes
drift from word to word based on when I "got" the word through my
skull.

> In the light of this discussion though, I'd like to going to make an
> effort to familiarise myself with the earier, 12th c., pronunciation.
> At the moment when I try to recreate it, I have to go very very
> slowly and constantly have to go back and correct myself over the
> nasals the open and close e, etc.

I'm quite sure I'm completely mucking up the nasals.

> But wouldn't it be great to learn some poems in true Viking Age
> pronunciation!

You have a gift for understatment.

Hmm. Ok, I'll keep beating my head against it, pending other ideas!

-Unnr