At 7:20:51 AM on Monday, January 9, 2012, Hrafn wrote:

> I am doing so research on nasales in old norse, and of
> course i am using "Fyrsta Málfrœðiritgerðin". One thing
> which i cant understand is the following phrase "Þriggja
> syna austr mun ek þér sẏna."

<Þriggja syna austr mun ek þér sẏna>, but both <y>'s are
actually long. In other words, the first <syna> is <sýna>,
and the second is the same but with a nasalized <ý>.

The third word is <austr> 'bilgewater'; the <-r> is part of
the root (as can be seen from the genitives <austrs> and
<austrar>), so <austr> can be either nominative or
accusative. Here it's accusative, the object of <sýna> 'to
show'. <Þriggja> is the genitive, so it's 'I will show you
bilgewater of three <sýna>', and <sýna> must be a genitive
plural. Unless we're dealing with a word that is not in
Cleasby & Vigfusson, Zoëga, Fritzner, or de Vries, this
could be either <sýn> and <sýni>. Unfortunately, none of
the senses given by any of these sources for either word
really fits the context.

Einar Haugen translated the sentence as 'I shall show you
bilgewater three laps deep'. I'm guessing that 'laps' here
refers to the overlaps of adjacent strakes forming the sides
of a Viking ship's hull, so that it would be bilgewater
three strakes deep, but I've no idea where this
interpretation of <sýna> comes from; perhaps it's a
technical term too rare to have made it into the standard
dictionaries. At any rate, without a clear idea of what
this word is, I'm not willing to guess why the vowel wasn't
nasalized.

Brian