Old Norse and Earlier English Pronunciation

[Amy West]

On 6/15/10 12:00 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
> Date:    Mon, 14 Jun 2010 14:47:01 +0000
> From:ronbutters at AOL.COM
> Subject: Old Norse and Earlier English Pronunciation
>
> Thanks to Amy for the information. I have removed her "OT" designation because this is clearly a linguistic topic and relates directly to issues involving the rationale for pronunciation of written texts.
>
> Do the Icelanders give some rationale for reading 13th century texts with 21st century pronunciations? If not, then it must be so obvious to them that they do not even think of giving a rationale--any more than we see a need for giving a rationale for not reading 16th century texts (Wyatt, for example) with 16th century pronunciations, even though the actual differences might well be viewed as considerable to a philologist.
>
> I have been told by Icelanders who are also medievalists that the early texts are linguistically quite accessible to living Icelanders. These are highly literate people, of course. But my guess is that, even though the phonological differences may seem considerable to a nonnative speaker, they seem relatively minor to an Icelander; insisting on the earlier pronunciations would seem trivial and distracting. I can't imagine teaching "Fairie Queen" and insisting on 16th century pronunciations. They probably feel the same way about classic ON literature. Moreover, given that the texts range in age from 900-1400, there is no single pronunciation set that would be completely accurate for all texts.
>
> It does seem a bit odd that I could not imagine teaching Chaucer or "Gawain" and not insisting on authentic pronunciations. This may be in part simply tradition. But I suspect that the tradition is rooted in the native speaker perception that Chaucer spoke the equivalent of a psycholinguistically different language, whereas Shakespeare just spoke "funny" English.
>
> Stage presentations, of course, have their own constraints: a tug of war between intelligibility and verisimilitude. Historically accurate renderings of Shakespeare would be even less intelligible.
> Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
>

I can't recall a particular laying down of the rationale. I'd be
interested in hearing the answer of the Icelanders who are also
medievalists. I expect that the rationale is akin to ours for reading
Shakespeare with modern American accents.

There is no "Middle Icelandic." There's Old Icelandic and Modern
Icelandic. In the 1600s and 1700s there was a conscious reform effort
that archaized the orthography and grammar to make the modern Icelandic
more akin to Old Icelandic, but the pron. continued to evolve naturally,
as it will. There's a good, slim little volume that covers this -- _The
Icelandic Language_ -- again available up on the VSNR publications site.

Because of the reforms, the difference between Old Icelandic and modern
Icelandic is much more akin to the difference between modern English and
early modern English rather than Old English. Except for poems retaining
older language, much of the language that the medieval Icelandic lit. is
recorded in is from the 1200s on. And yes, that problem of having a
historical pron that reflects the changes from 900-1400 is valid: if I
remember correctly, there's evidence that [v], for example, changes its
value over the time period. The historical pron. is intended to reflect
the pron. of around the 1200s.

So, Ron, I think we're back to me being an oddball. To those trained to
use the modern Icelandic pron., I sound like I'm reading Faerie Queene
with a 16th c. pron.

I return you to your regularly scheduled discussion of American dialets.

--
---Amy West

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