Talk:Old Norse

To-Do List

1. Phonology
   1. Multiple reconstructions: Benediktsson, Sweet, minimal and maximal inventories
   2. Umlaut: Information on conditioning from Germanic umlaut#I-mutation in Old Norse, The Conundrum of ON Umlaut.
   3. Syllable weight rules (see The Conundrum)
   4. +Contraction: Bisyllables (jǫtni); Strongs in ra; Vgr->ga (vindga, 1st Weak); Nicknames (Sigga); I consider this a phonological process, but it could go in morphology, too.
   5. +Inactive or historical transformations
   6. +Describe ǫ -> u in West Norse (just Icel.?) inflections, especially weak patterns.
   7. +Describe nnr -> ðr: Mentioned í following place(s): [1]
   8. +Dental assimilation (góðt -> gótt; hint -> hitt)
   9. Tones: Briefly mention a few arguments for and against Old Norse tones.
2. Phonotactics
   1. +Sonority hierarchy: See if one can be found. Certain bits in Málfræði. look suspiciously like one, with the division of the consonants into groups, accompanied by comments like, "…at aldri má tvá samhljóðendr ins sama hlutar setja í einni samstǫfun fyr raddarstafinn."
3. Gender
   1. +Note on the great gender shift in the English gender system, leading to its collapse.
4. Dialects
   1. Text example (multiple): change to "text examples" after adding Old Norwegian and Old Danish texts.

I'm starting a to-do list. The main reason is that there are a lot of things I would like to make sure people know are needed, but which I probably don't have time to write myself. I shall start it above, please feel free to edit it. LokiClock (talk) 09:03, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm curious about the sources for the phonology. The phonemes listed under the Vowels, Consonants, and Orthography sections differ significantly from the pronunciation guide in Gordon's Introduction to Old Norse and the Cleasby-Vigfusson book referenced in the article. They are also quite numerous and specific (unlike the general guidelines provided in most primers and introductions), and I would very much like to know the justifications for them. I didn't add this to the list in case a reference was already provided that I missed. MichaelGArtin (talk) 16:25, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Phonology's a tricky issue. Right now the article supports just one hypothesized phonology, whereas in the literature you can encounter multiple which are often very different. As for the earlier vowel chart, in "The Nordic Languages" Article 101, two very different phonologies are given, neither of which are the only possibilities. The one at this article is Benediktsson's, but with distinction of e and ę, and of nasal from oral vowels. The former's existence except in very early Norse may be challenged, as it is in the aforementioned article on the basis of Benediktsson's analysis, but the fact of the distinction's coverage in many important sources (Sweet, Cleasby-Vigfússon, etc.) makes its inclusion important for referential considerations. The phonology section and dialectical sections in this way oversimplify the academic reality, which is that there are of course multiple viewpoints, and certain information presented in the article takes one of these ideas for granted. ᛭ LokiClock (talk) 02:38, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

Also, on the disparity with Cleasby-Vigfússon, much as an English dictionary today will encompass Early Modern English to present, the book is a coverage of essentially the entire Icelandic up until its point of writing. It has a heavy slant on the older language, and is a very useful resource for information on Old Icelandic, but the pronunciation and spelling is based on the then-modern language, and you must be careful in reading it to notice when Vigfússon switches from discussing the language in general to the language of antiquity or the then-modern language. Note that its official title is not "Old Icelandic Dictionary" but "An Icelandic-English Dictionary." ᛭ LokiClock (talk) 07:02, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

Having read quite a few different academic accounts, I'd say that (almost) nobody today believes in Antonsen's version, and Benediktsson's is (basically) the standard (and the distinction between /ø/ and /œ/ is not present in Benediktsson). Sweet and Cleasby-Vigfússon are extremely old sources and their views are largely irrelevant; Cleasby-Vigfússon is still useful as a dictionary and may be used as a purely practical account of the morphological facts, but it's not a source I'd expect anyone to go to for a description of the phonological system.--62.73.69.121 (talk) 09:24, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

One thing that is missing is the basic facts about word order. Did ON have the kind of verb-second order with verb-final order in subordinate clauses that existed in Proto-Germanic and still exists in e.g. German and Dutch, or had the word order already changed, as it did in the later part of the Old English period?— Preceding unsigned comment added by 2a02:810a:b00:a70:f55f:69d5:488d:8f82 (talk) 10:49, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

Denmark

"Among these, the grammar of Icelandic and Faroese have changed the least from Old Norse in the last thousand years. In contrast, the pronunciations of both Icelandic and Faroese have changed considerably from Old Norse. With Danish rule of the Faroe Islands, Faroese has also been influenced by Danish." -- This sentence gives the impression that Danish rule is a difference between Faroese and Icelandic. But until relatively recently, Denmark also ruled Iceland. So the sentence does not explain why Danish has influenced Faroese more than it has influenced Icelandic (assuming that is the case). Is it the longer period of rule, or did the Faroes have lesser autonomy from Copenhagen for much of the period, or is there some other explanation? As it is, the sentence is misleading because it implies a difference between the Faroes and Iceland that until the postwar period did not exist. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.76.95.210 (talk) 10:42, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

Sweet's Icelandic primer

Anyone know of a source for the English translations of the exercises? FangoFuficius (talk) 15:18, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

The /œ/ vs /ø/ distinction - an obsolete view?

The claim that early Old Norse had a separate /œ/ phoneme ('obtained through a simultaneous u- and i-umlaut of /a/' as in gøra < *garwijaną, and søkkva < *sankwijaną) contrasting with the usual /ø/ resulting from regular i-umlaut is sourced to the introduction to the Cleasby & Vigfússon dictionary from 1874. That's a long time ago for a linguistic reference. I don't think this view is found in modern scholarly literature any longer. Looking through a number of reference works on Old Norse and Nordic language history from the 1990s onwards (and even one from the 1950s!), I don't find such a claim - instead, /ø/ is assumed to be the product of all of these processes. (I mean, I don't personally find it theoretically implausible that there might have been a difference between these vowels at first when they arose, but there just doesn't seem to be any material evidence for it, so people don't assert it.) 62.73.69.121 (talk) 09:14, 30 December 2023 (UTC)