Re: USAGE: What happened to Anglo-Saxon letters? (was: Intro to Frankish)

Quoting Tristan McLeay <conlang@...>:

> On 16 Jan 2005, at 12.44 am, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> > Danish æ is /E/ and /E:/. In Old Icelandic, it was /E/, with the
> > accented
> > version for /E:/. Icelandic vowels were subsequently thoroughly
> > screwed up.
>
> Could you (or our resident expert and Lord of Instrumentality) explain
> that?
Well, the long vowels shifted rather English-likely (ie, totally arbitrarily as
far as we outsiders can tell!), some of the short ones shifted too, and then
front rounded vowels unrounded. BP could no doubt give the details. Off the top
of my head, we have [a:]>[au], [E:]>[ai] and [e:]>[je], and of course [y]>[i]
and so on.

> Also, can Swedes (or Norwegians or Danes) understand Icelandic like
> they can Danish and Norwegian (or Swedish and the other one).
Nope.

                                                      Andreas