Re: Beauty of Old Norse (was Re: New to the list)

Óskar skrifði:

> Anyhow, we can't say if Old Norse was particularly beautiful or not. I
> suspect it had a similar sound to it as continental Scandinavian of today
> (Swedish and Norwegian). Icelandic sounds very different from the
> Scandinavian languages, and very different from the old language as well (it
> sounds like no European language you've heard before - lots of fricatives,
> just about any consonant can be unvoiced + very melodic intonation).
You know, I saw a tv-program from Iceland the other week and the narrator
was speaking Icelandic, but for the first minute or so, I couldn't tell
what it was. I thought it was like Dutch or Switzerdütch(sp?) or something.
The Icelandic I've heard before didn't sound like that. Don't tell me
you have dialects!

> Many Scandinavians have at least agreed with me in that Icelandic is the
> most beautiful Nordic language.
No, that would be Swedish. ;)

> One more thing: to Icelanders themselves, as well as some foreigners, the
> beauty of Icelandic lies much more in its prosodic features than its "actual
> sounds" (what are "non-prosodics" called again?).
Phonology? :) (For some reason I spelled that "phonolody" the first time.
I like that word!) But okey, 'segmentals' is probably the word you're looking
for.

> AFAIR, Old Norse was a pitch accent language, like Latin. But don't take me
> at my word there (not the kind of info my school system has concerned itself
> with).
I think you're right about the pitch accent. My books tell me that
the pitch accent came along already in Old Icelandic times. BPJ?
...and when I had written this, I noticed that he had already replied:

> Most likely, tho not inevitable.  The two pitch accents didn't become
> distinctive until words like akr, sokn, sigl became disyllabic in the
> mainland languages.  Probably ON had a dynamic stress on the first
> syllable  and a pitch rise on the last syllable of every word.  When these
> words became disyllabic there arose a distinction between those disyllabic
> words with the pitch rise on the first syllable and those of the old
> final-syllable pitch-rise type.  In my experience northern Icelandic still
> has that non-distinctive pitch rise, tho not as markedly as the dialects of
> southern Norway and southern Sweden.
I can nothing but agree.

Daniel Andreasson

PS. Ser fram emot att träffa alla nordiska conlangare i København om
ett par veckor.