Re: CHAT: Multi-Lingos

> Date:         Mon, 21 Aug 2000 11:48:37 -0400
> From:         Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
> On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, John Cowan wrote:
> > Because *all* the other Germanic languages think of it (if they
> > think of it at all) as mediaevaloid gobbledygook. Icelandic
> > preserves intact in lexis, morphology, and syntax (but not
> > phonology) the Old Norse of the first millennium.
>
> <G>  Could you read eddas (?) in it, then?
Icelanders only think they can read the Eddas fluently (sorry, Oskar),
because most Edda editions are spelled in modern Icelandic. Granted,
the difference between regularized thirteenth century spellings and
the modern ones aren't that great, but they exist. (13C MSS, OTOH...)

> > > I think I remember one of Mario Pei's books stating that Danish
> > > was very easy to learn to pronounce for an English speaker, but
> > > I won't swear to it...and from hearing a Dane at my HS read the
> > > names in the Norse creation myth (while the rest of us mangled
> > > 'em), I wouldn't bet on it.
His/her apparent ease at that may well be because some of the most
influential early scholars on Norse mythology were Danes, and used
danicized forms which became standard in the literature. Try getting a
Dane to pronounce Tanngnjost --- or compare [toQ?] with [To:r:] as
pronunciations of