tarchon
First Post
Joshua Dyal said:
Hmmm... I'm very curious as to which dialect of English has the vowel in "gout" pronounced the same as the first vowel in the German "thräne," which hasn't been spelled like that since the time of the Weimar Republic anyway. Verdict: questionable. Take its first advice and use the "continental" vowels.
Also, some of the consonant advice is based on debatable reconstructions. The idea that the final-r inflection was not generally pronounced would be vigorously denied by most scholars (though it was probably the case in certain later dialects). Modern Icelandic in fact regularly reflects those to "-ur," so it's <b>highly</b> unlikely that they weren't pronounced in ON. This particular reconstruction looks like it basically takes modern Swedish and grafts it onto ON. My ON prof learned iit in Iceland, so he had a very different take on it.
Generally speaking, don't trust any pronunciation guide that uses such phrases as "'a' in land" without telling you what dialect they refer too. English has several different reflexes of that vowel, and only one of them is really like the one in ON.
