Talk:Old Norse orthography

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Norse history and culture, a WikiProject related to all activities of the Norse people, both in Scandinavia and abroad, prior to the formation of the Kalmar Union in 1397. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the Project's quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.

	Norway Portal This article is part of WikiProject Norway, an attempt to better organize information in articles related to Norway. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale.

Portal	Old Norse orthography falls within the scope of WikiProject Denmark, a project to create and improve Denmark-related Wikipedia articles. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, all interested editors are welcome!
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.

On the discussion page for Ragnarök, Haukurth mentioned that there had been a discussion on using ö for o-ogonek on wikipedia. I hope I'm not breaking some consensus reached in that discussion when I replace ö with o-ogonek in this article (where appropriate). I know the o-ogonek doesn't always show up on computer screens, but I think, particularly in an article about orthography, that it should be used, as it is the character which is used in the standardised old norse orthography. --Barend 10:47, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

Back when I wrote the first version of this article we couldn't even use o-ogonek in article titles because Wikipedia was using Latin-1. Now we're using UTF-8 and unusual characters are slowly becoming more generally available but using o-ogonek is still cumbersome and requires the "unicode" template if most of our readers are to see it. As you say it's appropriate to discuss it and display it in an article about orthography, but generally I think 'ö' will serve us well for some years to come. It's common enough in printed books, especially older ones. [1] Haukur 11:18, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

he orthography of the Old Norse language since the introduction of the Latin alphabet in Iceland is a thorny subject. <--- best line EVER.

[edit] Ø in Old Norse.

Ø was used in Old Norse, ( ) is used in Icelandic.

What did Icelandic use to replace Ø in Old Norse?
Or did Ö in Icelandic replace both Ǫ and Ø in Old Norse?

20:35, 26 December 2007 Myusanem (Talk | contribs)

The Old Norse <ø> and <o-ogonek> sounds merged in modern Icelandic into the same sound, which is orthographically represented as <ö>. Its phonetic value is pretty much the same as old Norse (and for that matter, modern Norwegian) <ø>.--Barend (talk) 12:55, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

It also unrounded sometimes, e.g. kømr > modern Icelandic kemur. I don't know what the conditioning environment is. Rhyolite (talk) 21:15, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Old Norse had both kømr and kemr, so this is probably not a case of kømr developing into kemur after all.--Barend (talk) 22:48, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

My impression was that kømr is the older form and that this is indeed an example of the ø>e change. But I don't have a reference handy. Haukur (talk) 23:30, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that is probably right. What I meant to say was that the change from kømr to kemr came in the "common Old Norse" period, so to speak, i.e. also in Norwegian (nynorsk "kjem", although some dialects in Sunnmøre, "kjøm"), so it's not a particularly Icelandic development from kømr to kemur.--Barend (talk) 23:35, 4 June 2008 (UTC)