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Old Norse vowel phonemes mostly come in pairs of long and short. The standardized orthography marks the long vowels with an acute accent. In medieval manuscripts, it is often unmarked but sometimes marked with an accent or through gemination. Old Norse had nasalized versions of all ten vowel places.
Thus the Old Norse name Baldr comes out as Baldur in modern Icelandic. Other differences include vowel-shifts, whereby Old Norse ǫ became Icelandic ö, and Old Norse œ (oe ligature) became Icelandic æ (ae ligature). Old Norse ø corresponds in modern Icelandic to ö, as in sökkva, or to e, as in gera.
The sound system of Norwegian resembles that of Swedish.There is considerable variation among the dialects, and all pronunciations are considered by official policy to be equally correct – there is no official spoken standard, although it can be said that Eastern Norwegian Bokmål speech (not Norwegian Bokmål in general) has an unofficial spoken standard, called Urban East Norwegian or ...
Old Norse has three categories of verbs (strong, weak, & present-preterite) and two categories of nouns (strong, weak). Conjugation and declension are carried out by a mix of inflection and two nonconcatenative morphological processes: umlaut, a backness-based alteration to the root vowel; and ablaut, a replacement of the root vowel, in verbs.
Based on the description of minimal pairs of words in Old Norse, Einar Haugen proposes one tentative interpretation of the vowel description given by the First Grammatical Treatise. [6] There are potentially 36 vowels in Old Norse, with 9 basic vowel qualities, /i, y, e, ø, ɛ, u, o, ɔ, a/ , which are further distinguished by length and nasality.
A significant sound correspondence (rather than simply a difference in pronunciation) is the fact that Danish and Swedish have long monophthongs (e /eː/, ø /øː/) in some words, where Norwegian has restored the reflexes of old Norse diphthongs (ei [æɪ̯], øy [œʏ̯] and au [æʉ̯]) as alternatives or, sometimes, replacement of the ...
Other changes are the consequence of sound changes that separate Old Norse from Proto-Norse and Common Germanic (mostly changes to the vowel system). The first ætt was reduced to its first six letters, fuþąrk, losing the g and w runes (the old a rune is transliterated as ą for Old Norse as the phoneme it expressed had become more closed).
Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ) is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, Old Swedish and modern Icelandic alphabets, as well as modern transliterations of the Gothic alphabet, Middle Scots, and some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia but was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland, where it survives.