User talk:Bisky Riznu I

Old Norse and Icelandic IPA
I don't know if you're from Iceland or a speaker of Icelandic. I'm neither, but I study linguistics and try to go by reliable sources. And there are reasons for Old Norse and Icelandic IPA to be indicated in certain ways, which is why I reverted your IPA edits in Snorri Sturluson.

Standard normalized spelling of Old Norse is mostly based on the First Grammatical Treatise, but not entirely. In particular, the Old Norse morpheme-final vowels i and u were actually pronounced close-mid vowels, though they eventually drifted to near-close vowels , and now Modern Icelandic (though  is actually a central vowel ). Old Norse varied by century and region, so there may be reasons for different IPA transcriptions, but in this context the vowels were never actually close vowels as you indicated. I've set up a page that tries to describe the evolution of Iceland vowels according to available references, including Hreinn Benediktsson, with the hope of this helping Old Norse IPA in Wikipedia articles, but for now it's just a user page until it can be more seriously discussed among users.

As for Icelandic consonants, morpheme-internal consonant clusters can have more than one valid pronunciation, and Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson (2020) goes into this. The cluster sn is primarily described as, but if there's consensus that is also possible, then  can be used as a compromise. And Eiríkur says the cluster rl is traditionally, but has also gained ground, so  can be used as a compromise. - Gilgamesh (talk) 22:18, 20 December 2023 (UTC)


 * I am an Icelandic speaker yes; /sn/ is generally only realized as [stn] postvocalically so that should be changed back to [sn], but yeah [(r)tl] is a good compromise for /rl/ there (if a compromise toward the older/more traditional pronunciation is really needed there) and /ʏ/ (at least when short like it is in Sturluson) is indeed most often around either [ʉ̞] or between [ʉ̞] & [ʏ] (I don't have access to my IPA keyboard now but I'd transcribe it as ʏ with modifier minus) and not [ʏ] (though [ʏ] is still an accurate transcription for many speakers).
 * For Old Icelandic morpheme-final *[i,u] > [e,o], I can't find the article (or part of article) Benediktsson cites as support (reference 9, page 39 of his "Vowel System"; unsure whether that refers to page 39 of the same The Vowel System of Icelandic: A Survey of Its History article (which I don't have access to page 39 of through the page you have linked in the Evolution of Icelandic vowels page) or of a separate article which hasn't shown up on my searches), so if you have a link to that on hand it'd be appreciated. Without being able to see that source at the moment, all I can do is caution on taking that article alone as a definitive source.
 * That all aside, the work you've put in is great. Bisky Riznu I (talk) 01:52, 21 December 2023 (UTC)


 * Thank you.
 * For the time being, I changed to  at Snorri Sturluson.
 * I would mainly choose symbols like or  for u, because Icelandic u/ö are not front vowels, which is what the symbols  necessarily imply.  Neither u nor ö palatalize a preceding g/k, which is why spellings like gju/gjö/kju/kjö exist.  Correct?  I could understand if u really is front  for some people, though, but I've read multiple places that u/ö are normally central vowels.
 * Sorry, I don't have access to other pages of that book. But for now I haven't found any independent reference that contradicts it.  I know that's a weak argument, but it's easier to consider a reference in front of me when no contrasting references are readily found.  I also provided an additional link on the history of Icelandic vowels in that user page, but the text is in Icelandic, and I can only get so much out of it with Google Translate, and I'm not sure it addresses morpheme-final i/u. - Gilgamesh (talk) 00:41, 22 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Correct, /ʏ/ for most is generally not a true front vowel and doesn't palatalize preceding velars, though it also generally is more fronted than true central; [ʉ̞] isn't a bad transcription of it necessarily, it's just convention to notate it as [ʏ] both for convenience's sake and because it's in the range of common realizations. I wouldn't use the existence of ⟨{k,g}j{u,ö}⟩ as evidence for that though, since that's more a result of historical non-front values (modern jö in inherited words always being from older jǫ rather than disallowed *jø) and not current values, and - though not spelled with ⟨j⟩ in the standard orthography - archaic and/or nonstandard spellings of standardized ⟨(k,g)é⟩ as ⟨(k,g)je⟩ and the common though nonstandard modern merger of post-velar e,é do point to palatalization of older /kʰ,k,ɣ/ in modern Icelandic and therefore also Faroese (though *ɣ no longer being a phoneme proper in modern Faroese) being relatively recent independent developments and not dating back to the common ancestor between the two.
 * /œ/ on the other hand is definitely central though yeah, usually around [ɵ].
 * The new link doesn't address morpheme-final i,u, but it's a great indirect reference with plenty sources in turn so glad you added it. The reason for other sources not contradicting the claim is the same reason the claim isn't mentioned either way elsewhere: there isn't sufficient evidence to have made it discussion-worthy, especially as a change either specific to insular West Norse or predating the split between insular and continental West Norse. Later old continental Nordic languages both East and West likely did have a similar areal change though, so that might be where Benediktsson is getting the idea from, proposing it's not areal (that proposal needing the change to be older than we have evidence for). Bisky Riznu I (talk) 14:20, 22 December 2023 (UTC)


 * I read that not every case of jö derives from jǫ. As just one example, in Benediktsson page 300, he mentions gjörð coming from earlier gørð, and the Wiktionary article says gjörð is a doublet of gerð.  In that case, jö derives from ø without j, with the implication that ø palatalized g in a way ǫ did not, and that this difference had to be reflected in spelling when ǫ and ø otherwise merged to ö.  But what I don't know (and which my user page's notes already mention) is under what circumstances Old Norse ø became Icelandic e instead of (j)ö.
 * As for morpheme-final i/u being, Benediktsson says on page 286 that the First Grammatical Treatise itself implies that these vowels were equivalent to e/o at the time, in addition to sending the reader to an otherwise inaccessible page 39f. - Gilgamesh (talk) 14:23, 24 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Ah sorry, I misspoke: what I meant is that, as opposed to jǫ, specifically *jø (which as as I said was disallowed or otherwise doesn't occur in Old Norse) is not a source of modern jö; old ø does indeed also sometimes give modern jö. Worth noting though is Old Norse (k,g)ø doesn't consistently give (k,g)jö rather than (k,g)ö (or as you mentioned also e) in the modern language, which would point against it being a palatalization marker after the adoption of ⟨ö⟩ rather than representing old /j/.
 * Unfortunately ø > e into both Old and modern Icelandic aren't consistent enough in any environment to state as a conditioned change, but if it helps to note long œ(~ǿ) changed to é much less often. Gerð/gørð in particular though are interesting in that its e-ø alternation was already present by at least Old Icelandic (along with a few other words that show old (v){i,e}-{y,ø} alternations like kvikr and nonfinite forms of koma).
 * Reading through a recreation of the text itself again (at http://etext.old.no/gramm/), the closest it seems to get to implying what Benediktsson suggests is mentioning ⟨i⟩ sometimes being written as ⟨e⟩ before geminated consonants. Bisky Riznu I (talk) 15:46, 24 December 2023 (UTC)