[Wikipedia-l] Re: Old Norse

Hello Vegard, Mark, etc., An Old Norse project sounds fine with me -- either as a Wikipedia or as a Wiktionary. I am reasonably competent in Old Norse and can provide a bit of help along the way -- although I cannot promise to spend a lot of time on it, since there are so many other things I need to tend to also (including, first and foremost, the Nynorsk Wikipedia and the English one). Arguments against an Old Norse Wikipedia might be its proximity to Icelandic -- to which it is so similar that the difference between normalised Old Norse and Icelandic orthography can be summed up in a handful mostly one-to-one rules. Thus, Old Norse -r after consonant corresponds to Icelandic -ur; the Old Norse O with ogonek (a C-like shape under) corresponds to Icelandic ö; Old Norse long ø corresponds to Icelandic æ; Old Norse -k in personal pronouns corresponds to Icelandic -g; and the Old Norse grammatical ending -t corresponds to Icelandic -ð. Otherwise, the morphology and syntax are mostly the same (with some archaic forms in Old Norse being lost in Icelandic), but Icelandic has undergone a relatively dramatic expansion of its vocabulary in the recent century or so. Regarding the name, I suggest that the language be called norrœnt (with oe digraph) or norrønt with acute accent over the ø (not possible to type in Eudora...). The name gamalnorska ("Old Norwegian") would not have been used as a self-designation in the time of Old Norse as a mother tongue. Also, the language was used both in Norway and Iceland, as well as as a mostly spoken language in Sweden and Denmark before the languages of these countries started to drift apart. As for writing system, orthography etc., there is clearly a potential for disagreements there. My take on the matter would be that using the latin alphabet rather than the (Runic) Futhork makes the most sense, and that some degree of normalisation of the spelling is needed. (Should one write bók, bok, or boc, for instance?) The wiki language code :non: sounds fine with me. -Olve At 22:54 03/01/2005 +0000, you wrote: ___________________ Olve Utne http://utne.nvg.org