S1l3nt V1p3r said:
Did you even read anything at the site I posted? It says on the site how Old Norse, as it once was, changed over the course of time into three similar but distinct languages.
[sarcasm]Of course, what do I know. I'm not from "The Land of the Vikings". I am a mere idiot that doesn't understand someone else's culture because I don't belong to it. I mean, I must not since I'm American and there is no greater culture than ours. Nothing existed before us.[/sarcasm]
Don't take my word for it, but read the following taken from that site.
"The linguistic genealogy of Old Norse begins with the spread of Proto-Indo-European. Schematically, we may imagine that the community which later became Germanic speakers was at some time a group of speakers of a certain dialect of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). When their speech community became sufficiently separated from other PIE speakers to allow for independent language evolution, over time their dialect developed into what we may term Common Germanic or Proto-Germanic (PGmc). The same process then repeated, so that, through the course of migration, distinct groups within the PGmc speech community became isolated from one another. By the late pre-Christian, early Christian era, there emerged three distinct dialects: East, West, and North Germanic. From West Germanic developed Old English and Old Frisian, as well as Old High German and Old Saxon. From North Germanic are descended the Scandinavian languages, with the oldest literature in Old Norse. East Germanic is only attested in Gothic, which has no modern descendants.
Such a tripartite division unfortunately oversimplifies the situation. There seem to be several points of convergence between branches, so that it is difficult to maintain a view of early division and subsequent isolation. For example, Old Norse and Gothic show a common innovation within the Germanic family, whereby medial jj and ww are both sharpened (to ddj and ggw in Gothic, to ggj and ggw in Old Norse). Likewise both retain -t as a marker of the second person singular past indicative. These might be considered indications of a close affinity between the East and North branches of Germanic.
On the other hand, Old Norse shares some features with West Germanic, to the exclusion of Gothic. In Old Norse and West Germanic both -dōm and -skapi are used as suffixes to produce abstract nouns, whereas they are only used as root nouns in Gothic. Old Norse and the West Germanic languages also show the pervasive traces of umlaut, which is absent in Gothic. Gothic exhibits the change of initial fl- to þl-, absent in both North and West Germanic. Reduplicated verbs are still somewhat productive in Gothic, but completely marginalized in Old Norse and West Germanic.
Thus a simplistic family-tree model resulting from presumed linguistic isolation is a tenuous and sometimes misleading synopsis of the early development of the Germanic languages. Close ties between speech communities must have survived migratory periods, and the relative uniformity of literary traditions must gloss over a more intricate web of common speech."
If you don't understand that, it means that the language used called Old Norse doesn't truly exist anymore. As most lanuages, it evolved within separate locations into separate but close dialects. For a better example, if you ever visit China there are like 10 or more different lanuages spoken around their shores. To us, it all sounds the same, but there are many differences in pronuciation, tone, and execution of the languages when actually spoken. Another, example might be one close to home here in the US. If you talk to people up and down the east coast, you find a lot of different accents and sayings which in some regards is a totally different language to those not a custom to it. It all started from a beginning language, but change as people moved farther apart and interacted with others of different origin.
Now if you'd still like to be ignorate and say I'm completely wrong. Go ahead, at least I tried enlightening you to see beyond your set way of thinking.
Someone once told me, "Ignorance killed the cat, curiosity was framed".
Believe what you want, but always try to keep an open mind. In that fact I'll say this as well, bring me proof such as I've brought you, and prove that the old language is definitivly not dead along with proof that your pronuciation is correct, and I'll secede to your pronuciation.
Proof is not, I repeat NOT, the fact that you are a part of Viking/Nordic heritage only.
-Magnum
PS: I've emailed the director of the department at UT that heads up their language studies. Hopefully, he will settle this debate once and for all.
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