I’ll just quote from Wikipedia to establish this, but if you don’t already know what I’m talking about I doubt you’ll be able to help:
So, through the magic of Unicode, we can see that the first consonant in the name in Old Norse is the letter eth, even though in English it’s pronounced with /d/ in that position, which is the consonant in ‘dye’, for example.
Now, the interesting part is that Odin is apparently the counterpart of Wōden and derived from the Proto-Germanic *Wōdanaz; the ‘d’ sometimes changes into a ‘t’ (which I can only imagine corresponds to a sound change) but never to a ‘th’ or a ‘dh’. So this kind of challenges my initial idea that it was pronounced with a voiced ‘th’ way back when, assuming the reconstructed names correspond to reconstructed pronunciations in a reasonable fashion.
While we wait for the experts to chime in – I tried finding the answer in “Old English and its Closest Relatives”. I see in the Old Norse chapter a lot of words containing that character which would sound like our letter “d”. Someone else will have to explain the history…
In the Old Saxon and Old English chapters it seems to be used for “th”.
Not just here on the SDMB, but also Wikipedia and several other places on the net, I often see pronunciation rendered in those ridiculous dictionary symbols. They’re all but useless; I haven’t opened a dictionary in probably two decades.
Can we render pronunciation in a more meaningful and simple way? Instead of “ˈoʊdɨn” how about “OH-din” or whatever?
I agree completely with HeyHomie. In fact, one could argue that use of a specialized code in which just a handful of dopers is fluent can be seen as a violation of the SDMB rules on foreign language use.
Because it looks sorta like a “d”, maybe? Similarly how nowadays we would pronounce “Ye” as “Yee” instead of “the” as in “ye olde [whatever]”, because of the similarity of the letters?
Just the opposite. They’re not “ridiculous dictionary symbols.” They are, in fact, the only way to render pronunciation in a way that’s meaningful to an international audience. “OH-din” style attempts on this board only lead to endless circular confusion because two people with different accents pronounce them differently. Just learn the I.P.A. is easy and it will be useful any time you want to discuss pronunciation.
I find it helpful to think of the difference between “f” and “v” or “s” and “z”, which is the same distinction in a place where English makes it orthographically explicit.
I personally try to do both, but the problem is, as stated, the differences between accents. I’ve run into this problem before on this board where plain English renderings of pronunciations were ambiguous, not just because we have Englishes from all around the world here, but also with dialectical differences within the US.
Is this serious? IPA is just a symbolic system of representing sounds. It is nothing like a foreign language. It only takes a few minutes to get the basics down, but it may take a little while to get all the nuances. It honestly isn’t that difficult to learn, and it aids immensely in avoiding ambiguity in pronunciation discussions. Your complaint is like saying you can’t post math equations or even code because only a handful of dopers are “fluent” in it.
Here’s the best ones I can think of. All the sounds are the same except for the quality of the “th”:
No one ever pronounced it “ye” or “yee”. The printing presses didn’t have the correct letter (thorn, pronounced “th”) so they substituted a y. It was always pronounced “the”.
h/a? That pair doesn’t correspond. One’s a voiceless (or, in rare instances, voiced) glottal fricative, the other is a vowel. (And which of the many sounds of “a” are you talking about? This is where IPA comes in handy.)
Also, here is the complete order of voiceless/voiced pairs that I could think of in English:
p/b
t/d
f/v
k/g
s/z
sh/“zh” (as the sound in “treasure.”)
th (as in “thin”)/th (as in “then”)
Also, you could say ch/j (one is t+sh, the other is d+zh)