Spell My Name With An Eth: Why is 'Odin' pronounced like it is?

Also known as
ʃ ʒ
θ ð
tʃ dʒ

Oh, you get outta here with your secret language!

This is what I would ask for.

Something like either “ˈoʊdɨn (approximately OH-din)” or “OH-din (more precisely ˈoʊdɨn)” would help those of us playing along at home. We might even accidentally learn something :).

I’d like to see this in Wikipedia also, and have actually looked around a bit to see where to request it as part of a style recommendation, but nothing jumped out at me. Maybe I’ll look again.

ETA: I do see a parallel with using foreign language, where it seems to be OK when it’s called for, and generally a translation to English is also provided, even if it’s only approximate.

Actually, it seems to be correct, though I never thought of it that way before. You may just be getting caught up on the (somewhat artificial) distinction between vowels and consonants, but if you make a sustained H sound and then add voicing to it, you do end up with something awfully close to the sound of “a”.

This still doesn’t make any sense to me. The thing is there is a voiced “h” and an unvoiced “h.” The voiced “h” doesn’t appear in English (except in some dialects.) I’m making a voiced “h” sound right now and, no, it doesn’t sound anything like any variety of “a” anymore than a sustained “th” sounds like an “a” with voicing. ETA: You can read about it and hear it here. Compare with the unvoiced “h”. They add a vowel to it to make it easier to say, but that initial aspirated sound is what the voiced and unvoiced “h” sounds like.

Actually, if I add voice to [h], I end up with a voiced glottal fricative [ɦ], not “a” (I still don’t know what you mean by “a”).

Mouse over the IPA. In a lot of cases (not all of them), tooltips will show you what each IPA symbol (or linked pair of symbols) roughly corresponds to in a respelling scheme. (If this respelling scheme is too far from your own dialect, well, you still have the IPA to fall back on.)

OK, so when was it pronounced with a /ð/ to begin with? It sure looks like *Wōdanaz was pronounced with a /d/ in that position.

:rolleyes:

this is really a sad day for the fight against ignorance. Perhaps we should re-define π to 3 - who needs all those decimal places. Oh, I’m sorry, I mean ‘pi’.

Aw, now, I think that’s a little harsh. The vast majority of even reasonably intelligent people aren’t fluent in IPA.

There’s no reason they can’t become fluent between now and supper time.

Neither am I, not completely anyway - but I do recognize that it serves an important purpose that the regular alphabet cannot serve, and I would not argue that it should not be used on the Dope.

If this was intentional, then I see what you did there. If not, then never mind. . . IPA = India Pale Ale, becoming fluent by supper time. Nicely played!

Have you actually read the rules?

"Exceptions include requests for help with translation, explanation of foreign language words or expressions, foreign words or phrases that have come into English, etc. "

By “‘a’ sound”, I was referring to the sound at the beginning of “about”. What are you left with when you take away the voicing in that, if not an ‘h’ sound?

That would be a schwa.

A voiceless schwa, like in the first syllable of “potato” to many English speakers. It is represented by “ə̥” in IPA. You can also replicate it by whispering “about.”

awww! now my head has exploded.

You know, Odin Allfather only had to give up one of his eyes to learn the writing system he used. Looking at all this argument over IPA, he might well decide to finish the job and let his ravens split the other eye.

When you take away the voicing of a vowel, you get silence.

But there is such a thing as voiceless vowels See here. Note that the “potato” example is mentioned. And isn’t all whispering unvoiced? So any vowel whispered would be voiceless?