Phonotactics

To begin with, Þrjótrunn is written using the following letters, given in the order they appear in a (modern) lexicon.

a á b d ð e é f g h i í j k l m n o ó p r s t u ú v x y ý þ æ ö

The letters c q w only appear in recent loans and z only appears in old texts.

Þrjótrunn has the following monophthong phonemes, of which both the grapheme and the phoneme are given in the following table.

Note that i and y are only distinguished for historical reasons, they represent the same phoneme. The same holds for í and ý.

The following phonemic diphthongs exist.

All of the above vowels and diphthongs may be long and short. The above phonemic representation shows the phonetic realisation of the short phonemes. Compared to the short phonemes, the long phonemes change their quality only slightly, if at all. Typical is a slight diphthongisation of /eː/ as [eːə̯], /oː/ as [oːə̯], and /øː/ as [øːə̯].

Vowel length is determined by stress and phonotactic rules.

Before some consonants, vowel pronunciation changes significantly.

In a few dialects, [ɪː] and [eː] have collapsed into [eː].

Þrjótrunn has the following consonants. The following table lists them with one (not necessarily the only) way of writing the phoneme. Although Þrjótrunn pronunciation can quite regularly be derived from the spelling (if the morpheme breakdown is known), there is no easy grapheme-to-phone correspondance, so the following sections will clarify the orthography and pronunciation.

This section does not try to reason about phonemic and phonetic status of the sounds, but its purpose is to gives an overview of how to pronounce a written word.

Those consonants listed without graphemes are explained below.

Stress and length is determined on units of uncompounded words. Some affixes, however, are also an independent unit and are handled like parts of compounds. In the following, we will call these units stress units.

At an earlier stage, pronunciation was different (but we are not going into the detail here). Due to the similarity of grammar, written old texts are usually easily understood, and when read aloud, modern pronunciation is usually applied because of so much similarity.

Some additional graphemes were used in older texts. The following table lists the most common ones together with the modern letters they collapsed with. (Note that ö is a modern letter only – it was not used in old texts.)

Apart from these additional characters, the vowels that are written with an acute accent in the modern language, which were simply long vowels in the old language, are written with macrons instead: ā, ē, ī, ō, ū, ȳ.