[Ansteorra] Pronunciation was Re: "Ansteorran: of or pertaining to the Kingdom of Ansteorra"

[Richard Culver]

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From: HerrDetlef <herrdetlef at gmail.com>


[Wihtric]  That is not the case in this regard.  The "An-" element in this name is NOT being used as an indefinite article as in your example.  Instead it is follow the construction from the Wanderer of "anstapa", lone=stepper/wanderer- lone being the critical modern idiom to get the context of the poem as it was a society in which being alone was, if not physically at least emotionally and spiritual, a death sentence.

It would be much easier to remember if we pronounced the name in line with
rules for OE pronunciation; namely, stressing the "E" and not the "O". "eo"
is an Old English dipthong, and it should be pronounced like the "eo" in
"Beowulf" and not like the "eo" in "geometry".


[Wihtric]  There is contention, which I share, on that.  There are a few different camps on how breaking affected the vowels in early Old English lexicon. Jeremy Smith in _Sound Change and the History of English_ mention as such in the footnote on pg. 94 [http://tinyurl.com/ygpeqbm
]. Part of the problem is complicated that orthography was not always consistant, even within the manuscript at the time, f. ex. -eo- is often interchangeable with -io-.  This is further harder to study these days as most texts for study and teaching are reduced to "Standardized West Saxon."  I personally hold that there is some distinction, however nuanced, in the diphthong and that the e acts as a glide into the o which might become more of a schwa sound.  The glide element would be similar to ModE effect in certain words with "u" such as music or cute (and depending on dialect, stupid or cupid) where the glide is heard, though not written proceeding the vowel, [myoozic] and [kyoot]- though for -steorra it would not be as heavy.  

Of course another issue with it is the stress of the name.  Most people tend to stress it as so: an-STAY-or-a.  However as it is a compound word the "an-" and "-steor-" get the same stress, much the same way we say "answer"- AN-STYOR-ra.

With all due respect,

Wihtric
For what it's worth, "an steorra" is Old English simply for "a star", or
"one star".