| There are so many amazing ways! ;) Since it’s an old Norse word, try using Google Translate to hear what happens in Danish, Dutch, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish. I don’t know if it’s a modern word in those languages, but Translate is showing translations “election gate” for several languages, and “fall gravel” for Swedish. According to the audio pronunciations on Translate… Danish: “vale grint”, long a, hard tapped r, hard d sounds like t Dutch: sounds like “fall hint” but there’s a slight throaty r in there hard to hear for English speakers, so maybe “hrint” German: “val grinned”, val like value, grinned with the normal German r Icelandic: “vall grint”, vall like fall, hard tapped r Norwegian: “vall grin”, hard tapped r, almost “vall g’din”, silent or nearly silent d/t at the end. Swedish: “voll grint / g’dint”, hard tapped r, hard d German is the only one that has “Val” like “value”, all the rest sound more like “fall”. The word valgrind is the door to Valhalla, which means literally “fall hall”, as in hall of the fallen. For that reason, I suspect it makes the most sense to pronounce valgrind like “fall grinned”, but Old Norse might have used val like value, I’m not sure. BTW Valhalla has an equally amusing number of ways to pronounce it across Germanic languages, “val” sometimes turns into what sound like “fell” instead of “fall”, and in Icelandic the double ell makes it fall-hat-la. Languages are cool! |