Góð Júl Oskar!
I was slightly worried that you wouldn't judge my contribution
sufficiently serious. A principle that I think is important
is that "if you don't have the guts to use a language, you'll
never learn it". I am therefore very grateful that you take
the time to correct my errors. Then it becomes more like
_being_ in a different country, where necessity forces one to _use_
the other language - and where corrections by friendly citizens
are the SINE QUA NON of progress :)

>Heill kisi,

Now you teach me another word! (actually, it was once a hunting dog)

>> 1. Maðr kastir stein (a man throws a stone)
>
>"Maðr kastar steini"

Hmm... I started out writing "kastar" because intuitively
that seems more right to me. But lacking a dictionary of verbs, I
only found examples of "hann frumsir" or "hann smurfir" or whatever . . .
("smurf-", "frums-" = unknown X = "the blob", "please fill in").
ek frumsa, þú frumsar, hann frumsar, etc.. = "the oh so typical verb"
:) (Haukur will understand what I mean)

btw in modern Norwegian we have the two forms:
jeg kaster, eg kastar
The first one extrapolated backward in time would then yield kastir,
while the second one (nynorsk) would yield the unchanged form.
In the present case it would have been wise to follow the nynorsk hunch.
(oh well, better luck next time around)

>Your theory was amusing :) In the case of this sentence, "kasta"
>happens to take dative, so your following paragraph kind of gets
>blown into the wind...

Right.. well, making such a silly error kind of does
destroy my example (but not the idea behind it),
and also is an example of what I initially said in this post:
it takes courage to expose ones ignorance. :-/
But making a (limited amount of) error is also a good aid
to memory: for I shall now not easily forget that "kasta" is a
verb that takes the dativ! So perhaps we should attribute
the dativ case to the element of "air" then? (i.e. you throw
something "through the air" ) shrug.. I guess all tricks are
legitimate when it comes to storing new info in the big chip..

But I guess it is time that I started working on some verbs
and I think I mentioned before that my method of learning languages
has never been to memorize more than the absolute minimum.
Instead I have always relied on "the natural method", which
means "the maximum amount of interaction" with people who
know the language, and then try to develop a "feel" for what is right.
Nevertheless, I must confess that OLd Norse verbs simply ARE
difficult, and I decided that it is ABSOLUTELY necessary to learn
the correct and complete declination of at least ONE Old Norse
verb by rote: the only question is which verb to choose among the many.
But once ONE verb is done, the others would presumably crystallize
themselves around the one already known.

As it is, I have already consulted several grammar books concerning
ON verbs, without of course being too fanatic about memorizing
stuff (because I'd rather understand or "feel" -- rather than press
the stuff into memory by means of brute force).

What is striking, when looking at the different available grammar
books, is how differently the verbs are treated there: Some are way too
brief, others again are too detailed. And while some are very abstract
others are again way too concrete or explicit! Among the latter type of
books, I hope you will allow me to mention C. Jörg's book, which is
the most explicit verb-book I have seen -- and actually the term
verb-tables would be a more appropriate description. Jörg's book then
has one marvellous advantage: whenever you are stuck with an ON or
Icelandic verb, you'll almost always find the answer there.

A minor disadvantage is the fact that it only deals with Icelandic
verbs. But that is what I call a minor disadvantage, because verbs
are so similar in Old Norse, that it is usually quite easy to find
the ON form, once you know the Icelandic one. A more important dis-
advantage of Jörg's book is the fact that it is too explicit and
thus prevents you from becoming independent of books -- which may be
safely said to be the ultimate goal of all language study. Other books,
that attempt to classify verbs into categories, are much more useful
in this regard, even if they thus present a much steeeper learning
curve, where a much longer and tougher study will be needed before
you can begin to say that you know something about ON verbs.

At this point, let me mention the main classification of ON
verbs, a scheme that all authors agree upon: it is the division
of the verbs into the two classes: weak verbs and strong verbs.
In addition there are also irregular verbs, but of these there
are apparently not too many. Thus we have the following fundamental
and general scheme:

Old Norse verbs = weak verbs + strong verbs

(+ some irregular verbs)


(maybe Oskar will here say that some of the irregular verbs can
be seen as either weak or strong)

Anyway, let us concentrate on the weak verbs for the time being,
since these seem to be the easiest ones to learn. Example from English:

to call , I call , I called , I was called , I have been calling.

This is an important example of a weak verb in English.
It is weak because the past tense (called) is formed by simply adding the
ending "-ed" to the verb's main stem, which in this case is "call-".
The important weak ending "-ed" has the technical term "dental suffix"
because it is formed by placing the tip of the toungue against the back
side of the upper front teeth. (a "dentist" is someone who deals
with "teeth")

A good way of approaching verbs might be to proceed in small and
easy steps; that is to progress from the easy to the slightly more
difficult, and then from there to that wich is just a little bit more
difficult and so on: thus progress goes from the familiar to the
unfamiliar by means of small and easy steps. In the present case
such an easy path (=a smooth learning curve) might be realized
by going from English via modern Danish or Norwegian, because the
verb forms are quite sililar to the English verb forms there, and
yet represent an important step in the direction of Old Norse.
Thus in modern Norwegian (=almost the same as modern Danish),
the English verb "to call" is rendered in the following 5 main forms:

Å kalle , jeg kaller, jeg kallte, jeg har kallet, kallende

Then we need to have NAMES for these 5 main parts (there is also the
imperative that I didn't include: "call me!" ;)

These names, where the authoritative grammar books also seem to be
pretty much in mutual agreement, and where I thus do not run much
of a risk of presenting something that is off the main track in any
sense, are called by the following international (Latin) names:

infinitive , present , preteritum , past particile , present
participle.

And as far as I can see, there is no way one can avoid learning these
names -- since without them any discussion would seem futile -- especially
when we are trying to communicate with people who come from a number of
different countries, all with different traditions and terminologies
in basic language teaching, as practiced in the various school systems.

When it comes to Icelandic and Old Norse verbs, I'd say that the most
important declinations to learn are the PRESENT and PAST tenses.
More precice terms for these are "indicative present" and "indicative
preteritum".
Examples from English:

I call I called
you call you called
he calls he called
we call we called
you call you called
they call they called

As everybody will no doubt agree, the English verb forms are VERY easy!
Almost no morphology at all! The only morphology you can actually see
is the 3rd person singular "-s" ending (=he calls), and of course
the "-ed" dental suffix that differentiates the past tense from
the present tense.

Then proceed from here to modern Norwegian:

jeg kaller jeg kallte
du kaller du kallte
han kaller han kallte
vi kaller vi kallte
dere kaller dere kallte
de kaller de kallte

As you see, the morphology is here almost easier than in English:
no differentiation between singular and plural, and no differentiation
between 1st, 2nd and 3rd persons either! Here you also see the past tense
dental suffix realized as "-te" (a "t" is a dental sound, just like "d" is)
The difference from English is that the present tense is marked by
the "-er" suffix, which is typical of Norwegian -- and which
incidentally also forms a link with Old Norse and Icelandic!

I now wanted to proceed to the same example in German, because many
speakers of English already know some German, and it provides an
independent example of the same type of morphology for the weak verbs
as you have in English and Norse. Unfortunately the verb "to call"
seems to be absent from modern German. I therefore thought that if
I could find a continental version of the same verb in one of the
neighboring lands, it might be of as much use as a German example.
Thus, I tried to look for "to call" in Holland or North Germany,
where the morphology shares many features with modern German
(="hochdeutsch"), and yet might also perhaps be somewhat more similar
to English. (Frisians: please excuse me for lacking documentation
from your very interesting Frisian language, which is said to be even more
similar to English than Dutch is)

What I found in the Dutch language, then, was the verb "kallen" which
means to talk, to babble, or to tell stories, and which is obviously
related to "to call". Incidentally, there I also found an etymological
pointer to Old High German "challon", where the infinitive form displays
the very important "-on" ending, to which I'd like to return later.
But for the time being, I'd just like to state that Old Norse "kalla"
is in many books classified as an "-on" verb, where the "-on" verbs
forms an important subdivision of the Old Norse weak verbs. Here is
the Dutch verb "kallen" then:

main forms: kallen , kalde , gekald .

(which is the infinitive, the past tense and the past participle)

Note that the past participle has "ge-" as prefix. This is a feature
that Dutch shares with German, but that is absent from English
and Danish, and was already absent in Old Norse as well. Yes, maybe
we should even deplore the absence of ge- as prefix here, because
it is such a distinctive mark, that it in my opinion makes it quite a
bit easier to master the technicalities of the past participle.
Any way, I now proceed to list the present and past tenses of Dutch "kallen":

ik kal ik kalde
jij kalt jij kalde
hij kalt hij kalde
wij kallen wij kalden
jullie kallen jullie kalden
zij kallen zij kalden

Here you already see that the morphology has some more structure.
For example the 1st person singular present tense is differentiated
from the 2nd and 3rd persons by the lack of a "-t" ending.
Also, the 3 present tense plural forms uniformly differentiate
themselves from the corresponding singular forms by the "-en" ending.
Note also the uniform "-de" dental suffix that uniformly marks the
past tense, and which is quite similar to English and Norwegian,
and which causes Dutch verbs to be quite easy to learn for Englishmen
and Norwegians! Note also that the "-n" ending recurs both in the
present and the past tenses, and serves to identify the plural
without any exceptions. Dutch morphology is nice! In the first place,
it has not thrown all differentiations overboard -- thereby keeping
all the advantages of a differentiated morphology, and yet having
a very systematic morphology, that exactly for this reason becomes
quite easy to understand and learn.

The next step towards increasing the morphological structural details
will then be to move westwards across the ocean and make a stop at
the Faroe islands, where they speak a language somewhat similar to
Icelandic, but where the morphology is perhaps somewhat simpler, as
will be apparent presently:

Faroese "kalla" (=to call):

eg kalli eg kallaði
tu kallar tu kallaði
hann kallar hann kallaði
vit kalla vit kallaðu
tit kalla tit kallaðu
teir kalla teir kallaðu

First of all, we note that the past tense (=preteritum) dental
suffix is realized as -ði and -ðu. And we see exemplified that a
preteritum dental suffix is a common feature of the weak verbs
in Germanic languages. It can be realized either as a -d, as a -t,
or, as in the present case, a -ð. Next we note that the 3 plurals
(=vit, tit, teir) have uniform endings. Also note that the present
tense plural forms are the same as the infinitive, which is also a
feature of Dutch (see the above Dutch example).
An important difference between Faroese and Danish/Norwegian is that
the plurals have been differentiated from the singulars. But such a
differentiation is also present in Dutch, hence it cannot be said to
be a particular feature of Faroese. It is only that Danish and Norwegian
have gone through a morphological simplification that borders on the
extreme. Personally I think differentiation is a useful feature;
especially if its realisation is systematic and logical, as in the above
examples. In modern information theory redundancy of information is
known to be essential. It is the only efficient way to deal with
noise problems and other sources of disturbance.
(for a nice survey of Faroese grammar, see the book by W.B. Lockwood)

Then from the Faroe islands let us move west toward Iceland, to see
how "kalla" is declined there: (here I use C.Jörg's book)

ég kalla ég kallaði
þú kallar þú kallaðir
hann kallar hann kallaði
við köllum við kölluðum
þið kallið þið kölluðuð
þeir kalla þeir kölluðu

We see that it is actually quite similar to Faroese, except for a richer
morphology: the uniformity of the 3 plurals has been broken up with by means
of the characteristic -um, -ið/uð and -a/u labels. They signal the 1st, 2nd
and 3rd plurals. We also note the important presence of the u-umlauts, i.e.
a --> ö influenced by the proximity of the u-vowel. In Icelandic the a
in kalla gets "twisted" into a ö by the neighboring u. We shall find
the same mechanism active also in Old Norse, although here the u-umlaut
was realized by a different sound, whose sign was the famous "hooked-o",
that has already been discussed to some extent. Let me finish then by
giving the declination of "kalla" in Old Norse (source: Ragnvald Iversen):

ek kalla ek kallaða
þú kallar þú kallaðir
hann kallar hann kallaði
vér k@... vér k@...
þér kallið þér k@...
þeir kalla þeir k@...

The differences with Icelandic will be seen to be very minor:
1) The differentiation of 1st singular preteritum from 3rd singular preteritum.
2) The replacement of the o-umlaut by the hooked-o, for which I have here
used the @-symbol. I think this is a good choice since the "hooked-o"
has to be interpreted as a mix of an "a" with a "u". At least in Norway
we call the @-sign "alfa-krøll" (=alpha-with-a-curl or maybe simply
"curly alpha)

Here it is the endings that actually have to be memorized.
They are -a -ar -ar / -um -ið -a for the present tense
and -a -ir -i / -um -uð -u for the past tense (=preteritum).

The philologist Arne Torp has publlished a very brief summary of Old Norse
grammar, where he summarizes everything that the student needs to know
about Old Norse grammar in only 6 pages. I hope to return to this "bref"
of Old Norse grammar some time in the future. It is not a textbook, but
only a summary that is used by the students of Old Norse at the University
of Oslo. It takes some experience before you are able to use Torp's six-page
summary. But once you know the bare bone basics of ON grammar, it shouldn't
be too difficult to use. These six-page ON grammar tables are used by all
students during the examinations. But the "exam-version" differs from the
"excercise-version" in that some places have only been filled out with
question marks. The question mark entries are supposed to be known by heart.
ISBN: 82-7099-240-2 (Arne Torp: Norrøn hjelpebok, Novus forlag, Oslo 1995)

I am mentioning this, because he manages to squeeze everything you need
to know about Old Norse verbs into only two brief pages, whereas someone like
Christine Jörg uses 166 pages for the same thing! No doubt Jörgs book is
"better" in that it is more explicit and complete. But if your goal is to
become more or less independent of books, then no doubt Arne Torp's
approach is the best, since he gives you only the bare bones, and the
experienced student will then know how to quickly grow the meat back on,
quickly and without any external auxiliaries.

Oskar, please do not hesitate to correct errors! (time permitting)
That is, after all, one of the best ways to learn.

>(I don't mean to correct you, I just thought other students should
>have safe reference)


>> (Q: what is the stem of maðr ?)
>
>That's kind of complicated. Practically, the stem is MANN. A certain
>sound shift caused instances of stem final NN + R ending to yield ÐR;
>thus 'maðr', then 'mann' + ending in the rest of the cases.

I agree that the stem ought to be "mann". Especially since I also find
the form "mannR" listed as an alternative nominative singular form.
Etymological information also indicates a descent from a similar form.
(e.g. check what "man" Nom. sing. is in Gothic)

Thinking about this problem, I think the form "maðr" also idicates
how the ON "r" was pronounced. What do you think?

>> Góð júl!
>
>Gleðileg jól! :)
>
>Óskar

Fortsatt god jul!
(Ede dokker fenalår på Island òg?)

Keth