I am brand new to this list and have only just started looking into the
lessons I downloaded from the main web page. I would be greatly interested
in structured translations with other students.

I only ask that consideration be given to those of us who are just starting
out. I don't want to get lost in what others would think to be an already
accepted level of expertise/understanding.

I joined this list because I had purchased E.V. Gordon's "Introduction to
Old Norse" and have not been able to make any real sense out of his grammar
section. I am intelligent, but not an english or language expert. At my
level, I need the "Keep it simple stupid" approach.

Furthermore, pronunciation sources have been difficult for me to locate and
I will not be able to access the audible recordings available over the
internet.

Thanks for your time.

OlafVikingr <http://www.geocities.com/olafvikingr/index.html?985191410306>





-----Original Message-----
From: Arlie Stephens [mailto:arlie@...]
Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2001 9:41 AM
To: norse_course@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [norse_course] Making this List more Useful


What do people want from this list? Can it be more useful than just a place
to ask questions when you find yourself stumped on some translation?

Well, one thing I think we could do is work on things in parallel. That is,
have everyone interested working on the same translation at the same time,
and discussing their results and progress. The advantage here is that you
get feedback on your efforts, without needing to have someone more
experienced
available to act as teacher, and overloaded with the task of correcting
the exercises of many students. And you get to see others' answers, and
think about whether you like their approach better. (Since there are
generally
several options in translating anything.)

The problem, of course, is finding an accessible text to work on. It should
be something reasonably accessible to people with fairly little ON
background;
ideally, simply having finished the already completed lessons. It shouldn't
be too well known, lest we know what to expect already, and "translate"
based
on that expectation. And there should be translations available, so when
we do get stumped (or simply think we've translated a passage successfully),
we can find out how someone with more experience would have translated it.

For me personally, Hreiðar's Þáttr meets these requirements. The ON text is
available from the Viking Society in Anthony Faulkes' "Two Icelandic
Stories",
complete with a vocabulary list. There's a translation available in
Penguin's
"Hrafnkel's Saga and Other Stories" by Hermann Pálsson. The prose is fairly
simple, and it's obscure enough that the average person interested in ON
doesn't have it already half memorized.

On the bad side, I don't see an online source of this particular story. (I'm

not sure what resources people have.) Personally, I like the Viking Society
publications better than online texts, because of the glossaries included;
however that's less important now with Zoega's dictionary available online.


Would other people find it useful to work on translating this in parallel,
all working at a similar pace and posting results? Would it also help to
have
each week's portion of ON posted to the list at the beginning of the week?
(Or would people mostly rather just get the printed version?) Would a
different
text be better, perhaps something already available on line? (If so, what?
My vote would be to avoid poetry, and stick with fairly easy writing; other
than that, I'm pretty flexible.) What sort of pace makes sense?

--
Arlie

(Arlie Stephens arlie@...)


Sumir hafa kvæði...
...aðrir spakmæli.

- Keth

Homepage: http://www.hi.is/~haukurth/norse/

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