Interjections below-

-----Original Message-----
From: Gary Penzler
To: norse_course@yahoogroups.com
Sent: 10/17/2003 6:47 AM
Subject: [norse_course] Greetings and questions

Hello, all. I'm brand new here, having discovered the course only just
yesterday.

I'm glad to see this group here, because from the first two lessons,
I've
got a couple of questions. Perhaps some of you can help me out.

Question one:
In the solutions to the exercises for lesson one, "Óláfr is also a king"
is translated as, "Óláfr heitir ok konungr." To me, this says rather that
"Olaf is the name of another king." My translation of that line was, "Óláfr ek ok konungr." Can someone tell me if I'm wrong, and why?
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Heiter = 'is called' and it takes a compliment:
'Olaf is called also a king'
which looks a bit like idiom for the more common English expression:
'Olaf is also a king'.
This is not so confusing when you think about how we seek to know
some ones name: "What is your name?" while a Spanish speaker says:
"What call you yourself?". The point is that there are many ways
to both extract and provide information. Many times, these techniques
become codified such that the expression is greater than the sum of
its parts. This we call idiom. It is one of the second order difficulties
of learning an unfamiliar language.

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Question two:
When lesson two introduces some slightly irregular nouns, I see that the
nominative and accusative cases of some nouns are identical. This makes
me wonder, given "Jarlinn vegr hrafn," how does one know whether the earl
is killing the raven, or the raven is killing the earl? Normally, the
declension would tell you, as with "Konungr vegr úlf" versus "Konung
vegr úlfr."
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My understanding is too meager to give you an answer beyond what
you've already thought of. Yet, we are clearly looking at one of the
mechanisms of strict word order. Convention will save the day when
conventional grammar fails. Otherwise, somewhere down the line, someone
asks - "what ever happened to that earl?" wherein the response is -
"I told you he was killed by the raven!".

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Question three:
Take this sentence: "Konungrinn á brand, en hann hefir hann eigi." Is
this correct? Should it be "en hann hefir þat" instead? If the first
version is correct, how does one know whether "hann hefir hann" means
"he carries it" or "it carries him?"
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The sword is a he just as is his majesty. It would be complete nonsense
to refer to the sword as an it. A cloud is an it, as is fire but not
the sword. All the nouns you will learn on the norse course must be
referred to as he. As for the confusion, one could imagine the
statement:
'He carried his sword to victory'
-or-
'His sword carried him to victory'.
We know by means of the word order and by separate forms of the
personal pronoun for nominative and accusative cases what is being said.
But what if word order was not fixed and there was no difference between
the nominative and accusative forms of the pronoun? This is the condition
of Old Norse - and I cannot tell you how one would distinguish the two
statements above. There are several people on this list who could give
you a definitive answer - I'm sorry that I am not one of them.

Raymond


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Thanks so much for your time; I hope you can help me.

I'm having so much fun.

~Gary Penzler
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tor_thing
~Þórr kallar mik~

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