That's a lot of misspellings.
Did Lass make as many misspellings for the other Germanic languages?
I noticed that the copyright is 1994,
but can you verify that this is the first edition,
and not just a new printing with the first edition
being, say, 1904, or something like that?


In a message dated 11/21/2003 2:25:11 PM Eastern Standard Time, brahmabull@... writes:

>
>
> Greetings!
>
> I am an amateur, interested in Old Norse as part of early Germanic. I
> have been reading Roger Lass's <Old English: A historical linguistic
> companion> (Cambridge: 1994) and find it helpful in getting control of
> some basics.
>
> There are some misprints or mistakes in the book, and one whole class
> of them involves Old Icelandic. Can anybody tell me what these forms
> represent? Oldest attestations, or maybe a mnemonic scheme for learning
> the paradigms? I have Gordon's book, which I take as my authority.
>
> 1. Lass has /e/ for /i/ wherever this appears in the dative singular
> masc and neut. Even /deg-e/, where he explains the stem change is due
> to i-umlaut. For i-stem gestr Lass gives nom. pl. gest-er and acc. pl.
> gest-e.
>
> 2. The u-stem example is even stranger:
> sg.
> N sun-r for son-r
> G son-ar
> D syn-e for syn-i
> A sun for son
> pl.
> N syn-er for syn-ir
> G son-a
> D sun-um
> A sun-o for sun-u
>
> BUT a dative -i for foet-i (with oe=ligature)
>
> 3. Here is the present conjugation of bera
> sg
> 1 bær-a
> 2 bær-er
> 3 bær-e
> pl
> 1 bær-em
> 2 bær-eÞ
> 3 bær-e
>
> I understand from Gordon that ö (hook o) to á and then i-ulaut to æ.
> So why /e/ for /i/ in all the endings?
>
> 4. Last thing: for '9' and '10' Lass gives OIc nió and tió, instead of
> the expected níu and tíu; '11' is ellefo for ellifu.
>
> This is not an exhaustive list! I am going to write all these up for
> the author, but before I can do that I would like to have some idea his
> reasoning.
>
> Thanks,
> Gazariah
>
>
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