Until now, we have only taught you declensions and words of the
masculine gender, strong declension. In the next couple of lessons,
we will still only be using that declension. That means still more
texts with no women.
I'm writing to explain the reasons behind this. It's not at all that
we don't want to feature women in our texts; after all, women are a
prominent feature in many ON literature. Our reasons are purely
practical:
* The masculine strong declension has the maximal differentiation
between cases, i.e. it is the only declension which has different
forms for each case. The feminine declensions, for instance, only
have two different forms in the singular.
* We want to introduce all basic usage of the cases before we start
supplying the endings of the other declensions. We fear the students
who are learning by heart endings which they don't know how to use.
* The next 3-4 lessons will thus concentrate on case usage; the
masculine strong declension is huge, so there's plenty of new
vocabulary for us to work with in the meantime. The new cases will
really add spice (positive spice) to the texts, so I don't think the
texts will start to be boring (if they aren't already boring).
I just wanted to make sure no-one would start to feel offended that
there are no women in our texts so far. There will be plenty of them
when the time comes, just trust our way to get there :)