On Thu, Jan 25, 2001 at 11:28:19PM +0000, Eysteinn Bjornsson wrote:

> Yes, Haukur, of course we have, because we don't
> agree on one basic premise. You want the student
> to learn Old Norse from scratch, and then go on
> to Modern Icelandic. I think the student is better
> off learning Modern Icelandic first, and then
> discovering that he has actually learned Old Norse
> without realizing so.
>
> It is a matter of taste, really. I believe in FAST
> methods in language learning. You are more THOROUGH.

Well, I'm not sure which is more thorough. As an English speaker wanting
to learn Old Norse for reasons of (a) reading specific surviving lore
and (b) eventually branching out into related languages, it seemed to me
that learning modern Icelandic would be a whole pile of extra work.
I also prefered learning a reconstructed older pronunciation, mostly for
reasons of poetry appreciation ... the closer I can get to what it would
have sounded like, the better, even knowing I can't get all the way.

So I'm having the opposite surprise ... discovering that in attempting
to learn Old Norse, I'm picking up an awful lot of Modern Icelandic.
Not enough to be really useful (yet), since I'm very much a beginner.
But enough to see that I'm going to end up learning both ... which will,
I hope, have the delightful side effect of giving me access to a whole
bunch of modern scholarship that isn't being translated into English.

The biggest difficulty (whichever method you choose) is keeping track of
changes to the language. It seems like a lot of words have changed primary
meaning, or gotten new emphases. (It's the same way with Elizabethan and
modern English, of course; languages are never static.) So now when I learn
a word, I try to also learn what context I found it in ... old or modern, etc.

--
Arlie

(Arlie Stephens arlie@...)