Bless, Anþanareiks,
You certainly are enthusiastic! May I suggest that if you want
somebody to evaluate and correct your Icelandic sentences, you post them on the
Yahoo group LearningIcelandic? From what I have seen, there are more
Icelanders there than here. You can simply tell them that you are using
the spelling and forms of Old Icelandic. I'm sure that they will be
willing to help you.
I have been studying both Old Icelandic and modern Icelandic at the same
time. They are really so close that one could easily say that Old
Icelandic is a "dialect" of modern literary Icelandic (note that I say
"literary," not spoken or colloquial). In fact, I'm learning that the Old
Icelandic prose sagas make for relatively easy reading, mainly because of the
limited vocabulary -- limited, that is, in comparison with the vocabulary of
modern Icelandic. The main difficulty, I've found, arises from the
vast cultural differences between Viking society and the modern way of
life. Scholars will sometimes disagree about the meaning of a
particular Old Icelandic word or phrase, and there is no living Viking to
explain.
The main formal differences between Old Icelandic and modern Icelandic
are presented on p. xii of Stefán Einarsson's book _Icelandic_, in case you
didn't know that already. The book is published by the Johns Hopkins
University Press (
www.press.jhu.edu).
The most helpful beginners text I have found to learn modern Icelandic is
_Learning Icelandic_ by Auður Einarsdóttir et al., published by Mál og Menning,
2001. The second most helpful is _Icelandic for Beginners_, second edition
(1992), by Bartoszek and Tran, published by Fjölment / Bréfaskólinn.
I ordered both of these from the University of Iceland bookstore, which has a
web site (
www.bóksala.is). The third
most helpful has been Einarsson's _Icelandic_, since it has an
extensive glossary and a fairly full reference grammar, although
its pedagogical presentation leaves much to be desired.
For Old Icelandic, I favor _Old Icelandic: An Introductory Course_ by
Valfells and Cathey, published by Oxford University Press in 1981.
Although Valfells introduces in each chapter far too
many new vocabulary words and too few short reading
selections, his presentation of the morphology and syntax is extremely helpful
(to me, anyway -- but then I've had training in linguistics).
My interest is in developing only the reading skills. Leaving
out the other skills (speaking, aural comprehension, writing, and
translation) saves me a lot of time. I find that I proceed much
faster toward my goal, that of being able to read both Old and modern
Icelandic fiction with relative ease, i.e., little dictionary
thumbing.
Anyway, have fun!
Gordon Ross
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2001 7:10 PM
Subject: [norse_course] Vel á talaðr
æfingar
Vel á talaðr æfingar
More on talking
exercises.
Heill ves þú öll!
Anybody is welcome to jump on in,
just *try* to construct an ON
sentence as best you can and then hopefully
a native speaker or
somebody can point out some improvements. Hopefully a
few flow of
ideas will result as in a conversation. The SOV (subject,
object,
verb), or VOS, ect... I am going to have problems with as well as
grammar, but hopefully somebody can point out my mistakes.
I would like
it if somebody posted an ON sentence untranslated, then
somebody can
translate it and respond with an untranslated ON
sentence,
etc....
Besta,
Anþanarik
Sumir
hafa kvæði...
...aðrir spakmæli.
- Keth
Homepage: http://www.hi.is/~haukurth/norse/
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