On Sunday 05 August 2001 11:22, you wrote:

> I am a beginner, and what I need is a computer file or
> cassette that tells me audibly how to pronounce this
> stuff. I find the written pronunciation guides in the
> books to be inadequate. I use AN INTRODUCTION TO OLD
> NORSE by E. V. Gordon. Any suggestions?
>
> StaveRunner
>

I have Gordon's book as well. I spent a great deal of time trying to write a
java program that would enable me to enter the 'base' words (the ones that
aren't inflected, plural, etc.,) and use them as database keys. My hope was
to have a category for each word. Based on that category I wanted to define
all the possible variants of the word. What I came to realize was that I
don't know nearly as much as I thought I did about grammar.

One thing I would like to see is something similar to:

http://teaching.arts.usyd.edu.au/english/2000/icel/idunn/index.html

But with more information, such as the kind I failed to determine with this
effort:

http://www.geocities.com/valfather_1066/norse/havamal-001.html

I don't know how much time I will have to spend on such a project, but I
believe it would be instructive to work on, and helpful to others if made
available. It could become something of an open source project. For myself,
working on text I am already familiar with in translation is still of value
as long as I carefully evaluate the original. I found my translation came
out much different than the ones I had been reading. I also found I couldn't
figure out all the words.

What I find very interesting about ON is that it is so close to English and
German (which I know a little of) that almost every ON word seems to have a
cognate in one of the two languages. I find it helpful to study these
similarities because it gives me a feel for the words. It even helps me
understand English better.

WRT the database: what I was trying to do for each 'base' word (I don't know
if there's a better term) was to develop a graph of all the different
categories and sub-categories. It actually form a tree which goes kind of
like this:

1) Put it in a Part of Speech category:
Noun
Verb
Adjective
Adverb
Pronoun
Preposition
Conjunction
Article
2) find a sub-category:
Noun
Strong
(sub-sub-category)stem type...
Weak
...

and so on. I simply took the categories from Grodon. The category map forms
a tree which is followed to locate the proper sub-category, and
sub-sub-category, etc., for the given 'base'. After the proper location for
the base is determined the 'mutations' (declensions, pluralizations, etc. are
mapped out.) What I found is that I really don't know enough to complete
this task.

I don't know if I'm making any sense in all of this. I also don't know if
the task has a return value equal to the time investment. Of course the web
page I'm suggesting would not require the database, or even the graph that
underlies it. I do believe a visual depiction of such a graph would be
useful.

I also started to work on a glossary of grammatical terms:

http://www.geocities.com/valfather_1066/norse/terms.html

I really haven't gotten to deep into the norse_course site to see all the
resources it make available. Shame on me for not staying focused!

One last thing I should mention is that I took all of the _Concise Dictionary
of Old Icelandic_
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/germanic/zoega.html

And printed it out. I did it with linux scripting that enabled me to print
four pages per sheet and fold ten sheets together to form the sections of a
book. I have been doing similar things for a while. Unfortunately the fact
the dictionary is all in tiff files made the task very difficult. In this
case the effort was well worth the result. The hard copy is much more usable
than the online version.

I hope at least one sentence in all of this will prove usefull to someone.

Steven