On Sat, Dec 28, 2002 at 10:40:51PM -0000, fjornir <haukurth@...> wrote:
>
> Heil Arlie!
>
> > I'm sorry I'm so late with this. I was away the weekend
> > it came out, and after that it was Christmas week, which
> > tends to be chaotic.
>
> You hardly have to apologize to me - I haven't done a thing
> here for a long time. It's strange that a period of time that,
> when you look at the calendar, seems full of vacation can end
> up so exceptionally busy.
Perhaps we budget time better, when we know we don't have much
of it. Or perhaps it's just that this season is always exhausting.
(How little light do you get at this time of year? Fortunately I'm
far enough south not to have that problem at least.)
> > > Nú litlu síðar kømr Sigurðr í búðina til bróður síns ok mælti:
> > >"Tak þú nú silfrit, nú er samit kaupit."
> >
> > Now a little later Sigurð comes into the booth to his brother
> > and said: "Take you now the silver, now (it) is the same bargain".
>
> The participle 'samit' is from the verb 'semja'.
> We've translated "Nú er samit kaupit" as
> "Now the bargain is struck".
Hmmm... this is familiar. I think I'm doing badly about memorizing
alternate forms of verbs, even when I've seen them before. I got "same"
as the one thing I found in the dictionary that looked remotely like
"samit"; it didn't even occur to me to look for a verb.
> > > "Nei", segir Sigurðr; "ek hefi ekki á því tekit."
> >
> > "No", says Sigurð, "I have not taken it from that".
> > (I am so lost with these little adverbial phrases like "á því"...)
> > [After reading Konrad's vocab list:
> > "No", says Sigurð, "I have not touched it".
>
> A combination of verb and preposition is (in my book)
> called 'a phrasal verb'. Both English and Icelandic are
> crawling with them. The meaning is usually unpredictable.
> When I was learning English at school I remember this as
> one of the most difficult things.
Yikes! i didn't even realize this was a "come to" type of thing ...
well, not until I read Konrad's list.
> It's so unfair :-) Say I've learnt the meaning of the
> English verb COME. I think I'm doing alright - but then
> a mean little phrasal verb like COME TO turns up. There
> is no way on Earth that I can figure out from the meaning
> of COME and that of TO that COME TO means 'regain consciousness'.
>
> It's the same with Icelandic. You think you know what
> KOMA means - you even know how to conjugate the verb.
> You also think you know, more or less, what the preposition
> FYRIR means. But that's just not enough to figure out
> that KOMA FYRIR means 'destroy'.
New type of thing for vocabulary lists, even in the lessons?
I think I'll add "koma fyrir" to my list of things to memorize.
(I'm way behind on actually memorizing vocabulary introduced
in reading this saga; I'm pretty sure this is part of my current
problem.)
--
Arlie
(Arlie Stephens arlie@...)