![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
karmicdragonflyAlways the language nerd, I've been interested in learning Old English for a while.
At one point, I bought a copy of Beowulf with Old English on 1 side and Modern English on the facing page. But it was exhausting looking up every grammar item and every word meaning.
So I signed up for a once a week class! This class is moving faster than I have ever known a language class to go, but it's been fun -- reading and answering questions in Old English in class, and it's fun for me to see the origins of most of the short, everyday words we use in English! The grammar is pretty similar to most Proto Indo-European languages -- nouns declined, verbs conjugated, and the like. But the point of the class is not to drill on grammar, but to read and speak and understand.
And it hasn't been too hard to adapt to reading with the unusual letters - þ and æ -- haven't seen any ð yet, so maybe they are just using þ. They both represent the "th" sound, 1 voiced and the other not. But as i understand it, there wasn't a consistent use of both of the letters in OE.
Reading g as y in some instances is not hard because the text uses diacritics to give us the info of when the sound is y. And reading the c as hard c or 'ch'/'sh' is also indicated by diacritics.
The first couple semesters are from a text written by one of the instructors, leading up to a semester where Beowulf is the text.
I always found it unusual that Portuguese (and Spanish as I understand) have 2 verbs for 'to be' -- one more permanent, and one more transient.
It sort of surprised me that Old English had 2 verbs also. But beon seems to be more for universal or perhaps pithy ("gnomic") truths, and wesan is used for everything else. So it's not exactly the equivalent to the 2 verbs in Portuguese.
English now or then has no dedicated, specific future tense and uses helping verbs to indicate future tense, e.g. "I will go".
It seems beon can be used to indicate future tense in Old English.
Iċ eom sē cyning = "I am the king" from wesan
Iċ bēo sē cyning = "I will be the king" ("I be the king" in the future) from beon
At one point, I bought a copy of Beowulf with Old English on 1 side and Modern English on the facing page. But it was exhausting looking up every grammar item and every word meaning.
So I signed up for a once a week class! This class is moving faster than I have ever known a language class to go, but it's been fun -- reading and answering questions in Old English in class, and it's fun for me to see the origins of most of the short, everyday words we use in English! The grammar is pretty similar to most Proto Indo-European languages -- nouns declined, verbs conjugated, and the like. But the point of the class is not to drill on grammar, but to read and speak and understand.
And it hasn't been too hard to adapt to reading with the unusual letters - þ and æ -- haven't seen any ð yet, so maybe they are just using þ. They both represent the "th" sound, 1 voiced and the other not. But as i understand it, there wasn't a consistent use of both of the letters in OE.
Reading g as y in some instances is not hard because the text uses diacritics to give us the info of when the sound is y. And reading the c as hard c or 'ch'/'sh' is also indicated by diacritics.
The first couple semesters are from a text written by one of the instructors, leading up to a semester where Beowulf is the text.
I always found it unusual that Portuguese (and Spanish as I understand) have 2 verbs for 'to be' -- one more permanent, and one more transient.
It sort of surprised me that Old English had 2 verbs also. But beon seems to be more for universal or perhaps pithy ("gnomic") truths, and wesan is used for everything else. So it's not exactly the equivalent to the 2 verbs in Portuguese.
English now or then has no dedicated, specific future tense and uses helping verbs to indicate future tense, e.g. "I will go".
It seems beon can be used to indicate future tense in Old English.
Iċ eom sē cyning = "I am the king" from wesan
Iċ bēo sē cyning = "I will be the king" ("I be the king" in the future) from beon