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Old English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5406 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 9 of 14 17 August 2015 at 8:47am | IP Logged |
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Oh, I just remembered the online lessons of the University of Texas, Old English and plenty of other ancient/classical languages.
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| dmaddock1 Senior Member United States Joined 5431 days ago 174 posts - 426 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Esperanto, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 10 of 14 24 August 2015 at 9:10pm | IP Logged |
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I am just starting an online course on Old English that uses this grammar book (Drout's Quick and Easy Old English) and this reader.
One thing I've noticed is that there aren't many courses with audio, although Teach Yourself Old English has some. Check out Anglo-Saxon Aloud which has mp3 recordings of the entire Old English poetic corpus. The reader is one of the professors in my course--which begins this week and registration is still open if you want to join in. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6701 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 14 28 August 2015 at 12:33am | IP Logged |
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If I ever learn to understand spoken Anglosaxon I can thank dmaddock1's reference to the readings of professor Drout for it - nice clear voice without any histrionics and good downloadable recordings. I have made considerable progress in reading Old English thanks to my studies in the old TY (which I only have as a book), but the ability to understand a spoken language doesn't come solely from reading - you have to hear the language and have it ringing in your ears. Edited by Iversen on 28 August 2015 at 12:34am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| berabero89 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4640 days ago 101 posts - 137 votes Speaks: English, Amharic* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, French | Message 12 of 14 24 September 2015 at 8:53am | IP Logged |
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You've all been a great help, thank you!
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| jeff_fontaine Newbie Canada learnlanguageso Joined 3300 days ago 10 posts - 13 votes Studies: Portuguese | Message 13 of 14 17 November 2015 at 10:37pm | IP Logged |
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I myself have been obsessed over ancient Germanic languages when I studied linguistics. I was planning to get write a thesis on Old English for my master's degree, but upon inspection of the resources available to learn Old English, it became evident to me that all the texts written in Old English that have survived to this day, are not all written in the "same" Old English. There is a lot of varieties to this language and each variety is a unit with its own set of rules.
Also, the only thing that survived is the writing, and the best we can come up with is an estimation as to what the language sounded like. And since a language is primarily spoken (since a lot of elements are not well represented in the written language) well it makes for a quite incomplete and inaccurate form of language, unfortunately. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6701 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 14 24 November 2015 at 10:18am | IP Logged |
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Most old languages are found in regional variants. You could even say that standardized ortographies are the exception, and when you see something like it in for instance Old Norse then it's the work of the modern editors of the old works. I have spent some time on diffuse entities like (real) Scots and Platt which set are right on the border between languages and dialect(bundle)s, and there it is also a basic condition that there are several variants, and you just have to accept that. I have not tried to activate my rudimentary Anglosaxon, but I have written Platt and once I even did a video recording.
Actually my most comprehensive Low German dictionary uses an ortography which is quite different from the one in my small Sass dictionary. But Wikipedia and the writers from Schleswig-Holstein who are my main sources for written content generally stick to the Sass ortography so that is the version I want to emulate. This means that I have to guess or check in other ways how a word from the big thing should be written as Sass would have wanted it. And I have learnt to live with it, just as I have learnt to live with Latin texts that write v for u ("I Clavdius"). As for the lack of recordings from the Anglosaxon time. Well, again this is a condition which you just have to accept. There are specialists who have studied all extant hints to the old pronunciation and made recordings, and I would just try to listen to them to build my own conception of the sound of Anglosaxon. I'm never going to be confronted with a truly native speaker so it doesn't matter whether my conception is 100% correct; what does matter is that my version 'sounds like a real language', and that it basically is in agreement with the recordings of people who know the language better than I do. I'm more worried about the scarcity of competent recordings than I am about the possible divergences between for instance the readings of professor Drout and those produced by a monk in Wessex around the year 1000. Edited by Iversen on 24 November 2015 at 10:22am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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