Comments | sineala: Your Old English word of the day: ecghete

sineala

Your Old English word of the day: ecghete

Jan 17, 2009 18:16

lysimache is the best person ever and bought me The Cambridge Old English Reader, which is a big ol' book that has forty texts/excerpts of texts of varying difficulty levels, with the tricky words glossed in the margins. I [heart] marginal glosses. I am particularly charmed by all the texts discussing Latin, because I am a dork. I know, I'm still working my ( Read more... )

books, acquisitions, languages: old english

Comments 10

booksareadrug January 18 2009, 14:52:55 UTC

lysimache is the best person ever. That sounds like an amazing gift.

sineala January 18 2009, 15:21:24 UTC

I am quite enjoying it. Of course, she got herself a Gothic textbook and is now bugging me to learn an even more dead Germanic language.

(How can one language be more dead than another, you ask? Gothic is in its *own* branch of Germanic, with no other languages that survived. It has no descendants, so it is completely dead. It has exactly one extant text, the Bible. And not even all of the Bible, because not all of it survived. It's only attested until the 9th century. It's pretty dead.)

Of course, I think it looks like wacky unreadable German. I don't even know German. OE only sometimes looks like wacky German.

booksareadrug January 23 2009, 14:10:23 UTC

ah, the joys of dead languages.

sineala January 23 2009, 15:20:22 UTC

They are indeed joyful.

niki_chidon January 18 2009, 20:10:26 UTC

I hate OE cases from the bottom of my heart. I only survived my translation class thanks to a nifty table our teacher provided. He never *explained* it so it was still guesswork, but at least I was basing my guesses on something.

Our final exam was an excerpt from Beowulf. So surprised...

Hope you have fun with your reader, I'm so jealous!

sineala January 18 2009, 20:19:37 UTC

I already have th magic sheet. Or rather, I had the magic sheet but lysimache stole it and took it to work with her and now I don't have it anymore. Sad.

I'm just having a hard time making myself remember the endings because basically I can figure out what it must mean by knowing the words, you know?

niki_chidon January 19 2009, 01:03:46 UTC

Oh, I know... Trust me, I know;)

(Besides, who needs pesky things like tenses anyway?)

sineala January 19 2009, 03:08:34 UTC

I'm okay with tenses. It's cases that have always been my downfall. (You don't even want to know how many Russian case endings I've forgotten. I should read some Russian. Blarg.)

Thread 6