A language learners’ forum

jeff_lindqvist wrote: but it's not the first time a Latin p- disappears (pater->athair).

That's actually because Irish (and Proto-Celtic, too) actually lost /p/. Pádraig is actually the second time the name was borrowed into the language, with the first being something like Coithrighe, where /p/ was borrowed with /k/. I'll see if I can't find the article about it when I get on a computer. Some even use it as evidence (among other things) of two Patricks active in Ireland.

I have been on a family visit, and as usual that means less study time. I did however manage to read the last chapters in my old TY Irish (without doing the exercises) where some of the more interesting constructions are discussed, like for instance the subordinate clauses - i.e. those that in grammars for other languages mostly would be seen as adverbial clauses - and the relative clauses. The discussion about the relative ones is fairly opaque so I'm glad that I have read about them beforehand in other sources. The adverbial ones are described one category after the other using standard Latin terminology which makes it easier to follow this part of the discussion. And that's good since I can't take notes when I'm lying down in a bed. There is also a discussion about irregular nouns, including the first explicit mention of dualis forms. The next step will obviously be to read through some other grammars to get everything once more from other angles.

DU: Daarnaast heb ik Nederlandse en Vlaamse muziek beluisterd en gestudeerd, die blijkbaar buiten Nederland en België totaal onbekend is. Dit geldt voor senromantische componisten als Diepenbroek en Waagenar, voor componisten als Piper, Vermeulen, Andriessen die een generation later kwamen, en voor nog nieuwere componisten zoals Badings en Henkemans. Heeft iemand ooit iets van hen gehoord? Het zou me verbazen. Ik zag in de opmerkingen van een werk op YouTube dat er in het seizoenprogramma van een prominent Nederlands orkest niet één werk van een Nederlandse componist was. Ik weet niet echt of er vergelijkbare gevalle komen voor in Denemarken, omdat ik al lang niet naar concerten ben geweest met de gebruikelijke tien verslonden componisten op het programma - ik zie alleen de droevige staat van de programmaselectie door de anmeldingen. Wat ik wel kan zeggen is dat er meer leden zijn van Deense componisten die vergeten zijn vanwege de beperkte horizont van de programplanners..

I spent some time yesterday evening on Youtube lectures about the world of Tolkien, and I must say that I'm impressed by the knowledge some fans have acquired about even the minutest details of both the books and the films. I have read the Mastron de la Ringoj and the Hobbiton in English and Esperanto, and I have read most of the minor books in English or Danish. Besides I have seen the Ring trilogy (and even the old Bakshi version from the 70s) and at least some parts of the new Hobbit trilogy (which is too gamelike for my taste), but I have to confess with rue and repentance that I don't remember all the innumerable geographical and historical details. One problem is that there are scenes and characters in particularly the recent Hobbit trilogy which definitely didn't originate with Tolkien, like the fairy lady Tauriel. There is for instance a deleted scene where Galadriel saves Gandalf when his staff has been broken by the Witch King - and the fans are wildly upset either because a lowly ghost apparently could defeat Gandalf the Grey or because the scene was made at all or because it was deleted ... opinions differ, but the fans all love (and secretly fear) the mighty fairy queen Galadriel, who was born so far back that her native language was Quenya and not the more recent Sindarin.

Speaking of languages: Quenya has been so fascinating for some of the more hardcore fans that they have gathered all the widely scattered bits and pieces from the books and from Tolkien's personal notes and correspondance and constructed grammars and even a course in the language for those who simply can't get enough - an enterprise that bears comparison with the attempts to reconstruct extinct REAL languages from the scraps. The illustration below is from Ardalambion, which is the venerable old site in this field. But as impressed I may be with the erudition and patience of those amateur scholars, it won't make me try to learn any of the Tolkienesque languages. Right now I'm trying to get a foothold in Irish, and that's weird enough.


IT: Ho letto le prime pagine del libro con poesie italiani dal 1200 al 2000, che ho menzionato in un precedente messaggio. E mi chiedo come possa essere così facile capire i testi. Il libro era stato scritto per la scuola superiore, quindi il mio sospetto era che i testi fossero 'migliorati'. D'altra parte, non sono scritti nell'italiano standard di 2018. Qui sotto un estratto del poema più antico della raccolta, scritto da Francesco di Assisi :

Il Cantico delle Creature

Altissimu, onnipotente, bon Signore,
tue sò le laude, la gloria e l'honore et onne benedictione.
Ad te solo, Altissimo, se confano,
et nullu homo ène dignu te mentovare.

La seguente citazione di un poema di Guido Cavalcanti è anche sorprendentemente facile da capire:

Perch'io no spero di tornar giammai,
ballatetta*, in Toscana,
va tu, leggera e piana,
dritt' a la donna mia.
* diminutivo di "ballata"

Evidentemente ho cercato qualcosa di più esigente, e mi sovenne allora una discussione su HTLAL, per la quale ho studiato alcuni testi di un certo Ruzante nel vecchio dialetto padovano. La citazione qui sotto proviene dalla sua Betia dell'anno 1524:

El naturale in fra de gi umeni e le femene è la pì bela
cossa che sipia, e perzòntena naturalmen e dretamen
ognon de’ andare, ché, con te cavi la cossa del naturale,
la se inrovegia. Mo perché gi osiegi no canta mé sì ben
in le cabie, co’ i fa su i salgari, né le vache fa mé tanta la-
te in le çitè, cum le fa de fuora, a la rosà, a la salbegura?


E no, questo non lo capisco al 100%. Abbiamo tutti i nostri limiti...

Iversen wrote:I spent some time yesterday evening on Youtube lectures about the world of Tolkien, and I must say that I'm impressed by the knowledge some fans have acquired about even the minutest details of both the books and the films. I have read the Mastron de la Ringoj and the Hobbiton in English and Esperanto, and I have read most of the minor books in English or Danish. Besides I have seen the Ring trilogy (and even the old Bakshi version from the 70s) and at least some parts of the new Hobbit trilogy (which is too gamelike for my taste), but I have to confess with rue and repentance that I don't remember all the innumerable geographical and historical details. One problem is that there are scenes and characters in particularly the recent Hobbit trilogy which definitely didn't originate with Tolkien, like the fairy lady Tauriel. There is for instance a deleted scene where Galadriel saves Gandalf when his staff has been broken by the Witch King - and the fans are wildly upset either because a lowly ghost apparently could defeat Gandalf the Grey or because the scene was made at all or because it was deleted ... opinions differ, but the fans all love (and secretly fear) the mighty fairy queen Galadriel, who was born so far back that her native language was Quenya and not the more recent Sindarin.

Peter Jackson did such a wonderful job with the Lord of the Rings movies that his "take" on The Hobbit was so unexpected, and so horrible that I couldn't watch more than the first one, and I almost walked out of that one. Such ego to think that he could improve Tolkien's beloved novel. I honestly don't understand what he was thinking.

It is always a problem to make films from thick and complicated books like those of Tolkien - they contain so many details that some simply have to be left out. For instance Tom Bombadil was excluded from the LOTR trilogy because he only provided a temporary safe haven during the early part of the travel, but this episode didn't really change the course of events in any substantial way. And then it doesn't matter that Tom was born before both elves and wizards and didn't succomb to the power of stupid things like magical rings. Another example: in the film it is Arwen who with a spell rescues Frodo at the scene where some nasty nasguls were chasing him near a river, but in the book it is a male fairy named Glorfindel who saved him. The problem is that Arwen needs something to bolster her identity for later in the tale, and poor Glorfindel simply isn't as photogenic as Arwen - so he had to go. And the same applies to the original ending, where Saruman has taken over the Shire after the destruction of his tower and the industrial complex that surrounded it - but even in the LOTR trilogy Jackson may have felt that the story finished in a more clean and efficient way with the scene in the volcano and the final goodby to Frodo and Bilbo when they take the ferry to Valinor. And he may be right.

The main problem with the Hobbit trilogy is that Jackson post LOTR succumbed to the evil lore of computer games and became corrupted in such a way that he thought that their unrealistic battle scenes would be an improvement to Tolkien's work. I am more troubled by the feeling that the Hobbit tale has been transmogryphed into a mere computer game than I am by isolated deviations from the original book - like the nifty female orc killer Tauriel who isn't mentioned anywhere in the writings of Tolkien. She may have been included to add some 'girl power' to an otherwise male dominated fairy society, but her presence doesn't fundamentally contradict the way the world of Tolkien's works. On the hand: when mountains starts to disintegrate by themselves (instead of through magic) and the fighting scenes starts to resemble kungfu then we have definitely left the world of Tolkien.

I have read something about the grammar of Quenya. According to a letter Tolkien wrote to somebody called Dick Plotz in 1967 the substantives have four numbers and ten cases in Quenya, but the verbs are relatively simple. Wikipedia formulates the negation system as follows: "verbs in Quenya are negated by prefacing a "negative verb" ua- (not marked for tense) to the impersonal form of the same tense". When I first saw the expression "negative verb" I evidently thought of Finnish, where the negation actually looks like some kind of verb, but in Quenya it just seems to be a prefix attached to the impersonal form of the verb - which isn't even the thing we normally think of as an impersonal verb (like those denoting weather). And moods are expressed by particles, a system that probably was inspired by the Celtic languages.

Tolkien was of course well versed in a variety of languages, and I suppose most readers already have heard that he borrowed the dwarf names (and that of Gandalf !) from a poem in Old Norse. But of course the copyright of Vǫluspǫ́ had run out centuries before Tolkien grabbed his fountain pen and started to write.


IC: Ég hef skrifað eitthvað um Vǫluspá fyrr (í ágúst 2015). Söguþráðurinn samanstendur að Óðinn vekur spákonu frá gröfinni og biður hana um fortíð, nútíð og framtíð. Hún segir fyrst af öllu að hún hafi séð allt frá upphafi (kannski var hún kona Tom Bombadils?) Og þá byrjar hún að útskýra hversu var kalt niðri og hlýtt uppi og kú kölluð Umbla í miðju og svo framvegis - eða heldur: hún segjar að hún vel veit hvað Óðinn er að spyrja og hún er eldri en risarna og allt annað - og munnur hennar standar ekki síðan kyrr nú þar sem hún hefur tækifæri til að skína:

Ek man jötna ár um borna,
þá er forðum mik fœdda höfðu;
níu man ek heima, níu íviði,
mjötvið mœran fyr mold neðan

Ha ha, völva sá níu heimum. Tolkien átti aðeins þrjú. Mest undarlegt er að hún veit líka eitthvað um framtíðina, þannig að Óðinn þarf ekki að taka þátt í óperum Wagners fyrir þess að finna út. Og þá eru allir dvergarna á seðil sem hún hefur í bakvasa, en þeir voru ekki innifalin í fyrstu útgáfunni af ljóðinu. Tolkien verður að hafa lesið seinna útgáfu.

When it comes to Tarvos, yes, that is the old Gaulish for bull and it probably refers to an ancient Celtic story, where a bull is consistently surrounded by three cranes that help it survive and reincarnate. There is a particular myth surrounding this character.

I actually took the name from a song by a metal band who write exclusively about the history of the ancient Gauls...

Iversen wrote:(...) TARVOS TRI-GARANVS («der Stier mit den drei Kraniche. in den Ortsnamen Tarvisium (heute Treviso) und Tarvessedum (-» Wagen)". Kraniche ??? or Cranes in English?? Some kind of mistranslation has happened here...

I have seen oxpeckers on African buffalos and other big mammals, but never a crane on top of of any other creature - and three cranes around an ox would also be highly unusual. So my suspicion is that the Romans simply didn't understand Gaulish well enough to get the whole picture. I have tried to find some information about the Gaulish myth behind the expression, and the search led to all sorts of weird texts. In Revue Celtique (on Archive.org) somebody wrote this:

This circumstance, and the identity of geese,
swans, crânes etc. in thèse legends, suggest that in the cycle of myths
referred to above we may find something to throw light on the well-
known Gallic représentation found under the choir of the cathedral church
of Paris, the TARVOS TRIGARANVS, or buU with three crânes on his
back. In the first place that représentation should hâve something to do
with the very ancient cosmogonie fable — Egyptian, Persian and Chi-
nese — according to which the World-Egg, swimming about the sea,
floated to a rock, and lay there. The Bull came, and broke its shell
with his horns (...) it is plain that the Bull was a prominent figure in
Gallic mythology, perhaps figured in some forgotten legend of the origin
of the Gauls. The Cimbri, Ambrones, and Teutones, the host which
menaced Rome with destruction in the consulate of Marius, swore « by
a brazen bull (...)

So the bull is probably there, it was important to the Celts and there is actually a depiction of a bull with something on its back from the time of emperor Tiberius in Notre Dame de Paris (see the picture from Wikipedia below), but to my sceptical eyes those things look more like some kind of desert flora than as cranes. There is also a bull in German Trier, and when I searched for something about that one I found this (plus a better picture of the Parisian stone) in the Alemannic Wikipedia:

De Gott werd ufem Nautepfiiler vo Paris as e bärtige Maa dargstellt, wo e Bomm umhaut. Öberem Relief stoot ESVS. S nöchst Relief zaigt en Stier mit drai Vögel voreme Bomm, dröber stoot TARVOS TRIGARANVS, wa Gallisch isch und »Stier drai Chranich« heisst.
Ufere Stele us Trier im Piet vo de Treverer isch de Esus nomol abbildet, wien er e Bomm umhackt. I de Äst hocket drai Chranich und en Stier. Die ander Site vo de Stele zaigt de römisch Mercurius, wo nume en Torques - de typisch gallischi Halsring - ahett und i de Händ de Caduceus und en Geldbüttel hebt. Nebet em isch d Göttin Rosmerta abbildet]. Do zaigt sich dütli, de scho starch romanisierti Gott, wo aber dur de Torques as gallisch usgwise werd, nebetem rain gallische Mythos vom Bommfäller und em Stier und de drai Chranich. De Inhalt und d Bidütig vo dem Mythos sind aber nöd bikannt. De Religionsgschichtler Jan de Vries vermuetet en Zämehang mit de Hängiopfer, wo jo anen Bomm ghänckt wore sind.

PLATT: Aver sünd düsse Darstellingen ook redich echt Gallisch? Oder hett sik de Mythos vun Mithras jichtenswie met wat Keltisch Gloof vun de Gott Esus un sien Umkrink vun Veeh, Kraniche un Boome versmolten?

FR: D'ailleurs, pour ceux qui désirent avoir plus d'informations douteuses sur Notre Dame de Paris (et qui n'ont pas assez de temps libre pour lire tout le livre de Hugo) je vous signale que j'ai écrit une tragédie sur la transformation de l'église en centrale nucléaire, et vous le trouverez ICI dans mon fil de loch.

POR: Algumas pessoas têm uma mesa de cabeceira ao lado de sua cama. Eu tenho uma cadeira, e nela há um número da revista portugues Super Interessante. Comprei uma cópia regular e três números especiais durante a minha última visita a Lisboa - e pela razão de que esqueci-me deles andaram à esperar indefinidamente na minha bagagem de viagem.

Se ha intitulat um número dos quatro "A longa viagem do Homo sapiens", mas agora estou no meio do caminho e a viagem obviamente ainda não começou. Portanto, esse número especial é bastante versátil, com artigos sobre tudo desde objetos peculiares no universo até a espionagem das mídias 'sociais' contra seus usuários. Um dos artigos explora as possibilidades de tornar as coisas invisíveis. Isso significa que os raios de luz das coisas por trás do objeto são transportados para a frente e de lá emitidos no mesmo ângulo em que os raios originais atingiram a a parte traseira .... e estamos ainda muito longe de fazêr isto. E sem esse recurso, nossa visão estereoscópica revelará o truque.


EN: Apart from that I reorganised one corner of of my music collection yesterday, namely the one dedicated to Italian instrumental music from the 17. century, and the adjacent area representing the 18. century. And from there I continued to Spanish music for vihuela, cittern, lutes of different kinds and guitar.

IT: Il compositore seicentista più famoso oggi è sin dubbio Giovanni Gabrieli, che tra l'altro inventó la musica stereofonica collocando gruppi di strumenti in competizione attorno alla chiesa di San Marco a Venezia. Ma Giovanni G non fu l'unico compositore di quest'epoca e quando ascolto la musica di alcuni dei suoi concorrenti, penso che avrebbero potuto essere così popolari se fossero già stati abbastanza popolari già da essere registrati. La mia frenesia di ieri comminciò quando notai che potevo raccogliere tutte le mie opere di Giovanni Legrenzi in due file invece di quattro (la mia collezzione personale di musica è organizzata con file corrispondenti alle pagine A e B sulle vecchie cassette), e poi mi venne l'idea di aprire Youtube per vedere se ci fosse arrivato qualcosa di interessante dopo mia ultima visita. E ho incontrato un video con 23 canzoni di Pietro Lappi ... era come inciampare nella caverna di Aladino o mandare uno stupido ragazzino in un negozio di dolci con una banconota da cento euro. E poi ho iniziato a esplorare la zona. Evidentemente cognoscevo già almeno i nomi di compositori come i due Gabrieli, Legrenzi, Lappi, Guami, Berger, Albrici e Grillo, ma ciò che è importante per lo studio di lingue è che ci sono tanti fonti in italiano per questi compositori (i cui dati biografici non sono sempre facili da trovare) che non sia necessario ricorrer all'inglese.

SP: Después el estudio de los compositores italianos yo hice el salto a España, donde me enteré en la projeto gigante de escuchar todas las grabaciones en Youtube de la celeberísima Fantasía Número X de Alonso Mudarra, la fantasia que "contrahaze la harpa en la manera de Ludovico". Y realmente hay muchas ... la mayoría con guitarra moderna, algunos con laúd o vihuela historicos y almenos tres con arpas y una con fortepiano moderno. Me sorprende soltanto que todavía no se haya grabado con tubo (dado que hay grabaciones para tuba solo de varias variaciones sobre el Carnaval de Venecia y la Czardas de Monti). Peró una de mis grabaciones favoritas estaba ausente de Youtube, a saber la versión hecha del grupo rock Sky, que también grabó otras piezas de música clásica de hace una vida.

EN: Since I really do want to lure people into listening to Mudarra's trailblazing two-minute masterwork I would like to quote Victor Coelho & Keith Polk: Instrumentalists and Renaissance Culture, 1420–1600, p99:

In the Tres Libros, the first book is devoted to fantasias, variation and dance settings, some intabulations of Josquin, and the first works ever published for de 4-course Renaissance guitar. (...) This section also contains one of the most unique fantasias in the entire lute or vihuela repertoire, the fantasia "that imitates de harp in the manner of Ludovico" (que contrahaze la harpa en la manera de Ludovico), who can securely be identified with the great Ludovico el del Arpe, the harpist who served Christopher Columbus' patron, Ferdinand II of Aragon. (...) To imitate the chromatic technique of Ludovico, Mudarra uses a cross-stringing effect to create bold semitone dissonances in the final section, which is appended with the printed warning that "From here to the end there are some dissonances [but] played well they don't sound badly" (Desde aqui fasta açerca del final ay Algunas falsas tañandose no pareçen mal).

I think is the first case in the history of music where a composer warns his listeners (and players) that his music may be terrible and full of scary false chords, but in spite of this it doesn't sound too bad.

POR: Claro, continuei lendo meu Super Interesante - e tenho agora leido alguns artigos sobre a história humana. O artigo mais interessante fala de esqueletos sapiens encontrados no Oriente Próximo, a maioria no Israel, mas também outros paisos até os Emirados. Mas também lemos que todos os homens indígenas fora da África derivam de um pequeno grupo que emigrou muito mais tarde. Como pode se harmonizar estas declarações divergentes? A suposição é que os primeiros emigrantes não alcançaram mais departe do Oriente Próximo, e finalmente eles morreram (o artigo sugere eles sofreram resistência dos neandertais). Mas a hipótese sobre Eva também diz que uma árvore genealógica pode ser arrastada de volta ao primeiro grupo - mas isso não exclui contatos com outros grupos. De fato, similaridades com DNA de neandertais e Densoivans em diferentes grupos de sapientes derivados de Eve foram detectadas.

RU: Следы генов неандертальцев, очевидно, чаще всего встречаются у европейцев, тогда следы генов Денсована встречаются в какой-то изолированной группе на островах вокруг Новой Гвинеи. А для тех, кто забыл денизованы, это объяснение: В 2010 году некоторые палеонтологи обнаружили ноготь в пещере Денисове в районе Алтайском (к западу от озера Байкал). Позже были обнаружены некоторые другие биты, включая зубы, и ДНК была извлечена.... Чок: не было никаких неандертальских генов, и не было генов от гомо сапиенс. Эти люди были от нового вида или подвида. И вы нашли генные последовательности от дени́совскых человек как у хан-китайцев, так и у меланезийцев, но не у европейцев. Кстати, один из четырех обнаруженных людей был смесью неандертальца и денизована, поэтому между этими группами также был контакт.

EN: And to supplement these informations: a couple of days ago I watched a video about the ancestry of the Ainu, who live in the Northern part of Japan (sorry, but I can't write this in Japanese - and maybe that also would be unfair to the Ainu, who were assimilated by force into the Japanese population with the result that their language and culture have almost disappeared by now). It is fairly certain that the ainu are the last rest of the peoples (commonly known as the 'Jomon') who inhabited the Japanese archipelago before the arrival of today's Japanese population. And where do they have their nearest relatives: well, genetics tell us that they are distant relatives of people in Tibet and on the Andaman islands - and nothing in between. For more details, watch the video or read this wordpress article.

BA I: Kita juga harus ingat bahwa Homo Erectus meninggalkan Afrika sejuta tahun yang lalu - subspesies Homo Ergaster ditemukan di Georgia, manusia Beijing di Cina, pria Jawa di Trinil, Jawa, Indonesia, dan mungkin berasal hobbit di Flores dari Homo Erectus. Yang terakhir adalah, bagaimanapun, hipotesis, dan para ulama tidak setuju. Ada juga orang-orang kecil di Flores hari ini, tetapi terbukti bahwa mereka tidak berhubungan dengan hobbit.

EN: Yesterday evening I did the first vocabulary count this year. In the thread "How much words should you learn in a day? What technique to use and how not to forget them?" I got into a discussion about methods to bulk learn vocabulary and the efficiency thereof, and I mentioned an experiment I did with Serbian words in 2014.

SE: Наравно, користио сам мој листе речи са три колоне. Радио сам преко српско-енглеског речника, а истовремено сам радио бројање речи са страница које су или коришћене или нису коришћене за спискове. У неискоришћеном одељку сам знао или могао погодити једну трећину ријечи, а након кориштења листа сам знао двије трећине. Пошто у књизи има око 15000 наслова, научио сам 5000 речи за око три месеца. Они то често кажу да реч брзо научена реч, брзо заборављена. Да ли је то тачно? Синоћ сам направио бројање речи на основу шест страница у истом речнику, и још увек сам знао две трећине речи. Можда сам заборавио неке речи, али сам такође научио нове речи, тако да је ниво исти. Ово учење у великом броју није идиотско лудило.

Just a short remark this time:

Today I went to a lecture in the section for cheapskate senior members of my trade union ("Magisterforeningen"). The topic was the history an US installation buried in the ice of Northern Greenland that existed in the early sixties, but since I can't write about that subject in Greenlandic I shall abstain from writing more about it. But during the ten minutes before the lecture I for some reason happened to give an ultra short version of the early history of the Indoeuropean languages to those sitting around the same table, and it seemed that they found the theme interesting. Well, then I made the pledge to do a proper two hour lecture about this topic in early 2019. As some of you may know I have made speeches about precisely this thing in Bratislava for two years in a row (in English and in French, both on Youtube by now), and I have also written about them in this thread so I don't think it will be a problem to fill out the time - the problem is mostly how to cut down on the things I want to say. And this time the language will of course be Danish since the listeners all will be retired union members from Denmark. I really look forward to this as it will serve to 'keep the pot boiling'...

I have been reading too, but mostly in English. For some reason I ended up on a WIkipedia page that described the events leading up to the invasion of Great Britain in 1066, namely the one describing Harald Harefoot. For those that think that encyclopedias have to be boring. please read this extract:

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports that Harold said that he was a son of Cnut the Great and Ælfgifu of Northampton, "although it was not true". Florence of Worcester (12th century) elaborates on the subject. Claiming that Ælfgifu wanted to have a son by the king but was unable to, she secretly adopted the newborn children of strangers and pretended to have given birth to them. Harold was reportedly the son of a cobbler, while his brother Svein Knutsson was the illegitimate son of a priest. She deceived Cnut into recognizing both children as his own. Harriet O'Brien doubts that Cnut, the shrewd politician who "masterminded the bloodless takeover of Norway" could have been deceived in such a way. She suspects that the tale started out as a popular myth, or intentional defamation presumably tailored by Emma of Normandy, the other wife of Cnut and rival to Ælfgifu.

And from there I went on other pages describing the same period,including the one that tells about king Æthelred the Unready, who only became king after the mysterious murder of his brother Edward the (so-called) Martyr, and who was ... not unready, but "ill advised" (the original meaning) enough to kill all the Danes he could get hold of in 1002, including the sister of King Sweyn Forkbeard. And then Sweyn invaded England. One of the earlier skirmishes with invading vikings was the Battle at Madon in 991, and that's important because it has been described in an Anglosaxon poem which has been read aloud by Peter S.Baker on Youtube (20 minutes of pure Anglosaxon bliss). And from there I went on to the regal chronicles of the Wessex kings and other fascinating subjects, but that's another history.

The most irritating thing about Anglosaxon is shared with other dead languages, namely that it is hard to find dictionaries that go from the old language to some modern one. Otherwise I would try to write in them here.