TY Complete Old English Holiday Mini-Challenge

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Re: TY Complete Old English Holiday Mini-Challenge

Postby IronMike » Thu Dec 12, 2019 9:50 pm

Let's get this started!

OK, fellow OE learners, here's my plan for this mini-challenge. Feel free to follow or ignore what you see below. I will tell you this, though: I intend on posting about each chapter on the date I list below. So if you are afraid of spoilers, don't come to this thread until you're done with that particular lesson. :D

All that being said, the kids (all four plus one girlfriend!) will be home for the holidays (hurray!), so who knows if I'll be able to keep to this schedule. Plus I'm traveling with them 20-23 Dec. I promise you, though, that I will certainly try.

15 December: Mini-challenge official start.
17 December: Finish chapter 1, Here Edward was consecrated as king.
19 December: Finish chapter 2, A king must hold a kingdom.
22 December: Finish chapter 3, Say what I am called.
24 December: Finish chapter 4, Here in this year.
27 December: Finish chapter 5, About the four seasons.
30 December: Finish chapter 6, I saw in a dream.
2 January: Finish chapter 7, King Cnut greets his archbishops.
5 January: Finish chapter 8, He promised her the land at Orleton.
8 January: Finish chapter 9, I seek my brothers, where they are keeping their herds.
11 January: Finish chapter 10, These are the bounds of the pasture at Hazelhurst. Mini-challenge official end.

Make sure you download the TY Library app to your device and then within the app get the audio for TY Complete Old English. Or go to their website to get the audio. It's free!

Hope you all are doing well. Looking forward to hearing from you all!
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Re: TY Complete Old English Holiday Mini-Challenge

Postby Mista » Fri Dec 13, 2019 12:05 am

I have an exam on the 16th, but I'll be with you no later than the 17th. I'm planning to try to do one chapter a day and see how that goes.
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Re: TY Complete Old English Holiday Mini-Challenge

Postby lavengro » Fri Dec 13, 2019 1:46 am

Looking forward to this! I still have a final two hour Intermediate Italian Conversation evening class coming up during the AngloSaxon period, and will need to continue to some degree with some of my other language commitments, but I figure I will have a solid hour per day to throw at this over the month, perhaps up to 1.5 hours. Unless I see a squirrel or something shiny, then all bets are off.

Less than that on December 25th if I get some trinket or toy as a gift to distract me, but realistically based on where I likely fall on Santa's "naughty v nice" matrix, I’m anticipating just a lump of coal, as per previous years.

And zero study hours on December 31st – during the early part of the day, I will be too busy drinking per local custom to have time to read or study, and during the latter part of the day, I will have drunken so much that I literally will have lost the ability to read (or even to speak Modern English very well – trust me, I speak from experience here). Which will be a shame, as I am purdy sure there are some good Old English drinking toasts that would come in handy on new years eve.

Not sure what this will translate out to in terms of progress. I tend to prefer proceeding slowly with languages, with lots of repetition and review. Which is prolly why I am still a monoglot. Your schedule Mike seems readily doable for me. A chapter per day would be awesome but probably not doable for me.
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Re: TY Complete Old English Holiday Mini-Challenge

Postby sfuqua » Mon Dec 16, 2019 5:30 pm

I'm in.
First issue, maybe I missed something in chapter 1, but I noticed a difference between the pronunciation of the male and female speakers on the first passage. It seems like a regular difference, so perhaps it reflects different views on how things were pronounced, or perhaps the pronunciation in different time periods or places.

I hear gehalgod being pronounced differently by each, particularly the way that the second "g" is pronounced.

I plan to copy each speaker when I am practicing.

By the way, I find the voice of the female speaker, Catherine A. M. Clarke, to be absolutely beautiful. :D

edited to add the name of the woman speaker
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Re: TY Complete Old English Holiday Mini-Challenge

Postby IronMike » Mon Dec 16, 2019 11:30 pm

sfuqua wrote:I'm in.
I hear gehalgod being pronounced differently by each, particularly the way that the second "g" is pronounced.

By the way, I find the voice of the female speaker, Catherine A. M. Clarke, to be absolutely beautiful. :D

Ditto. I hear a difference and I agree about her voice.

I think she is simply showing an alternate pronunciation.

All (or eall?), I'll put some comments on unit 1 in a post tomorrow.
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Re: TY Complete Old English Holiday Mini-Challenge

Postby Mista » Tue Dec 17, 2019 3:57 am

Since the dates are given in Latin, and the Latin way saying the date is a little unusual from a modern point of view, here is a short explanation of how it works:

https://www.answers.com/Q/How_do_you_write_dates_in_Latin wrote:Each Roman month only has names for three days: the kalends of the 1st day, the nones of the 9th, and the ides of the 15th. In the rest of the month, the days are given numbers according to how far away they are from the particular day. So after the kalends, the numbers count the number of days before the nones. After the nones, the countdown is to the ides. After the ides, the countdown is to the kalends of the next month.

This means that the date given in the first text, .iii. nonas Aprelis, is the sixth of April. Unless they count like the Greeks did, in which case it is the seventh. I know I have a thorough explanation of the Latin date system in a book somewhere, but unfortunately, I can't remember where.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I was a little curious about the statement "Old English often placed the verb in second position with the subject following" on page 5. Is this an indirect way of saying that Old English was a V2 language? (V2 = in main clauses, the verb always takes the second position (technically, is the second constituent) of the clause, demoting the subject to the third position whenever another constituent, typically an adverbial phrase, is promoted to the first position). Checking in the "Old English Grammar" (Quirk/Wrenn) which I got at the library yesterday, V2 isn't mentioned there either, but they do say (p. 92 in the 1994 edition) that SVO order is typical, but that VSO is more usual if certain adverbs come first. Again, this seems like V2, but they also say that the word order is quite variable and that it is therefore difficult to state more than tendencies concerning word order. The same pages informs us that in the case of compound verbs, the second element will come directly afterwards (like in Scandinavian languages) or at the end (like in German).

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thinking about studying Old English has made me remember a piece of research that was making headlines a while back. Originally I couldn't remember who and when, but I have now managed to dig it up, and there is a book ("English: The Language of the vikings") as well as a summary of the book in an article ("English as North Germanic") by Joseph E. Emonds and Jan Terje Faarlund.

lavengro wrote:I have recklessly signed on to IronMike’s challenge of a four week stomp through Old English, which begins today. I assumed this would be pretty simple, based on the mistaken impression that Old English is exactly identical to Modern English except with a bunch of "forsooths" and "egads" thrown in for dramatic effect. But I am now getting the sense that this impression was not entirely accurate.....

Faarlund and Emonds would probably tell you that you would be better off trying to read Old Norse. Their theory is, as the titles suggest, that modern English should be considered a branch of the North Germanic group, i.e. Scandinavian. I know that the theory is contested, but I still think the article is well worth reading, and that it will be especially interesting to read while learning Old English (however, please note that this is my opinion of it before reading it myself). If anyone else is interested, the article can be downloaded for free here:
https://brill.com/view/journals/ldc/6/1 ... e-p1_1.xml
("Download PDF" didn't work for me, I had to use the DOI link)
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Re: TY Complete Old English Holiday Mini-Challenge

Postby LunaMoonsilver » Tue Dec 17, 2019 9:22 am

Mista wrote:Since the dates are given in Latin, and the Latin way saying the date is a little unusual from a modern point of view, here is a short explanation of how it works:

https://www.answers.com/Q/How_do_you_write_dates_in_Latin wrote:Each Roman month only has names for three days: the kalends of the 1st day, the nones of the 9th, and the ides of the 15th. In the rest of the month, the days are given numbers according to how far away they are from the particular day. So after the kalends, the numbers count the number of days before the nones. After the nones, the countdown is to the ides. After the ides, the countdown is to the kalends of the next month.

This means that the date given in the first text, .iii. nonas Aprelis, is the sixth of April. Unless they count like the Greeks did, in which case it is the seventh. I know I have a thorough explanation of the Latin date system in a book somewhere, but unfortunately, I can't remember where.



Ah, thanks for that! I was having difficulty understanding the date there, especially since they don't explain it in any detail in the first unit :lol:

I'm enjoying this so far; having some trouble remembering pronunciation rules (but agree with the rest of you that I like the woman's voice!) but the grammar seems v close to German (in some aspects) which means I've not been entirely thrown in the deep end, thank god. Just have to work on memorising the vocabulary—manude is about the only word that's stuck!
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Re: TY Complete Old English Holiday Mini-Challenge

Postby IronMike » Tue Dec 17, 2019 12:46 pm

Sounds like some of you are done with unit 1! Great work everyone, and thanks for the dates info. I was gonna trust the book to tell us later. ;) So far to me it is very Germanic, which makes sense. Thanks for that article link, Mista. Gonna read it now.

I'll write more today after work, just in case some others aren't there yet. I will be starting unit 2 tonight.

Edit: Wow, all the Norse-OE articles in that volume of the journal are open access. Some good back and forth on the hypothesis. Thanks again, Mista!
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Re: TY Complete Old English Holiday Mini-Challenge

Postby David1917 » Tue Dec 17, 2019 3:37 pm

I got through Unit 6 awhile back, but I haven't looked at it since then so I'm reviewing them all right now.

In addition to earlier comments I made on the expansion of this volume with the extra chapters, it seems that more reading passages are interspersed, beginning with this first lesson. The section labeled "Reading 2" which begins with "Her wæs Eadgar..." is not in the previous iteration of the book. Exciting!

Since the passages are relatively short, I tend to copy them out and annotate the unknown words in a different color ink - since I really hate marking up books. So this is even better to have new material to work with while reviewing.
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Re: TY Complete Old English Holiday Mini-Challenge

Postby LunaMoonsilver » Tue Dec 17, 2019 3:44 pm

David1917 wrote:In addition to earlier comments I made on the expansion of this volume with the extra chapters, it seems that more reading passages are interspersed, beginning with this first lesson. The section labeled "Reading 2" which begins with "Her wæs Eadgar..." is not in the previous iteration of the book. Exciting!


Ah, no! I got the kindle version so looks like it's a slightly older edition and doesn't have this :(

Still, will have to work with what I've got, I guess!
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