On 2008-05-07 E. A. Kinzel, Seattle, WA United States wrote: This book is intended for graduate students of English who might need to acquire a reading knowledge of Old English for their studies, but who are not necessarily knowledgeable in Indo-European linguistics or familiar with archaic, highly inflected languages.
The author begins with a simplified but fairly comprehensive grammar of Old English which runs about 40 pages, and covers pronunciation; an explanation of gender, number, and case(s); the forms of the definite and relative articles; strong and weak verbs; adjectives; nouns; additional sections dealing with more advanced declensions/conjugations of nouns and verbs; and i-umlaut.
I read the grammar several times initially, and returned to re-read several times as I progressed through the readings, to review some of the concepts. As an earlier reviewer noted, you don´t want to rush through the introductory grammar in your haste to get to the Old English texts; only confusion and frustration will ensue.
I should note in respect to pronunciation that Prof. Diamond uses distinctive symbols to denote palatalized C and G, which allows the beginner to avoid having to check the rules constantly to determine if a given C or G needs to be palatized in its environment within a word. This allows the student to pronounce Old English with confidence from the beginning, and I found that I quickly internalized the use of palatalized C and G using this method.
The readings are interesting and challenging. They are printed with Old English on the left- and Modern English on the right-hand page, allowing the student to plunge right into reading Old English without memorizing long vocabulary lists, with minimal flipping back to the glossary. The readings are graded, increasing in complexity of grammar and vocabulary as one progresses, and also incorporate fewer word-for-word translations as the student is guided into Old English poetry; this makes the student work harder on translations as he/she advances through the readings, and prevents excessive reliance on the Modern English.
There is a full glossary in the back, which includes all divergent verb and noun forms for the student´s convenience. For example, it lists ´seoles´, the genitive singular of ´seolh´; and ´slog´, the preterite singular of ´slean´. For a beginner, these situations might otherwise be nightmarish, trying to feverishly determine the infinitive of the verb or nominative singular of the noun, sufficient to look it up and find its meaning.
This book fulfilled my fondest hopes, allowing me to gain a reading knowledge and proper pronunciation of Old English in a relatively short period of time, and I highly recommend it.. And summed up by saying Learning to read Old English. Currently Old English Grammar and Reader has an overall rating of 10 over 10.
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