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For those of you following along with the Old Norse lesson series (or who might have learned Old Norse before from somewhere else), today I launched "Unit 2," which is focused less on presenting new grammar and more on applying your grammatical knowledge to reading texts in the language.

In today's video, one of the exclusive items I promised to Patreon supporters was a list of the commonest verbs in the language in all their "principal parts" (the forms that allow you to predict all the other forms of the verb).  I attach that to this post. Any questions or comments are, of course, welcome.

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Old Norse Unit 2, Lesson 1: Using a Dictionary to Read Old Norse

Whether you've learned Old Norse grammar from Jackson Crawford's videos or somewhere else, the first video in Unit 2 of the Old Norse lesson series focuses on teaching you how to read Old Norse better, which starts with using dictionaries effectively. Jackson Crawford, Ph.D.: Sharing real expertise in Norse language and myth with people hungry to learn, free of both ivory tower elitism and the agendas of self-appointed gurus. Visit JacksonWCrawford.com (includes bio and linked list of all videos). Jackson Crawford’s translation of Hávamál, with complete Old Norse text: https://www.hackettpublishing.com/the-wanderer-s-havamal-4275 Jackson Crawford’s translation of The Poetic Edda: https://www.hackettpublishing.com/the-poetic-edda Audiobook: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Poetic-Edda-Audiobook/1982597550?qid=1542115406 Jackson Crawford’s translation of The Saga of the Volsungs: https://www.hackettpublishing.com/the-saga-of-the-volsungs-4098 Audiobook: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Saga-of-the-Volsungs-Audiobook/B07L44HRNH Latest FAQs: https://vimeo.com/375149287 (updated Nov. 2019). Jackson Crawford’s Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/norsebysw Music © I See Hawks in L.A., courtesy of the artist. Visit http://www.iseehawks.com/ Logos by Elizabeth Porter (snowbringer at gmail).

Comments

Anonymous

Hej och tack för alla jättebra videor! Jag vill bli bättre på att läsa alla svenska runstenar. Will continue in English for the sake of others. I have a question about the verb for "do" or "make", namely "gøra". In modern Swedish, this verb has the forms of "göra", "gjorde" and "gjort". What are the forms of it in Old Norse? Also, another question. Sometimes when I try to read rune stones, there are variations in spellings that are different from how it is spelled in dictionaries. Mostly, it's things like words having diphthongs on runestones while not having diphthongs in the dictionaries. A very good example would be the the word for "and", namely "ok". More often than not in my experience, this word is spelled "auk" instead of "ok" on rune stones. Is this just variations because of local dialects (Uppland for example) or is it actually a different pronunciation of the word in Old East Norse compared to Old West Norse? Thank you again for all the time you put into this.

norsebysw

I'm sorry that I'm just now seeing this for some reason. The verb "to do" has varying forms in Old Norse. The oldest form, which we rarely see in the present tense, is gǫrva. In the present tense, West Norse dialects (Icelandic and Norwegian) usually have gera, while East Norse dialects (Swedish and Danish) usually have gøra. In the past tense, they sometimes have forms consistent with that (ek gerð-, or eastern jak gørð-), but sometimes have forms consistent with the oldest form of the root (ek/jak gǫrð-). It's from this that we get the unusual distribution of present and past tense vowels in modern Norwegian and Swedish. "Auk" is an interesting case since that is almost always how the word is spelled in Younger Futhark, even while the oldest manuscripts in the Roman alphabet spell it "ok." We do know that "auk" is a legitimate older form of the word "ok"—it's cognate with German "auch"—but we don't know when exactly it monophthongized. If anything, we'd expect it to have monophthongized *earlier* in East Norse. It's possible that the runic spelling with "au" was just a convention that hung on even after the real pronunciation of the word changed for most speakers (kind of like how all English speakers continue to write "what" even though only a minority pronounce the "h" now). Does that answer your questions?

Anonymous

It does answer my questions, absolutely. Thank you very much, very interesting! :)

Anonymous

If anybody wants to know: German "auch" & the Dutch "ook", both have the meaning of "already". The "au" in the German "auch" sounds a bit like in "cloud" & the Dutch "ook" has a very long o, longer than in "ocean".