Linguistics 411: Old English

Fall 2017

The goal of this course is to teach you to read Old English prose and to introduce you to the grammar of Old English, the phonology, morphology and syntax. The grammatical material will help you to learn the language but is also interesting in its own right. There will be some discussion of the place of Old English in the Germanic language family, both typologically and historically.
Germanic Lexicon Project

An Old English keyboard layout for the Mac. To install the layout, download and expand the zip file. Then copy the result into the Library/Keyboard Layouts in your home folder. (If you can’t see a Library folder, press ⇧⌘G in the Finder and type ‘~/Library’ into the dialog box, then look for the ‘Keyboard Layouts’ folder.) Then go into System Preferences and turn it on in the Keyboard → Input Sources panel. You should then be able to select the Old English input method from the menu bar. The web page with the download link contains instructions on which keys have been mapped to the Old English characters.

Caitlin Richter's Orm materials for Wednesday, 12/6

Two files to download: Some notes for Caitlin's class:
  1. Take a look at the Wikipedia entry for the Ormulum.
  2. Don't spend more time on it than other translations for class.
  3. Use provided glossary and see notes on first page.
  4. Lots of inflection (noun, adjective, etc) is no longer present in the language
      so don't necessarily bother looking too much up in your grammar.