Hello again! I’ve been occupied with other things than Ænglisc during this last week, as I had an exam yesterday. Nevertheless, I’m now back and into the business again, continuing with my studies of Old English. Today’s subject was the declensions of other classes of nouns. Many of them are more or less identical to stān.

dæġ (m) – ”day” and fæt (n) – ”vessel”

Dæġ is declined like stān while fæt is declined like scip. Their shared exception is that the front vowel /æ/ turns into /a/ when followed by a vowel further back (/a/ and /u/).

scōh (m) – ”shoe”, eoh (m) – ”horse” and feoh (n) – ”money”

Notice how the /h/ disappears and how the short diphthongs become long.

That’s all bother write today. I’ll update you’ll tomorrow with even more fascination declensions! Anyway, something that I noticed was that almost all of these words had fairly similar cognates in Swedish: dæġ – dag, fæt – fat, scōh – sko and feoh – fä. Eoh, although having no cognate in modern Swedish, is of course related to Proto-Indo-European *h₁éḱwos and therefore Latin equus. However, mearh, also meaning horse (I’ll decline it tomorrow, no worries!), has a cognate in Swedish: märr. Interesting stuff!

Hi again!

Yesterday I kept studying the previous declensions of adjectives. Today I studied the conjugations of five different verbs, which I’ll show you tables for. They’re not that difficult if you’ve studied German or Icelandic before.

fremman – ”to do”

lufian – ”to love”

habban – ”to have”

I can now make this simple sentence to say to my girlfrend: Ic lufie þe!

My second day of Old English. Still basic stuff, but I can’t wait until I’m able to write these posts in Old English! Anyway, some more tables:

tila (‘good’) – Weak Declension

tila (‘good’) – Strong Declension

Some artificial sentences in Old English

This is just to try out what I’ve learned so far, so bear with me!

Se tila stān. Þone tilan stān. Þæs tilan stānas. Þǣm tilan stāne.
Þæt tile scip. Þæt tile scip. Þæs tilan scipes. Þǣm tilan scipe.
Sēo tile ġiefu. Þā tilan ġiefe. Þǣre tilan ġiefe. Þǣre tilan ġiefe.
Þā tilan stānas. Þā tilan ġiefa. Þāra tilra scipa. Þǣm tilum wordum.

I have recently begun my studies of Akkadian and Old English, which gave me the opportunity to use my blog from the beginning of my studies. I’ll therefore try to update my blog and write about my journey to ”fluency” in these languages. Of course, both of them are dead languages, so attaining any kind of fluency is not only heard but outright misleading. In the case of these two languages, though, by fluency I mean the ability to write solely in them. However, my updates may not be of much interest for everyone, as they probably will include many tables and various rules, but I hope that they may be of use to learners of these languages.

Starting with Old English

Today (and partly yesterday) I learnt the declensions for the demonstratives (se/þæt/sēo/þā and þes/þis/þēos/þās), the personal pronouns (iċ, þū, hē, hit, hēo, wit, ġit, wē, ġē, hīe) as well as the declensions of some nouns and verbs. Let’s make some tables!

Pronouns

Nouns