There's something about taking a grammar lesson in gorgeous Colorado during my first cup of coffee. Though I may need a second cup to really get the full benefits from the lesson.
What a great resource your videos are. As someone who has studied languages before, this is definitely enough for me to activate my study of Old Norse, a core to build rich learning around. As a native Swedish speaker it feels somewhat funny learning Old Norse in English. But I've come to realise that it makes for even deeper learning. Triangulating and connecting Old Norse, English and Swedish. Seeing clearer how the organic growth process of our language has travelled down through the ages. Keep up the good work. Much gratitude from a Swedish Laplander in Australia.
Yes, but those phrases have become set expressions, so they aren't good examples of how the genitive case works in modern Swedish. You can't say "till affärens" or "till sjukhusets", for example.
@@roaringviking5693 Exactly, that's why one doesn't perceive them as the genitive case anymore. Your examples have the definite article though, maybe we should start using "till affärs" etc? Doesn't have the right ring with words longer than one syllable though...
“Whom” is definitely still in use! This brings to mind the days we used to spend diagramming sentences way back in the stone age when I grew up. Can’t wait for your “Great Courses” offering!
In German we have the exact same cases and it seems like the noun geners are also similar (die Hand = the Hand feminine, der Ring = the ring maskuline, but we say der Baum, which means tree but is masculine)
I didn’t think I could possibly ever remember this stuff, but I setup a flash card app on my phone, and amazed myself! Great lessons! I also just started small group lessons with a tutor, but this is really helping.
@@eduardocarbonellbelando6865 I think you being a non-native speaker puts you at an advantage with this, since "whom" is preserved in formal and academic English, but just barely hangs on in standard spoken dialects, mostly around formulaic phrases we all remember like the one Jackson Crawford avoided using that sparked this conversation. And the thing is, languages are living things. If a word falls out of use and replaced by another word, then it ceases to be correct. In this way English standard is always somewhat behind the curve since academia tends to be linguistically conservative
Got your point by the oddly structure of your first sentence here :) Btw, I'm also impressed with the lexical similarity. At least my tiny competence in German as a fourth language made a relation with the other Germanic languages which is awesome
Kind of unrelated to the class, but You should post stuff on tic tok. There are so many Norse “experts” on there it’s insane. Just found your channel today though, looking forward to binging all your videos.
Many people still use 'whom' :) I also use it but when I have to do spellchecks before sending emails, documents, etc. the dictionary does routinely argue that my choice of words are [arch.] (rolls eyes) I don't care if it's "archaic" as long as it says what I intended to say. ^_^
Thank you for these well laid out videos on old Norse. After much searching on computer I finally found a font for my notes with all the alphabet. The old Norse helps understand the difference between Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic, The language started to split due to different influences as more Norse started settling and marrying within the clans. Because the odd norse q is obsolete there is no short cut found for that so far.
Wonderful lesson, with an excellent backdrop as ever. And I've learnt where the placename element -garth comes from (for instance Aysgarth, Applegarth and so on )
Latin helps me in understanding U-Umlaut, because if you think of Norse -u as mutated -a all the endings make sense - jörd would be jard-a, and neuter plural haf-a (mari-a, e.g.). All is left is apply U-Umlaut.
Thanks for this, I'm diving ever deeper into the material and I'm at the stage where I should really be understanding cases if I want to understand the original meaning of a text, even when using a wordbook.
Thanks Dr. Crawford. I'm a voice over artist and I just completed production of an audio book that had a lot of language that was completely alien to me. It was an introduction to Asatru. But, I used the rules you outlined here to help me when I couldn't find a modern Icelandic pronunciation. I really did my due diligence for the pronunciations. But, sometimes I just went back to an American pronunciation when the Icelandic just sounded "too foreign". Like anything with rolling "r's", Americans don't roll their "r's", by and large. I guess the reviews will let me know how well or how poorly I managed it. I'm certain that your video helped me a lot though.
Vatn is an uncountable noun in modern Icelandic when talking about water, so it doesn't have a plural form. Only when talking about a lake would you use the plural: vötn Is this not the case for old norse?
Though it is a mistake in Old Norse, there are languages where genitive phrases may mark the possessed “object” together with or rather than the possessor. The best known of these is Arabic, where the grammar calls this the “construct state” .
The implication of your lesson is that Americans do not use "whom", is that true? If so it is unusual because we, the English, tend to see American as retaining many archaic English forms. For example I think Americans still say "gotten". And Americans are better at the subjunctive than we are; we tend to simplify it to a simple future. We certainly still say "whom" and it sounds a little awkward when ignored. The oddest thing to our ear about American is the tendency for it to use adjectives as adverbs, "He won big". The river flows quick etc. I learn Bokmal on Duolingo and often have no idea what their English means, in some cases the Norwegian is actually closer to the English than the American is: examples: loft, kjeller, mobil etc.
Your example, “ his blessing was also his curse,” explains something that never made sense to me in Spanish: “Yo soy yo.” “ I am I.” Nominative in both positions. I got in trouble with some spanish speaking friends by pointing at a photo and saying, “ Este es mi.” I thought that would translate to “This is me,” but they insisted that “yo soy yo! yo soy yo!”
I notis right away that we use som of the nouns to day in Swedish. Singularis Accusative = normal form, Plural Nominative = plural. This is fun to discover. Edit: so Gardr sounds like Gård. Can it comes from this?
The NAGD case order always messes me up... probably because we use NADG in Faroese. I think I usually see NAGD in Norwegian text books or at least Iversen springs to mind (beside it being the standard order in German, of course). Still, that doesn't detract from this course. Kudos.
So, the Germans number their cases? That answers a big question for me which is why do Czechs and Slovaks number their cases too, so NGDAVLI are the 1st through 7th cases, even though Slovak has no vocative.
The way you explained, " masculine, feminine, neuter", made me wonder if literal root of the thing was relevant. The neuter, tree, is from creation/the gods, we know they see mother's as where people (including their hands) come from and, metal smiths were likely, mostly men. I'm sure it might break down with further examples but, does it? You're a good teacher. Thank you.
Your logic, unfortunately, doesn't hold true for most words encountered. While it's true that Masculine occupations like a Smith are indeed of the Masculine Gender and a few other general rules can be applied to a limited amount of other nouns, the Genders of the parts of the body, for instance, are all over the place and make no consistent sense whatsoever - the Norse word for "hand" is Feminine, but the word for "knee" is Neuter, for example.
Excelent! So, does "Sigurđ sló ormr" still means "The serpent struck Sigurd"? Because the one who carries the -r is always the subject who/that performs the action of the verb?
Yes, that's absolutely correct. In general, highly inflected languages such as Norse and German rely far more on the case endings to indicate syntactical relations than mere linear placement as in English. Placing the Subject at the end of a clause rather than in its customary position at the beginning does, however, shift the EMPHASIS of the statement by having us focus more on the Object of the slaying rather than the Subject. Thus, "Sigurđ sló ormr" emphasizes that it is SIGURD the worm happened to strike rather than some other individual. Capisce?
Question regarding u umlating with masculine words: It wasn't mentioned for the masculine nouns, so does it still happen there with words such as garðr for the plural dative?
love the red dead redemption vibe, thanks for these videos though, I can't purchase much, but this has helped a lot already. I sit here with a pen and paper like I'm really in your classroom. just so I'm kinda getting the whole -r suffix...if I were to do my name in Old norse it'd be Endidraug roughly right? but if people refer to me or I talk about what I did in a game (RP) it'd be Endidraugr? p.s. I don't mind an answer from anyone.
Not really relevant here but still interesting, "He shot I" would actually work and be understood where I am from, the accent around here the (albeit rural) people use is really odd at times, one example would be "I sees him and he sees I" "whare's it to" (ask whare something is, I met a northern lady who struggled with that one) and "How be on" (how are you doing/ how is it going)
The Cleasby-Vigfusson-- it's public domain, so you can find it in multiple places online, but this is a link to one: lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/texts/oi_cleasbyvigfusson_about.html
@@SwampFeet678 Yeah-- due to the sheer size of the C-V I've never honestly seen a newer print copy that was in price range (one may exist, but I admit due to the size I've stuck to using the online one or a PDF from the Internet Archive, since it's public domain). If you're looking for something to carry around as a hard copy, the Zoëga Concise Dictionary is probably your best bet-- it's basically the C-V, but as the title implies the definitions are shorter and you don't get as much grammar notation, but that allows for it to be more of a portable thing. Amazon has a newer printing here: www.amazon.com/Concise-Dictionary-Icelandic-Language-Guides/dp/0486434311/ -- that said, it is a republication of a 1910 version, but they have the "Look Inside" feature available so you can make sure the printing/text is readable for you.
I think being a russian is huge cheat here. We have 6 cases, but it's kinda counterintuitive in a way. Cause "его дар был также его проклятием" = his blessing was also his curse in russian is actualy... Genitive - Nominative - Genitive - Instrumental. haha
5:26 Do we (as in "we", humans who are interested) know why English is so different from the other languages it is related to, in that the genitive must be marked by what essentially is an arbitrary typographic and/or orthographic convention? Why did the English possessive become marked by an apostrophe? 🤔 Was that introduced before the printing press? At the same time lots of French words were introduced that also brought in the -s plurals? What's going on there?
About the genetive. How do you explain its use in "nýtr manngi nás"? Useful to nobody of corpse? Or is this some super archaic saying and it actually comes from "nýtr manngi ná-es". Useful to nobody is corpse? But then why is it dative? Can someone wrap their head around this? Or is it even so archaic that the "nár-es" combination became ná-s?
Question, PIE languages have those gender cases that you mentioned. I do understand why gender is used when referring to cow or bull or things in that nature. However, certain items (inanimate in particular) still follow those gender rules. May I have your opinion on that? I kind of saw it as either, things seemingly meant to used by males/females as one reason why. The other reason was that the sound of the word would fit to either having better sound flow when speaking a sentence, thus to rhythicalize the sounds so that the sentence itself so that would be recognized as a proper and complete sentence. Example: Seo catto eato se mouseo (rhythicalized). Anyway, may i have your take on this subject?
Gender in language tends to be grammatical rather than natural. Mentally you could just call them "noun class 1", "noun class 2" etc. Languages like Swahili with a more rigorous noun classifying systems tend to have more consistency in these categories but in PIE langs it might as well be arbitrary. The terms masculine feminine and neuter aren't the best way to think about said classes of nouns
"The easy way is the hard way."
-Jackson Crawford
There's something about taking a grammar lesson in gorgeous Colorado during my first cup of coffee. Though I may need a second cup to really get the full benefits from the lesson.
Here are some timestamps:
01:04 - Noun cases: Introduction
08:32 - Masculine nouns
12:46 - Neuter nouns
16:40 - Feminine nouns
21:35 - Exercises
What a great resource your videos are. As someone who has studied languages before, this is definitely enough for me to activate my study of Old Norse, a core to build rich learning around.
As a native Swedish speaker it feels somewhat funny learning Old Norse in English. But I've come to realise that it makes for even deeper learning. Triangulating and connecting Old Norse, English and Swedish. Seeing clearer how the organic growth process of our language has travelled down through the ages.
Keep up the good work. Much gratitude from a Swedish Laplander in Australia.
Thank you for putting all this energy and passion in teaching! You are a true inspiration!
We still say 'till fjälls' in Swedish, also 'till sängs' (to bed), 'till sjöss/havs' (to/on the sea) etc. Never thought of it as the genitive case!
Yes, but those phrases have become set expressions, so they aren't good examples of how the genitive case works in modern Swedish. You can't say "till affärens" or "till sjukhusets", for example.
@@roaringviking5693 Exactly, that's why one doesn't perceive them as the genitive case anymore. Your examples have the definite article though, maybe we should start using "till affärs" etc? Doesn't have the right ring with words longer than one syllable though...
“Whom” is definitely still in use!
This brings to mind the days we used to spend diagramming sentences way back in the stone age when I grew up.
Can’t wait for your “Great Courses” offering!
Classroom to the World.......Thank you.
'given the lack of rewards' ... Don't we all know it. My full sympathy!
I can tell you this lesson has taken me much much longer than 24 minutes on this day... I am so happy for it though. I am learning so much thank you.
In German we have the exact same cases and it seems like the noun geners are also similar (die Hand = the Hand feminine, der Ring = the ring maskuline, but we say der Baum, which means tree but is masculine)
10:35 "This is not an admition of arson." Sure, Doc ;) we believe you.
nothing like starting up this "ON class" playlist and seeing the language described as "chaotic"
I didn’t think I could possibly ever remember this stuff, but I setup a flash card app on my phone, and amazed myself!
Great lessons!
I also just started small group lessons with a tutor, but this is really helping.
Thank you, I never had the chance of putting the teacher on “pause” when I was in school🙏
'Whom' is still used by some of us here in England.
whom'st'd've'le'n't'ly
@@casten_eldritch_blasts lmfao
W H O M S T W O D E N ?
I try to use whom as well . In fact I had to correct a lot of native people in that aspect ( and I’m a foreigner xd).
@@eduardocarbonellbelando6865 I think you being a non-native speaker puts you at an advantage with this, since "whom" is preserved in formal and academic English, but just barely hangs on in standard spoken dialects, mostly around formulaic phrases we all remember like the one Jackson Crawford avoided using that sparked this conversation.
And the thing is, languages are living things. If a word falls out of use and replaced by another word, then it ceases to be correct. In this way English standard is always somewhat behind the curve since academia tends to be linguistically conservative
It seems old Norse grammar is just my like native language, German, when it comes to nouns, which makes it easier. How lucky I am
Got your point by the oddly structure of your first sentence here :) Btw, I'm also impressed with the lexical similarity. At least my tiny competence in German as a fourth language made a relation with the other Germanic languages which is awesome
@@МаксимЕрофеев-э1х if your brain didn't correct it for you right away there is a slight chance your slow.;)
Currently learning old norse for my master's. since I was six classes late, I was recommended looking you up. so far, so good
Thanks so much for these lessons! I'm teaching myself Old Norse, and your videos are a huge asset.
Kind of unrelated to the class, but You should post stuff on tic tok. There are so many Norse “experts” on there it’s insane. Just found your channel today though, looking forward to binging all your videos.
Many people still use 'whom' :) I also use it but when I have to do spellchecks before sending emails, documents, etc. the dictionary does routinely argue that my choice of words are [arch.] (rolls eyes) I don't care if it's "archaic" as long as it says what I intended to say. ^_^
Thank you for these well laid out videos on old Norse. After much searching on computer I finally found a font for my notes with all the alphabet. The old Norse helps understand the difference between Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic, The language started to split due to different influences as more Norse started settling and marrying within the clans. Because the odd norse q is obsolete there is no short cut found for that so far.
Time stamp for me to resume😂 4:38
Wonderful lesson, with an excellent backdrop as ever. And I've learnt where the placename element -garth comes from (for instance Aysgarth, Applegarth and so on )
Latin helps me in understanding U-Umlaut, because if you think of Norse -u as mutated -a all the endings make sense - jörd would be jard-a, and neuter plural haf-a (mari-a, e.g.). All is left is apply U-Umlaut.
Thanks for this, I'm diving ever deeper into the material and I'm at the stage where I should really be understanding cases if I want to understand the original meaning of a text, even when using a wordbook.
If you have any old homework/practice worksheets, you could make those available on Patreon
Thank you for making these videos!
best gotdamned intro ever.
knows all about a dead language but refuses to say whom... I love it.
Thanks Dr. Crawford. I'm a voice over artist and I just completed production of an audio book that had a lot of language that was completely alien to me. It was an introduction to Asatru. But, I used the rules you outlined here to help me when I couldn't find a modern Icelandic pronunciation. I really did my due diligence for the pronunciations. But, sometimes I just went back to an American pronunciation when the Icelandic just sounded "too foreign". Like anything with rolling "r's", Americans don't roll their "r's", by and large. I guess the reviews will let me know how well or how poorly I managed it. I'm certain that your video helped me a lot though.
Love these videos, and this man has such a nice voice.
I really wish I could have a presential old norse class with Dr. Crawford ;-;
Vatn is an uncountable noun in modern Icelandic when talking about water, so it doesn't have a plural form.
Only when talking about a lake would you use the plural: vötn
Is this not the case for old norse?
Though it is a mistake in Old Norse, there are languages where genitive phrases may mark the possessed “object” together with or rather than the possessor. The best known of these is Arabic, where the grammar calls this the “construct state” .
The implication of your lesson is that Americans do not use "whom", is that true? If so it is unusual because we, the English, tend to see American as retaining many archaic English forms. For example I think Americans still say "gotten". And Americans are better at the subjunctive than we are; we tend to simplify it to a simple future. We certainly still say "whom" and it sounds a little awkward when ignored. The oddest thing to our ear about American is the tendency for it to use adjectives as adverbs, "He won big". The river flows quick etc. I learn Bokmal on Duolingo and often have no idea what their English means, in some cases the Norwegian is actually closer to the English than the American is: examples: loft, kjeller, mobil etc.
Your example, “ his blessing was also his curse,” explains something that never made sense to me in Spanish: “Yo soy yo.” “ I am I.” Nominative in both positions. I got in trouble with some spanish speaking friends by pointing at a photo and saying, “ Este es mi.” I thought that would translate to “This is me,” but they insisted that “yo soy yo! yo soy yo!”
knowing swedish makes this a little easier i can see so many cognates
Very informative. Thank you for making these videos.
I truly appreciate all your knowledge and effort. Keep up the great work :)
Thank you for sharing this knowledge!
It's not mentioned here but note that the n d and t is dental in this language unlike in English where these consonants are alveolar
I notis right away that we use som of the nouns to day in Swedish. Singularis Accusative = normal form, Plural Nominative = plural. This is fun to discover.
Edit: so Gardr sounds like Gård. Can it comes from this?
Gård and gardr indeed come from the same root.
The NAGD case order always messes me up... probably because we use NADG in Faroese. I think I usually see NAGD in Norwegian text books or at least Iversen springs to mind (beside it being the standard order in German, of course). Still, that doesn't detract from this course. Kudos.
So, the Germans number their cases? That answers a big question for me which is why do Czechs and Slovaks number their cases too, so NGDAVLI are the 1st through 7th cases, even though Slovak has no vocative.
I have found I have a terrible habit of over complicating this stuff so a couple of bottles of mead later and it becomes much more clear lol
How come "heimr - home" is a masculine noun while in for example Swedish it is neuter?👀
Accusative and Dative always presented a problem to me, it was confusing compared to Nominative and Genitive who are, quite easy to memorize.
So many similarities to German, for instance, 'borg', 'Burg in German.
The way you explained, " masculine, feminine, neuter", made me wonder if literal root of the thing was relevant. The neuter, tree, is from creation/the gods, we know they see mother's as where people (including their hands) come from and, metal smiths were likely, mostly men. I'm sure it might break down with further examples but, does it? You're a good teacher. Thank you.
Your logic, unfortunately, doesn't hold true for most words encountered. While it's true that Masculine occupations like a Smith are indeed of the Masculine Gender and a few other general rules can be applied to a limited amount of other nouns, the Genders of the parts of the body, for instance, are all over the place and make no consistent sense whatsoever - the Norse word for "hand" is Feminine, but the word for "knee" is Neuter, for example.
Excelent! So, does "Sigurđ sló ormr" still means "The serpent struck Sigurd"? Because the one who carries the -r is always the subject who/that performs the action of the verb?
Yes, that's absolutely correct. In general, highly inflected languages such as Norse and German rely far more on the case endings to indicate syntactical relations than mere linear placement as in English. Placing the Subject at the end of a clause rather than in its customary position at the beginning does, however, shift the EMPHASIS of the statement by having us focus more on the Object of the slaying rather than the Subject. Thus, "Sigurđ sló ormr" emphasizes that it is SIGURD the worm happened to strike rather than some other individual. Capisce?
What's the wordbook you mentioned?
Question regarding u umlating with masculine words:
It wasn't mentioned for the masculine nouns, so does it still happen there with words such as garðr for the plural dative?
love the red dead redemption vibe, thanks for these videos though, I can't purchase much, but this has helped a lot already. I sit here with a pen and paper like I'm really in your classroom.
just so I'm kinda getting the whole -r suffix...if I were to do my name in Old norse it'd be Endidraug roughly right? but if people refer to me or I talk about what I did in a game (RP) it'd be Endidraugr?
p.s. I don't mind an answer from anyone.
The Great Courses?
Not really relevant here but still interesting, "He shot I" would actually work and be understood where I am from, the accent around here the (albeit rural) people use is really odd at times, one example would be "I sees him and he sees I" "whare's it to" (ask whare something is, I met a northern lady who struggled with that one) and "How be on" (how are you doing/ how is it going)
What was the dictionary he suggested?
The Cleasby-Vigfusson-- it's public domain, so you can find it in multiple places online, but this is a link to one: lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/texts/oi_cleasbyvigfusson_about.html
@@SwampFeet678 Yeah-- due to the sheer size of the C-V I've never honestly seen a newer print copy that was in price range (one may exist, but I admit due to the size I've stuck to using the online one or a PDF from the Internet Archive, since it's public domain). If you're looking for something to carry around as a hard copy, the Zoëga Concise Dictionary is probably your best bet-- it's basically the C-V, but as the title implies the definitions are shorter and you don't get as much grammar notation, but that allows for it to be more of a portable thing. Amazon has a newer printing here: www.amazon.com/Concise-Dictionary-Icelandic-Language-Guides/dp/0486434311/ -- that said, it is a republication of a 1910 version, but they have the "Look Inside" feature available so you can make sure the printing/text is readable for you.
@@nkhtn663 How do you use it? When it's not set like normal dictionary?
I think being a russian is huge cheat here. We have 6 cases, but it's kinda counterintuitive in a way. Cause "его дар был также его проклятием" = his blessing was also his curse in russian is actualy... Genitive - Nominative - Genitive - Instrumental. haha
5:26 Do we (as in "we", humans who are interested) know why English is so different from the other languages it is related to, in that the genitive must be marked by what essentially is an arbitrary typographic and/or orthographic convention? Why did the English possessive become marked by an apostrophe? 🤔 Was that introduced before the printing press? At the same time lots of French words were introduced that also brought in the -s plurals? What's going on there?
If g is before r in a sentence, does that make it stay a g sound instead of changing to an h sound like in eigi for example?
what is the name of the dictionary he said?
So the inflection is as hard as German then ?
About the genetive. How do you explain its use in "nýtr manngi nás"?
Useful to nobody of corpse?
Or is this some super archaic saying and it actually comes from "nýtr manngi ná-es".
Useful to nobody is corpse?
But then why is it dative?
Can someone wrap their head around this?
Or is it even so archaic that the "nár-es" combination became ná-s?
I still use whom and I'm not even English.
Oh, first comment! :D
Wait, what? I use "whom"!
'Vindr' + land = ......
time to learn a dead language lol
still exists as Norwegian Danish Swedish Faroese and Icelandic
dude shootin down bad grammer boing
Odd that you say “hwat” but not “whom”.
Chasidah *TheFineArtOfWalkingPoint Fried My point was the irony that he uses the conservative wh pronunciation but innovative who form.
Question, PIE languages have those gender cases that you mentioned. I do understand why gender is used when referring to cow or bull or things in that nature. However, certain items (inanimate in particular) still follow those gender rules. May I have your opinion on that? I kind of saw it as either, things seemingly meant to used by males/females as one reason why. The other reason was that the sound of the word would fit to either having better sound flow when speaking a sentence, thus to rhythicalize the sounds so that the sentence itself so that would be recognized as a proper and complete sentence. Example: Seo catto eato se mouseo (rhythicalized). Anyway, may i have your take on this subject?
Gender in language tends to be grammatical rather than natural. Mentally you could just call them "noun class 1", "noun class 2" etc. Languages like Swahili with a more rigorous noun classifying systems tend to have more consistency in these categories but in PIE langs it might as well be arbitrary. The terms masculine feminine and neuter aren't the best way to think about said classes of nouns
So German.