Old English

KEYTERMS

1. A set of key terms useful for the study of Old English.

VOWEL CHART

2. An interactive drag-and-drop exercise that asks you to place the vowels of Old English in the appropriate place on a diagram of the mouth.

TRANSCRIPTION

3. An exercise in pdf format based on an Old English translation of the story of the Tower of Babel. For an audio recording see the link below.

LISTEN TO OLD ENGLISH 4. Listen to audio excerpts of the following Old English translations: the Tower of BabelThe Dream of the RoodThe Seafarer, and the Rune Poem.

GENDER

5. An exercise in pdf format on grammatical gender in Old English.

INFLECTIONAL SURVIVORS

6. There are some surprising survivals of Old English inflection in Modern English. Read about some of them. The last three ask you to do some investigative work.

STRONG AND WEAK VERBS

7. An exercise on distinguishing strong and weak verbs, using the Tower of Babel passage, which we'll refer to throughout the course. A link on this page will let you print out the Babel passage again if necessary.

SYNTAX

8.Using the Tower of Babel passage, this exercise will ask you to determine the syntactical order of Old English parts of speech.

FOR THE CURIOUS

9. Optional. To see a complete grammatical analysis of a simple text, visit the page created by Peter Baker, which he calls "Extreme Annotation." It takes the Old English translation of the first Psalm ("Blessed is the man who does not enter the counsel of the unrighteous, etc.") and subjects it to a word-by-word analysis. This is not an exercise to complete for section, but rather a chance to see up close how Old English is more richly inflected than Modern English.

Note: for any exercise that asks you to write out something, bring your written work to section.