Old English

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

VOWELS & CONSONANTS 

2. Four activities showing the correspondence between the spelling and pronunciation of Old English. Please read the corresponding pages in our textbook before beginning. 
A. a fill-in-the-blank exercise to place Old English vowels in the appropriate place on the vowel chart (using IPA characters); 
B. a follow-up exercise asks you to identify vowels by their description; 
C. try reading an excerpt of the Old English translation of the story of the Tower of Babel from Genesis (for an audio recording see the exercise below); 
D. an exercise to give an IPA transcription of Old English words, some drawn from the Babel passage, some more general.

LISTEN TO OLD ENGLISH

3. Listen to audio excerpts of the following Old English translations: the Tower of Babel, (see above), and excerpts from The Dream of the Rood, The Seafarer, and the Rune Poem from CEEL p. 13

4. An exercise on grammatical gender in Old English.

NERDING OUT
INFLECTIONAL SURVIVORS

5. 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.

6. 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.

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

NERDING OUT
A DEEP DIVE

8. 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. You can see up close how Old English is more richly inflected than Modern English.