Navigation: 0:40 looking at English verbs as a springboard 18:50 the verb vera ('to be') 25:17 "i-type" weak verb endings 31:54 "a-type" weak verb endings 36:39 strong verb endings 41:38 i-umlaut / i-mutation 47:23 chart of i-mutation effects 51:00 sample strong verb affected by i-mutation (taka) 54:04 strong verb classes 1:02:48 using the classes to figure out strong verbs
Proto-Germanic *flekaną, flak, flēkun, flukanaz Old English _flecan, flæc, flǣcen, ġeflocen_ Old Norse _fleka, flak, fláku, flokinn_ Old High German _flehhan, flah, flahhun, giflohhan_ Gothic _flaíkan, flak, flēkun, flaúkans_ Did I do it right?
Thanks for the videos, but if I may suggest: If you could short your videos into chapters and parts like "Part 1: Present Tense" "Part 2: Past Tense", and add segments in the Videos description like you did in the comments section, they would be much easier to watch and find what one is look for. Grateful
Thanks for the videos, but if I may suggest: If you could short your videos into chapters and parts like "Part 1: Present Tense" "Part 2: Past Tense", and add segments in the Videos description like you did in the comments section, they would be much easier to watch and find what one is look for. Grateful
In making up a language for some characters in a story I'm writing, and I'm wanting to use a combination of Spanish/ English/ old Norse for some of the rules. Any suggestions?
Ertu að grínast í mér, Jackson/Are you kidding me, Dr. Crawford! "Þú vast" later becomes "þú vart" which in Modern Icelandic then became "þú varst" but most Icelanders will pronounce it as "Þú vast" ... and we've come a full circle!!! #Tungumáleruskrýtin #Languagesareweird
Considering how different Old Norse is from Danish, I must say I was positively surprised to look at the classes of verbs where vowels change. I could predict 100% of them just looking at the first word, simply because the changes are the exact same as in Danish. Even for some of the words I don't understand, I can still intuitively guess what the change in vowel will be, it's beautiful, haha!
The umlauts remind me of vowel harmony in Turkish, where vowels in consecutive syllables are either all front vowels or all back vowels (mostly within agglutinated words or words with case endings). This is completely unrelated to Old Norse of course, but the process is just very practical. When the vowels in consecutive syllables change to similar vowels, the words become easier to pronounce.
Engl. "to give" is actually even a loanword from Old Norse. If English had retained the Old English cognate of the Norse word it would probably be "yive" today because the onset was palatalized before front vowels in Old English. I'm just wondering why the Anglo-Saxons would borrow a word for which they had a completely sufficient word themselves. I mean, this is core vocabulary! Great video. Thanks a lot. However, there is one little thing: Could you make it a little louder next time? For me it's really very hard to hear.
It's the same situation with the pronoun "They, them, theirs" (Old Norse: Þeir, þeim, þeirra) and the verb "take" (Old Norse: taka), for example. Extremely common words that the Anglo-Saxons adopted. My theory is that this is the result of how much the Anglo-Saxons mixed with the Norse people who lived in England. It was probably very common for many children to have one English speakign parent, and one Norse speaking parent and their children would have spoken some mixture of Old English and Old Norse.
@@jonko82 There is evidence (that I can't really cite) to support English being either a creole of North and West Germanic with lots of latin loan words or even that English IS a North Germanic language
I am a Flemish Dutch speaker. Thank you for these videos about Old Norse. I am often surprised that old Norse is more intelligible to me than, for example, modern Danish.
Thanks for taking the time for your stellar videos! I'm going to sign up to your patreon page. Could you possibly move the mic closer or increase the recording volume? Thanks again Dr. Crawford! Cheers!
I like showing your videos to my Icelandic friends to see how much Old Norse they understand, and quite a few have asked to hear your speaking modern Icelandic.
The subjunctive has been preserved in English for all verbs in such constructions as "I insisted he come on time" and "We suggest he tell the truth." Also in a number of fixed expressions like "Come hell and high water," "Be that as it may," "Please God," etc.
The present subjunctive is used more frequently in Modern English than one might think. The if-construction is rare, indeed, but there's another construction, whose name I don't know (and I don't even know whether it *has* a name), but you might call it a post-adjective-complement subordinate irrealis construction. Or not. But here are examples: + It is necessary that he be here on time tomorrow. - It is necessary that he *is* here on time tomorrow. (Occasionally you hear that, but it's rare and really sounds off.) + It is imperative that he complete his work before Friday evening! - It is imperative that he *completes* his work before Friday evening! (Again, happens but rare and off-putting.) Now, in a realis construction of the same type, the indicative is used without awkwardness. + (realis) It's good that she isn't sick because she works with children. + (irrealis) It's important that she not get sick because she works with children. Note the reversal of "not" and the subjunctive verb. This further highlights the awkwardness of using the indicative, as in: - *It's important that she not gets sick because she works with children. (The asterisk indicates in this example that it is so wrong as to be considered ungrammatical.) There's another subordinate irrealis construction that uses present subjunctive, such as: + It is my greatest wish that she fall in love with me. - It is my greatest wish that she falls in love with me. Anyway, just thought I'd put those out there because, although it's fair to say the present subjunctive is dying in English, it's still used more often than is immediately apparent when thinking of examples - and it is my hope that it _remain_ in use for many years to come!
Loved this♥ It is very interesting how when comparing the grammar old Norse and modern Icelandic, the verbs are the one that seem to have changed the most (with the nouns having changed the least). Looking forward for your next video. =D
Singular imperative has changed to include ðu/du/tu at the end (eg. ON tak (þú) -> Icel. taktu). The older form still exists but is considered archaic at this point. Weak verbs' first person singular past tense has changed from -ða/da/ta to -ði/di/ti, (eg. ON ek heyrða -> Icel. ég heyrði). 2nd person singular past tense has changed from -t to -st in many strong verbs (eg. ON þú gaft -> Icel. þú gafst). This is likely due to influence from the much middle voice which is used a lot in both Icelandic and ON which always has an -st ending in Icelandic. Speaking of which, the middle voice also has -sk and -k endings in ON which have all changed to -st in Icelandic. This difference is very noticeable because it's used so much and it's not immediately obvious that -st and -k are the same thing. Old Norse allowed -a/-t/-at to signify negation (eg. ON fjár síns *skyli-t* maður þörf þola) but this is entirely gone from Icelandic. Even in saga-era ON this was seemingly almost archaic and rarely seen outside of poetry. The subjunctive is used less in modern Icelandic and seems to be almost dead among the youngest speakers, although it's mostly unchanged among educated speakers. Icelandic has a new present continuous tense not found in ON formed with vera að + infinitive verb. So (ON 'ek horfi' -> Icel. 'ég er að horfa' for "I'm watching"). Some miscellaneous changes as well like hjálpa becoming a weak verb I noticed in this video. So the present participle is hjálpaður and hólpinn has become it's own adjective. Probably missed something but those are some of the major differences. As you can see Icelandic morphology is extremely conservative and the orthography reflects that, being mostly identical to Old Norse despite the pronunciation being quite a bit different as dr. Crawford likes pointing out every single video.
I’m trying so hard to have at least a skeleton understanding of this amazing language, but many videos in I truly think I’m just never going to understand it. I can’t figure where to even start, I’m annoyed with myself as this gentleman is obviously teaching clearly and concisely.
@@bobthabuilda1525 that’s really kind of you, I sort of abandoned the entire thing. I appreciate your good words, I’ll give it another stab and, unlike last time, not expect immediate results. Thank you so much, wishing you a wonderful day.
It's funny, in modern Danish you can (still) say "Du est" (You are), instead of "Du er", though it's optional and a bit archaic, only the Queen and myself would use the old verb forms (there are quite a few of them). You'd also say/write "Estu hjemme?" (Are you home?), instead of "Er du hjemme?". Don't know why Danish has retained some of the older inflections as optional, but I like the more complex and inflected way! Though sadly I'm the minority, so these old forms'll soon go extinct..
"Jeg er" (I am), "du est" (you are), "han/hun/det es" (he/she/it is), "vi erem" (we are), "I eret" (you pl. are), "de ere" (they are).. I think that's how it goes! I've only seen the first three used though.
RemyMartin Do you have a theory as to why Danish/Swedish/Norwegian have lost so many inflections (and a noun gender) compared to Icelandic? I find this curious. The same situation exists with Dutch and German.
@Josh Adams, I'm not a linguist by any means, but I think it has something to do with larger cities and the mixing of different people and dialects. You don't have to drive very far out of Copenhagen before you'll find people who still use three noun genders, the dative case and more verb inflections. (Some dialects include Vendelbomål, Sydfynsk and Bornholmsk). I think the same goes for rural Sweden and Norway.
RemyMartin That reminds me of one theory of how English lost inflections: the mixing of natives and Viking settlers, who had different inflections. Rather than deciding which inflections to keep, the English largely stopped using inflections. (That said, use of 's for possession is a vestige of the genitive case. The m in "whom" is a vestige of the dative or accusative case.)
Start watching the video Background video while doing other things Notice video is playing for quite a while Look at time on video Over an hour long #thisiswhyisubscribed
Hey, very interesting ! I have a question though, I'm currently learning old norse on my own, and your videos are just perfect. Really, it helps so much. But some things bug me : How can we find the type of a weak verb ? Let's take vaka for instance. It conjugates like this : vaki vakir vakir Vökum Vakið vaka but why ? Why exactly wouldn't it conjugate by using the a-type : vaka vakar vakar Vökum Vakið Vaka Same for Hafa : Why would it conjugates as an i-type (1 sg : Hefi) ? why would gera be i-type and not a-type ? another verb , Maela, whose first person becomes Maeli, does that too, and lot of others. Why ? I can't find a way to make sense out of that. At first I thought it had to do something with long and short stems, but the verb "tala" (to talk) is a-type and not i-type. then I thought it could be about the consonants at the end of the stem , but herja is a-type (herja herjar herjar hörjum herjið herja) , and spyrja is what I'd call a ja-type (spyr spyrr spyrr spyrjum spyrið spyrja) , and the same can be seen with leita (to search) , a-type , and veita (to grant), i-type. Why do verbs that seem so close to each other conjugate differently ? If you could enlighten me, that would be great !
In German we'd construct a present progressive with an adverb, similar to "I drive now" or "I drive at this moment". Did Old Norse use such constructs?
Hey can you talk about some noteworthy semantic or syntactic differences between old norse and modern icelandic? These languages appear so extraordinarily rich in idiomatic idiosyncrasies that i think eventual changes in these would be the greatest contributor to their overall stylistic difference.
I'd love to see a video on some of the major syntactic differences. For a native Icelandic speaker reading the sagas and Eddas those are by far the most obvious differences. Some of the differences are clear like ON not using the dummy pronoun það nearly as extensively as Icelandic but other differences are more subtle and harder for a layman to grasp.
In my dialect of English, the first person singular form of 'to be' has taken over almost all other persons except for third person in the present so it is: I am You am He/she/it is We am You all am They am I was You was He/she/it was We was They was Also, we've got separate negating verbs for 'to be', 'didn't' and 'don't. For example: I day do that. (Didn't) I dow (like dough) do that. (Don't) I ay home. (Am not) I war (like bar) home. (wasn't)
Is the participle / "dummy" verb from French influence on the Germanic English language? Also I want to add that "to be" in Danish/Swedish/Norwegian is very regular, but we are probably the odd ones out. 'To be' in German is hell - but so is everything else. It's funny. The sea has isolated Icelandic and Faroese, but I assume the mountains have isolated the Germans.
Dr. Crawford - forgive me if I've missed the answer to this question somewhere but what percentage of the Old Norse language would you say has been lost to the ages? And if a rough percentage of that which has been lost can be estimated, would say it is mostly vocabulary?
Thanks for another wonderful video! Do you really think the subjunctive is dead in English? What about expressions like, "It's important that he study every day" ?
Hi, i’m from indonesia, i want to write a sentence with an old norse. Can you help me? I want to translate from English sentences to old norse, thank you so much🙏🏼
Sir Jackson, when I looked up some Old Norse lessons online, I came across a vowel "į" or an i with a hook. What does this mean? How do you pronounce it?
Thanx your Post's are so informative. Love them. So how did Oden get to be a good guy? That's my interest or any of the God's. Drunk on gold fever. Again thanx
I guess, old english would ask somehow lik: "drivest thou". And then it is again like in contemporary german. No wonder why norse handles it similarly.
From what I can tell, no, it's not from Swedish. Proto-Finnic underwent an irregular *s > *h sound change with this pronoun so Proto-Finnic *hän (Finnish hän, Ingrian hää, Veps hän etc.) is cognate with Proto-Samic *sonë (Northern Sami son, Skolt Sami son, Southern Sami satne, Pite Sami sån etc.)
Navigation:
0:40 looking at English verbs as a springboard
18:50 the verb vera ('to be')
25:17 "i-type" weak verb endings
31:54 "a-type" weak verb endings
36:39 strong verb endings
41:38 i-umlaut / i-mutation
47:23 chart of i-mutation effects
51:00 sample strong verb affected by i-mutation (taka)
54:04 strong verb classes
1:02:48 using the classes to figure out strong verbs
Proto-Germanic *flekaną, flak, flēkun, flukanaz
Old English _flecan, flæc, flǣcen, ġeflocen_
Old Norse _fleka, flak, fláku, flokinn_
Old High German _flehhan, flah, flahhun, giflohhan_
Gothic _flaíkan, flak, flēkun, flaúkans_
Did I do it right?
Jackson Crawford Thank you very much for your videos. The navigation here and note at the beginning of this reupload are both very handy!
Thanks for the videos, but if I may suggest: If you could short your videos into chapters and parts like "Part 1: Present Tense" "Part 2: Past Tense", and add segments in the Videos description like you did in the comments section, they would be much easier to watch and find what one is look for.
Grateful
Thanks for the videos, but if I may suggest: If you could short your videos into chapters and parts like "Part 1: Present Tense" "Part 2: Past Tense", and add segments in the Videos description like you did in the comments section, they would be much easier to watch and find what one is look for.
Grateful
In making up a language for some characters in a story I'm writing, and I'm wanting to use a combination of Spanish/ English/ old Norse for some of the rules. Any suggestions?
I never thought in my life that I would be interested in an hour long grammar video before finding this channel.
That Smeagol impression really caught me off guard!
William Bilson I watched the entire thing, but wasn't able to find it, could you give me the timestamp?
Berkay Tüzel it's just about every time he mentioned the word "smjúga" he did it in a smeagol voice
_Gollum!_ _Gollum!_
49:06
He also does it again at 56:10
Ertu að grínast í mér, Jackson/Are you kidding me, Dr. Crawford!
"Þú vast" later becomes "þú vart" which in Modern Icelandic then became "þú varst" but most Icelanders will pronounce it as "Þú vast" ... and we've come a full circle!!!
#Tungumáleruskrýtin
#Languagesareweird
Considering how different Old Norse is from Danish, I must say I was positively surprised to look at the classes of verbs where vowels change. I could predict 100% of them just looking at the first word, simply because the changes are the exact same as in Danish. Even for some of the words I don't understand, I can still intuitively guess what the change in vowel will be, it's beautiful, haha!
The umlauts remind me of vowel harmony in Turkish, where vowels in consecutive syllables are either all front vowels or all back vowels (mostly within agglutinated words or words with case endings). This is completely unrelated to Old Norse of course, but the process is just very practical. When the vowels in consecutive syllables change to similar vowels, the words become easier to pronounce.
This video will keep me busy for a long time, thanks.
Thank you SO MUCH, Dr. Crawford! You videos are PURE GOLD, but this one about verbs is simply DIAMOND!
Best regards from Brazil!
I as a Swede finds it fascinating that our language has continuously devolved in complexity since the 10th century
Ikke udviklet sig - afviklet sig haha, just præcis
Engl. "to give" is actually even a loanword from Old Norse. If English had retained the Old English cognate of the Norse word it would probably be "yive" today because the onset was palatalized before front vowels in Old English. I'm just wondering why the Anglo-Saxons would borrow a word for which they had a completely sufficient word themselves. I mean, this is core vocabulary!
Great video. Thanks a lot. However, there is one little thing: Could you make it a little louder next time? For me it's really very hard to hear.
It's the same situation with the pronoun "They, them, theirs" (Old Norse: Þeir, þeim, þeirra) and the verb "take" (Old Norse: taka), for example. Extremely common words that the Anglo-Saxons adopted.
My theory is that this is the result of how much the Anglo-Saxons mixed with the Norse people who lived in England.
It was probably very common for many children to have one English speakign parent, and one Norse speaking parent and their children would have spoken some mixture of Old English and Old Norse.
@@jonko82 There is evidence (that I can't really cite) to support English being either a creole of North and West Germanic with lots of latin loan words or even that English IS a North Germanic language
I am a Flemish Dutch speaker. Thank you for these videos about Old Norse. I am often surprised that old Norse is more intelligible to me than, for example, modern Danish.
Thanks for taking the time for your stellar videos! I'm going to sign up to your patreon page. Could you possibly move the mic closer or increase the recording volume? Thanks again Dr. Crawford! Cheers!
I like showing your videos to my Icelandic friends to see how much Old Norse they understand, and quite a few have asked to hear your speaking modern Icelandic.
could you do a video like this but about old English conjugations?
The subjunctive has been preserved in English for all verbs in such constructions as "I insisted he come on time" and "We suggest he tell the truth." Also in a number of fixed expressions like "Come hell and high water," "Be that as it may," "Please God," etc.
The present subjunctive is used more frequently in Modern English than one might think. The if-construction is rare, indeed, but there's another construction, whose name I don't know (and I don't even know whether it *has* a name), but you might call it a post-adjective-complement subordinate irrealis construction. Or not. But here are examples:
+ It is necessary that he be here on time tomorrow.
- It is necessary that he *is* here on time tomorrow. (Occasionally you hear that, but it's rare and really sounds off.)
+ It is imperative that he complete his work before Friday evening!
- It is imperative that he *completes* his work before Friday evening! (Again, happens but rare and off-putting.)
Now, in a realis construction of the same type, the indicative is used without awkwardness.
+ (realis) It's good that she isn't sick because she works with children.
+ (irrealis) It's important that she not get sick because she works with children.
Note the reversal of "not" and the subjunctive verb. This further highlights the awkwardness of using the indicative, as in:
- *It's important that she not gets sick because she works with children.
(The asterisk indicates in this example that it is so wrong as to be considered ungrammatical.)
There's another subordinate irrealis construction that uses present subjunctive, such as:
+ It is my greatest wish that she fall in love with me.
- It is my greatest wish that she falls in love with me.
Anyway, just thought I'd put those out there because, although it's fair to say the present subjunctive is dying in English, it's still used more often than is immediately apparent when thinking of examples - and it is my hope that it _remain_ in use for many years to come!
Loved this♥
It is very interesting how when comparing the grammar old Norse and modern Icelandic, the verbs are the one that seem to have changed the most (with the nouns having changed the least).
Looking forward for your next video. =D
Singular imperative has changed to include ðu/du/tu at the end (eg. ON tak (þú) -> Icel. taktu). The older form still exists but is considered archaic at this point.
Weak verbs' first person singular past tense has changed from -ða/da/ta to -ði/di/ti, (eg. ON ek heyrða -> Icel. ég heyrði).
2nd person singular past tense has changed from -t to -st in many strong verbs (eg. ON þú gaft -> Icel. þú gafst). This is likely due to influence from the much middle voice which is used a lot in both Icelandic and ON which always has an -st ending in Icelandic. Speaking of which, the middle voice also has -sk and -k endings in ON which have all changed to -st in Icelandic. This difference is very noticeable because it's used so much and it's not immediately obvious that -st and -k are the same thing.
Old Norse allowed -a/-t/-at to signify negation (eg. ON fjár síns *skyli-t* maður þörf þola) but this is entirely gone from Icelandic. Even in saga-era ON this was seemingly almost archaic and rarely seen outside of poetry.
The subjunctive is used less in modern Icelandic and seems to be almost dead among the youngest speakers, although it's mostly unchanged among educated speakers.
Icelandic has a new present continuous tense not found in ON formed with vera að + infinitive verb. So (ON 'ek horfi' -> Icel. 'ég er að horfa' for "I'm watching").
Some miscellaneous changes as well like hjálpa becoming a weak verb I noticed in this video. So the present participle is hjálpaður and hólpinn has become it's own adjective.
Probably missed something but those are some of the major differences. As you can see Icelandic morphology is extremely conservative and the orthography reflects that, being mostly identical to Old Norse despite the pronunciation being quite a bit different as dr. Crawford likes pointing out every single video.
I’m trying so hard to have at least a skeleton understanding of this amazing language, but many videos in I truly think I’m just never going to understand it. I can’t figure where to even start, I’m annoyed with myself as this gentleman is obviously teaching clearly and concisely.
@@bobthabuilda1525 that’s really kind of you, I sort of abandoned the entire thing. I appreciate your good words, I’ll give it another stab and, unlike last time, not expect immediate results. Thank you so much, wishing you a wonderful day.
It's funny, in modern Danish you can (still) say "Du est" (You are), instead of "Du er", though it's optional and a bit archaic, only the Queen and myself would use the old verb forms (there are quite a few of them). You'd also say/write "Estu hjemme?" (Are you home?), instead of "Er du hjemme?". Don't know why Danish has retained some of the older inflections as optional, but I like the more complex and inflected way! Though sadly I'm the minority, so these old forms'll soon go extinct..
RemyMartin I've never ever heard about that, how interesting. I'm Norwegian myself, and there's no way that would be used in modern Norwegian.
"Jeg er" (I am), "du est" (you are), "han/hun/det es" (he/she/it is), "vi erem" (we are), "I eret" (you pl. are), "de ere" (they are).. I think that's how it goes! I've only seen the first three used though.
RemyMartin Do you have a theory as to why Danish/Swedish/Norwegian have lost so many inflections (and a noun gender) compared to Icelandic? I find this curious. The same situation exists with Dutch and German.
@Josh Adams, I'm not a linguist by any means, but I think it has something to do with larger cities and the mixing of different people and dialects. You don't have to drive very far out of Copenhagen before you'll find people who still use three noun genders, the dative case and more verb inflections. (Some dialects include Vendelbomål, Sydfynsk and Bornholmsk). I think the same goes for rural Sweden and Norway.
RemyMartin That reminds me of one theory of how English lost inflections: the mixing of natives and Viking settlers, who had different inflections. Rather than deciding which inflections to keep, the English largely stopped using inflections. (That said, use of 's for possession is a vestige of the genitive case. The m in "whom" is a vestige of the dative or accusative case.)
Thank you for making this. When I get to work on my Language for my books this will help.
Thanks very much for this! It's the easiest-to-understand explication of ON verbs I've seen. I feel I have a solid handle on this now.
Start watching the video
Background video while doing other things
Notice video is playing for quite a while
Look at time on video
Over an hour long
#thisiswhyisubscribed
You know you want to do an entire video in that Smeagle voice.
I vote for the cowboy with mountains in the background.
Excited to learn....
in some dialects of american English you can also drop do and did from the beginning of the sentence and just raise your intimation at the end.
Hey dr. Crawford, could you go in depth into the icelandic sagas? Your videos are great, thank you.
Thank you for your brilliant videos!
When did the kongurent verb forms in the scandinavian languages disappear - like: jeg, du, ... er?
Hey, very interesting ! I have a question though, I'm currently learning old norse on my own, and your videos are just perfect. Really, it helps so much. But some things bug me :
How can we find the type of a weak verb ? Let's take vaka for instance. It conjugates like this :
vaki
vakir
vakir
Vökum
Vakið
vaka
but why ? Why exactly wouldn't it conjugate by using the a-type :
vaka
vakar
vakar
Vökum
Vakið
Vaka
Same for Hafa : Why would it conjugates as an i-type (1 sg : Hefi) ? why would gera be i-type and not a-type ?
another verb , Maela, whose first person becomes Maeli, does that too, and lot of others. Why ? I can't find a way to make sense out of that. At first I thought it had to do something with long and short stems, but the verb "tala" (to talk) is a-type and not i-type.
then I thought it could be about the consonants at the end of the stem , but herja is a-type (herja herjar herjar hörjum herjið herja) , and spyrja is
what I'd call a ja-type (spyr spyrr spyrr spyrjum spyrið spyrja) , and the same can be seen with leita (to search) , a-type , and veita (to grant), i-type. Why do verbs that seem so close to each other conjugate differently ?
If you could enlighten me, that would be great !
In German we'd construct a present progressive with an adverb, similar to "I drive now" or "I drive at this moment". Did Old Norse use such constructs?
Max Maria Wacholder
old English did, but that's for the future tense I think. "I drive now" in Medieval English means "I shall drive"
Hey can you talk about some noteworthy semantic or syntactic differences between old norse and modern icelandic? These languages appear so extraordinarily rich in idiomatic idiosyncrasies that i think eventual changes in these would be the greatest contributor to their overall stylistic difference.
I'd love to see a video on some of the major syntactic differences. For a native Icelandic speaker reading the sagas and Eddas those are by far the most obvious differences. Some of the differences are clear like ON not using the dummy pronoun það nearly as extensively as Icelandic but other differences are more subtle and harder for a layman to grasp.
In my dialect of English, the first person singular form of 'to be' has taken over almost all other persons except for third person in the present so it is:
I am
You am
He/she/it is
We am
You all am
They am
I was
You was
He/she/it was
We was
They was
Also, we've got separate negating verbs for 'to be', 'didn't' and 'don't. For example:
I day do that. (Didn't)
I dow (like dough) do that. (Don't)
I ay home. (Am not)
I war (like bar) home. (wasn't)
Is the participle / "dummy" verb from French influence on the Germanic English language?
Also I want to add that "to be" in Danish/Swedish/Norwegian is very regular, but we are probably the odd ones out.
'To be' in German is hell - but so is everything else. It's funny. The sea has isolated Icelandic and Faroese, but I assume the mountains have isolated the Germans.
Do you have a video on abstract words/thinking in Old Norse?
Skriver eksamen om mellomnorsk der jeg skal analysere to diplom fra 1358 og 1520. Denne videoen hjalp veldig!
Dr. Crawford - forgive me if I've missed the answer to this question somewhere but what percentage of the Old Norse language would you say has been lost to the ages? And if a rough percentage of that which has been lost can be estimated, would say it is mostly vocabulary?
Thank you for this.
excellent, thanks so much!
Thanks for another wonderful video! Do you really think the subjunctive is dead in English? What about expressions like, "It's important that he study every day" ?
" ''Let's be enemies', if you're riding the bus in Berkeley." Haha!
How do you tell future tense?
Hi, i’m from indonesia, i want to write a sentence with an old norse. Can you help me? I want to translate from English sentences to old norse, thank you so much🙏🏼
Sir Jackson, when I looked up some Old Norse lessons online, I came across a vowel "į" or an i with a hook. What does this mean? How do you pronounce it?
Where can we get old norse vocabulary?
That "fleck" part was so sad!
Great video!
Quality content
>see length
oh boy
Yes! Just as I'm sitting down to eat!
Why is there no i-mutation in kallađi and kallađir?
Because the *i* in those forms was actually a Proto-Germanic *ē*.
ek kalzōdǭ
þū kalzōdēs
iz kalzōdē
wīz kalzōdēdum
jūz kalzōdēdud
īz kalzōdēdun
Thanx your Post's are so informative. Love them. So how did Oden get to be a good guy? That's my interest or any of the God's. Drunk on gold fever. Again thanx
mmm, I could be flecking some KFC right now...
can "you" be used instead of "y'all" ? Would "y'all' be a regional variant?
ye.
And yes. It's mid west U.S. cowboy accent :P
"If I were a rich man...."
>whith
I have heard it all.
I guess, old english would ask somehow lik: "drivest thou".
And then it is again like in contemporary german. No wonder why norse handles it similarly.
That is some different letters, but the same words, and even more: the same syntax. Isn't it?
Ek veit einn, at ek get smíða... verbs
Haha only real dr. Jackson Crawford fans will understand
The Finnish third-person singular pronoun is "hän". I guess they picked that up from Swedish, perhaps.
From what I can tell, no, it's not from Swedish. Proto-Finnic underwent an irregular *s > *h sound change with this pronoun so Proto-Finnic *hän (Finnish hän, Ingrian hää, Veps hän etc.) is cognate with Proto-Samic *sonë (Northern Sami son, Skolt Sami son, Southern Sami satne, Pite Sami sån etc.)