Suggestions for Medieval Language books

Does anyone have any reccommendations on books for learning Middle Welsh, Old Irish, Gothic, Old Norse, Old French, etc? I've already done some study in Old English, and a little Medieval Spanish and Classical Latin, and I'm just crazy enough to try as many dead languages as possible!! :)

There's a set of 3: grammar, reader, glossary, if I remember correctly, for Old Norse. I know someone who intends to try to learn it using them. I'll have to dig around in my files to find the info.

I'm back. For online courses and books, check out http://www.northvegr.org/language.php#norse

They list a place to get the 3 books from amazon.uk, but only one is available from amazon in the US. I have the info from a place in the US I could e-mail you if you wish. I don't think this site would let me paste in the attachment with all the info.

Back again 8-) I finally figured out where I got the info in the above-mentioned document I thought I'd have to e-mail:
http://www.acmrs.org/publications/mrts/vsnr.html

Enjoy!

Trying again:
http://www.acmrs.org/publications/mrts/vsnr.html

Librarything keeps cutting off the end of the URL:
Add snr.html to that v

Erilarlo - LT cuts off the end of URLs, but if you click on the link, they work. I guess it's just to keep really long URLs from cluttering up messages. All of the links you posted worked.

CG - I have had experience with Old Norse and Middle Welsh. If you've done Old English, Norse ought to be a piece of cake. (Actually, if you just read Old Norse out loud, it sounds like English.) The 3-part book Erilarlo mentions is A New Introduction to Old Norse by Anthony Faulkes. Those are very well-written, and you should be able to pick up Old Norse on your own pretty easily.

Middle Welsh is a slightly different matter. Celtic languages have some pretty quirky things about them, and your background in Germanic and Romance languages might not be all that helpful. The big problem with Middle Welsh is that there isn't a good introductory book.

There are two websites out there that aim to be introductions to Middle Welsh:
http://canol.home.att.net/index.html - Reading Middle Welsh, by Gareth Morgan
http://heatherrosejones.com/medievalwels... - a Medieval Welsh self-instruction course by Heather Jones
They are both very good, but will only take you so far. Beyond that, you're stuck with A Grammar of Middle Welsh by D. S. Evans, which is amazingly comprehensive, but painfully poorly organized and dense. All that is not to say you can't learn Middle Welsh on our own - especially if you're good with languages, you ought to be able to do it.

Good luck! And feel free to contact me if you have further questions about Welsh!

Regarding Old Irish: The standard reference in two volumes (grammar and dictionary) is from Rudolf Thurneysen: Handbuch des Alt-Irischen, Heidelberg, Carl Winter, 1909. This got recently translated into English by D. A. Binchy and Osborn Bergin: A grammar of Old Irish, ISBN 1-85500-161-6.

A Grammar of Old Irish is indeed the old standby. Its relationship to Handbuch des Altirischen is somewhat complicated: it is not just a translation, but also incorporates drafts of a revised English edition that Thurneysen was preparing before the War at the request of the Irish government. (The German first appears in 1909; the English in 1946.) Even if you are okay with either English or German, the English may still be superior. The second volume is Old Irish Reader.

If you can read both French and Late Latin (it isn't clear), a different approach to Old French would be to just review the grammar (for instance, some of the chapters of From Vulgar Latin to Old French) and then dive into reading texts with French or English glosses.

When studying Gothic, we used Manuel de la langue gotique, again in French. Grammar of the Gothic Language is classic, too. When they get to readings, both will assume that the student is comfortable with Koine: rather than giving a translation of the Wulfila's translation, they'll give the original. If you aren't comfortable with NT Greek, translations of the Bible aren't hard to come by, of course.

Thanks everybody!! I can't wait to get started learning! I'm also glad to see I'm not the only language nut. I'm particularly excited about the Welsh--even though I have no experience with Celtic languages. In college I took a course on Medieval Welsh Lit and also visited Wales and compeletely fell in love with it.

I don't think I could manage Welsh, but I visited Wales and loved it, too 8-)

12: Oh, Welsh is *easy* ;-) At least it's relatively phonetic.

For Old Irish, how about David Shifter's Sengoidelc: Old Irish for Beginners? I haven't gone very far with it yet myself, but it's worth it for the sheep cartoons...

As much as my previous post was cautious about Welsh, Gwernin is right - it is easy. I don't have a gift for languages, and Middle Welsh has been the easiest for me of every language I've ever tried. There are a couple of really perverse things about the language, but you'll discover those right off the bat, and get used to them really quickly. Once you've mastered lenition, the rest of the language is a piece of cake.

For Gothic, I highly recommend Bennet's Introduction to the Gothic Language. I taught myself from it last summer and found it immensely useful.