Elementary Old Irish I

This course is an introduction to the grammar of the Old Irish language as it is attested in contemporary documents from the 8th and 9th centuries CE and as it is reflected in later manuscripts. Old Irish has a number of unusual features for a western Indo-European language including such oddities as verb-initial word order, initial mutations, conjugated prepositions, accentually conditioned allomorphies. These features are much easier to acquire with some knowledge of where they came from and how they relate to cognate features in more familiar European languages like Latin. In this course we will combine instruction in the synchronic grammar of the language (learning paradigms, memorizing vocabulary, internalizing syntactic rules) with some degree of historical explanation. But in addition to its interesting grammar, Old Irish is also the vehicle for one of the earliest vernacular literatures of Western Europe. Authors writing in Old Irish produced a distinct literary tradition of great interest to students of Medieval Europe. In this class we will start to read some of this literature, both prose and poetry as well as selections from the Old Irish glosses.