Tip Sheet

ENGL6699 Old English

TIP SHEET

The final exam is heavily weighted toward translation, and the ultimate goal of the class, after all, is to be able to read and translate Old English. Any gaps in grammatical knowledge will affect your ability to translate, but some gaps will hurt you more than others. So here are my top twelve things you should definitely memorize and know inside and out. This is pretty stripped-down; i.e., I’ve kept the list short so that you can really prioritize. I’ve also arranged it with the most important things nearest the top.

1. The demonstrative. Almost every sentence you will ever see in OE will have at least one demonstrative in it. If you don’t know the forms, you can easily confuse the cases of the nouns, which will make it harder to translate. Know your demonstratives!
2. Personal pronouns. Ditto.
   
3. A word with –es is a masculine or neuter noun or adjective, and it will always be genitive singular.
   
   
4. A word with –um is a noun or adjective. It will always be dative. If the word is a noun, it will always be dative plural
   
   
5. A word with –as is always a plural noun. It is either masculine or neuter, and it is either nominative or accusative plural.
   
   
6. A verb ending in –st is 2^nd person singular.
   
   
7. A verb with an –ed or –od in the middle of it is in the past tense, and it is a weak verb.
   
   
8. A verb ending in –on is past plural indicative.
   
   
9. A verb ending in –en is plural subjunctive.
   
   
10. A word ending in –ende is a present participle.
    
    
11. A word with –ena is a noun or adjective, and it will always be genitive plural.
    
    
12. A word with –ra is an adjective, and it will always be genitive plural.