Introductions to Older Languages – serie

Occitan lyric poetry for language learnersA Troubadour Reader, a supplement to William D. Paden's Introduction to Old Occitan, provides a diverse selection of thirty medieval lyric poems in Occitan for language learners. Featuring poems by women, poems composed especially early or especially late in the language's literary use, and poems that feature Occitan in contact with other languages, the book highlights the range and wealth of medieval Occitan lyric poetry. Each poem is presented with a brief introduction, glosses on the text, and notes after each stanza. The volume also includes a section on basic Occitan grammar, a list of manuscripts, bibliographical references, and an index.

This handbook was written specifically for beginning students. It presents twenty-seven graded readings, each accompanied by a vocabulary and an explanation of grammatical details; the final chapter provides a sample of the Codex Argenteus. Among the readings, the first seven are in effect preliminary exercises. The remaining twenty readings represent the Gothic Bible and the Skeireins. The external history of the language is also outlined, as well as the elements of phonetics, and the essentials of phonologic and analogic change.

The first section, on the grammar, presents reading selections from Marie de France's lai "Fresne" and selections in two major literary dialects of Old French--Anglo-Norman and Picard. These are followed by chapters on Old French morphology and syntax; phonology sections are included at the end of each chapter. Contains a glossary, an index, and a select bibliography.

An Introduction to Old Occitan is the only textbook in print for learning the language used by the troubadours in southern France during the Middle Ages. Each of the thirty-two chapters discusses a subject in the study of the language (e.g., stressed vowels, subjunctive mood) and includes an exercise based on a reading of an Occitan text that has been edited afresh for this volume. An essential glossary analyzes every occurrence of every word in the readings and gives cognates in other Romance languages as well as the source of each word in Latin or other languages. The book also contains a list of prefixes, infixes, and suffixes and a dictionary of proper names. An accompanying compact disc includes discussion of the pronunciation of the language, with illustrations from the texts in the book, and musical performances by Elizabeth Aubrey, of the University of Iowa.

This unique textbook teaches the Old English language, pairing grammatical instruction with Old English passages from historical and literary documents in chronological order and provides a summary of major events. Fifty lessons present translation passages from the Peterborough manuscript of the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Alfredian translation of the Universal History of Paulus Orosius, and other prose and poetic texts. Supplementary sections in each lesson provide additional lexical, historical, literary, and cultural information relevant to the translation passages, and the lessons are reinforced by brief exercises and advanced translation sentences. A section of twenty-six advanced readings features a generous assortment of poetry, including passages from Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Dream of the Rood, and The Wife's Lament. The book concludes with a thorough grammatical appendix as well as glossaries of linguistic terms, proper names, and Old English words.