Old Irish resources
I get the feeling that there is a lot of useful material for Irish on the Internet, even Old Irish, but it is poorly indexed. I have found some resources which fascinate me.
The 1890 Kuno Meyer edition of The Voyage of Bran, my favourite of all Irish mythological stories, is available with the Old Irish text and English translation along with Alfred Nutt’s companion volume of criticism. Meyer’s Irish Metrics can be found online in a perfect demonstration of how not to digitize a book.
The Old Irish text of the Aided Froích (“The Death of Fróech”) edited by John Strachan in 1903 is helpfully presented with all grammatical forms explicated. The Timeline of the Irish Language found on this site is quite interesting.
I am fortunate enough to have two classmates who are native speakers of Irish, and think that I shall get started on the modern language with the hopes of more efficiently learning the Old and Middle forms of Irish.
September 30th, 2005 at 05:44
Thanks for the Meyer Metrics tip. Yeah, that interface sucks. I downloaded the JPG’s and PDF’ed them together.
October 4th, 2005 at 18:53
By all means learn Modern Irish — I hadn’t planned to (what does an Indo-Europeanist need with Modern Irish?), but when I got to the Dublin Institute a lecturer told us all that we would never understand earlier forms of the language without a grounding in the modern spoken language: “Even the great Thurneysen, who could identify a deuterotonic irregular verb at fifty yards, sometimes confused is and tá, a mistake no first-year student of Modern Irish would make.” And that turned out to be perfectly true. I very quickly found myself getting a much better feel for Old Irish, and annotating my Thurneysen with modern forms helped me fix both in my head.
April 10th, 2008 at 17:49
Thanks for the links! :-)
Here would be the updated link for the Voyage of Bran:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/vob/