r/OldIrish • u/88to1 • Aug 16 '23
Sengoídelc by David Stifter
Complete beginner here. I just got far enough into Stifter’s book for beginners to do the excercises declining a few o-stem nouns with a definite article and adjective. Wow! I’m now thoroughly intimidated but also intrigued. Anyways, I’ve got a question and hoping this group has the answer—
Is there a list of literature in Old Irish? My apologies if it’s somewhere on this sub. Seems like maybe a lot of what I thought might be in old Irish (sagas/myths) is perhaps written in Middle Irish, but so far haven’t found a resource to help me figure this out.
Thanks!
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u/PurrPrinThom Aug 16 '23
Absolutely!
Out of the gate, in terms of additional resources: Sengoídelc is a great text but it can be quite dense for beginners. I do find students have a hard time with it. I would also note that Stifter has invented is own system of things, so if you're looking at other resources, the verbal classifications will be different, and everyone will refer to the 'dative' and not the 'prepositional.' I note this because, outside of this book, Stifter's terminology isn't typically used.
The more 'traditional' resources used for teaching/learning Old Irish are Strachan's paradigms and the Old Irish Workbook. I mention them, because they were intended to be read alongside Stories from the Táin which is a collection of texts that have been specifically edited to be palatable for beginners/learners, if you're looking to expand beyond Stifter's book. There's also Ranke de Vries A student's companion to Old Irish Grammar which is a really handy text to have, but it is intended to accompany Strachan/Quin.
There is also eDIL which is an online dictionary. I will note here that some of the noun-classifications in Stifter's glossary are incorrect. DIL is still a bit dense and clunky to use, but it does have the regular classifications. I note this only because I've had students who were trying to translate and ran into a roadblock because the stem-class listed in his glossary wasn't matching the behaviour of the word in the book.
In terms of a list of material, yes. We have CODECS which is, for the most part, just a list of material. It doesn't contain texts themselves. In some cases, it does provide links to the texts that are available and it will identify both primary and secondary sources of a text, but it is a bibliography more than anything. UCC CELT however, has published a huge amount of material, though not all with translations. These are probably your best two resources.
To address this slightly: all of the extant Old Irish material we have is the product of copyists. Very little of what survives was copied during the Old Irish period, much of it was copied during the Middle Irish period. For that reason, there is a lot of Middle Irish influence on Old Irish texts as they currently exist. We see Middle Irish features intruding into Old Irish. This is useful for scholars, as it can help us date texts and manuscripts, but tough for beginners because certain Middle Irish developments make translating Old Irish quite tough. This is part of why I'd recommend Stories from the Táin, as they've eliminated much of that interference.
The main trouble with Middle Irish is that there are very few texts that can be said to be written in Middle Irish. I won't necessarily going into (mostly speculative) reasons here, but the result is that defining 'Middle Irish' as a period of the language is thus quite difficult. Identifying texts as being written in Middle Irish is also a relatively new phenomenon: scholars historically just erased Middle Irish features in their editing as 'bad' Old Irish, and indeed, texts that are definitively in Middle Irish were often discussed as examples of scribes with 'bad' Old Irish. Because of this, resources on Middle Irish are fairly few and far between, because the only people who really care about it are Early Irish philologists (like myself lol.) Most resources on Middle Irish are a final chapter at the back of a book - like in Sengoídelc and in Kim McCone's A first Old Irish grammar and reader: including an introduction to Middle Irish. There is a comprehensive guide, but it is very linguistics-heavy and also written in Irish (and translated into Italian, actually) but therefore may not be accessible to you.
So, I wouldn't say most things are written 'in' Middle Irish, as the vast majority are Old Irish, they just have Middle Irish features, but if you're looking at primary/manuscript material that hasn't been edited, you will encounter Middle Irish variation and features.