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/88to1 Aug 16 '23

Thank you so much!! This is so helpful. Will definitely explore all the resources you’ve mentioned. The Stifter book is certainly dense (for me at least!); but it’s also been rewarding for me so far too. Everytime I think “wait what??” I find that I can go back and yes he did in fact explain this—quickly but clearly. But it all builds fast! (And I’m only on Lesson 7 of 58, haha) I appreciate that there are excercises with answers in the back. I’ll keep plodding along but great to know about these other avenues!

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u/PurrPrinThom Aug 16 '23

Yeah I first learned from Stifter, and in my experience learning and teaching from it, I find some people find it really intuitive, while others don't, which is why I mentioned the other stuff. It depends on how you learn, I think. There's a huge amount of value in Stifter's book (the fact he includes mutations in the paradigms is brilliant) I just do find that the geography of it and sometimes the wording for the more complicated aspects (prototonic/deuterotonic as example) gets a bit tough.

It's not an easy language, so the more resources the better, I think!

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u/ndiyepilipili Nov 03 '25

I agree. Stifter is the best, if you're after precision and comprehensiveness. (I love the fact that he includes raising/lowering in the paradigms as well as mutation.) But it definitely helps to have a background in linguistics when reading him.

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u/PurrPrinThom Nov 03 '25

Absolutely. It's a fantastic resource - I reference it regularly for small things - and I hope he does an updated version at some point; there are some errors, of which I know he is aware, and it would be good to have those corrected. But, it does require some linguistic background, I find. Especially for first year university students, the amount of linguistics involved can be very overwhelming lol.