An Introduction to Old Irish (Paperback)

by R. P. M. Lehmann (Author), Lehmann W. P. (Author)

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Text: English

Product Details

• Paperback: 201 pages
• Publisher: Modern Language Association of America (September 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0873522885
• ISBN-13: 978-0873522885
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,320,320 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too much running, no walking or crawling, March 13, 2006

By	Andrew Lemons (Reykjavik, Iceland) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

...and you have to walk before you run.

I must disagree with the other reviewers. This is simply not an efficient introduction to Old Irish. For the student interested in grasping and retaining Old Irish for more than a few weeks, what have been called the virtues of Lehmann's book are actually its chief faults.

Each chapter presents a passage of actual text (the scela mucce meic datho, or Story of Mac Datho's Pig), an analysis of the text, and then a section of grammar.

There are no simple texts in Old Irish. That you begin reading an actual Old Irish text before you even begin to learn the grammar, though it certainly feels good, is not necessarily conducive to good language learning. Fairly quickly, even a diligent student of Lehmann will find him/herself lost in the labyrinth of OI grammar and vocabulary, with a half-remembered story and a mess of morphology teeming under a layer of false confidence.

O.I. grammar is as hard as Indo-European grammar comes, and the pronunciation is impossible to master (since no one agrees how it was pronounced!). Lehmann tries to skirt these problems, the pronunciation by offering a kind of modified I.P.A. transliteration of the texts, which he doesn't define beforehand and which may be harder than the Irish to interpret. As to the grammar, he defines every word in the passage in a dizzying exegesis. This becomes tedious. The 7-line text in Chapter One and its two pages of description are enough to show that too much is going on in the language to grasp without extensive study of the grammar and at least a little training in vocabulary. You simply can't remember a text whose grammar you don't understand.

The grammatical sections that follow the text illuminate few or none of the questions that arise from the reading passage. Chapter one drops masculine and neuter o-stem nouns on the reader in a lump, along with a strong verb (berid), with no description of what's going on. Why is the nominative of son 'mac,' and the genitive 'mic?' What else declines like 'mac'? What words in the passage are o-stems? How do I USE these paradigms? No answers are given, not even in the glossary. Lehmann leaves the reader to guess, blindly memorize, and move on to another difficult passage of text. This process continues for 20 chapters until, at length, little about Old Irish has been communicated by the author, even less digested by the reader.

I offer an alternative. No good introduction to Old Irish has yet been written. But there are three cheap and available books that together form a superior course: E.G.Quin's "Old-Irish Workbook," Strachan's "Old-Irish Paradigms," and Green's "Old Irish Verbs and Vocabulary." Quin's book gives 40 lessons on grammar with progressively harder translation excersizes. It refers you throughout to Strachan's book for full paradigms and explains them thoroughly. Finally, Green's vocabulary answers all the lexical questions you will encounter in the course. Taken at a properly slow pace, these three books will prepare the reader to actually understand Old Irish texts without many crutches (such as Lehmann leans on everywhere). Maybe after reading these books, you might try to tackle Lehmann's "Introduction" as a text of "The Story of Mac Datho's Pig." But keep your Quin, Strachan, and Green close, you will still need them!

It is said that one never learns Old Irish just once. With Lehmann, you may not even get that 'once.' But with the alternative course, you may just save yourself a few refresher courses down the line.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Introduction to an Abstruse Subject, August 24, 2001

By	Thomas F. Ogara (Jacksonville, FL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

For the interested, there are a variety of source materials for the study of Old Irish. The problem with most of them is that they're hard to come by, unless you know where to look. The best sources are the Irish Texts Society based in London, the Royal Irish Academy (yes, that's correct) and the Center for Advanced Studies, both of which are in Dublin. Most of their publications are inexpensive and good, but it's hard to get their books here in the States.

So you could invest in a trip to Dublin. Or you can start with this book. Please don't assume that this is an exhaustive grammar of Old Irish; it's not - it's a book for beginners. While the Professors Lehmann do not skimp on the basic information, the book moves along at a reasonable pace. The book is straightforward, and is aimed at two audiences. One of these audiences will be students of Historical Linguistics, who will find much of interest here, what with descriptions of consonantal shifts, where Old Irish fits into the Indo-European paradigm, and analyses of VSO versus SVO languages. The other audience would be students of ancient Irish literature, who will find enough to start them feeling their way through the early material, as the bulk of the book is a minute analysis of the grammar and vocabulary of one not extremely long Old Irish tale (Mac da Dho's Pig).

The only problem with this book is that these two audiences are usually not interested in the same things, so be advised. If you fall into a potential third audience - seeking after information on ancient Irish society or folklore - you'll be better off reading somebody like John Matthews, as this book is first and foremost a piece of linguistic scholarship.