My friend from Aberdeen went home (again) today. He is going out to the Isles for research so I might catch him in Aberdeen before he goes. Anyway, I thought I had another week to do a translation for my professor. Well, I did not. So now I am scrambling to have at least a good portion of this translation ready for Thursday.
One thing about Old and Middle Irish that I have learned while I have been here: I do not know enough of it. I never seem to know enough to read this texts right off the manuscript. I am constantly looking words up in the dictionary. The one comfort in this is that there are very few people who can. This is small comfort however when you are up to your armpits in slightly misspelled words that you have to do special linguistic incantations to find them in the dictionary. One of my favorite is the 'g' for 'c'. In the Early Modern Irish period, they reformed the spelling and all 'c' became 'g' (there are others like 'd' for 't'). This is still true in Modern Scottish Gaelic. However, they continued to write down the older material and thus this spelling crept into Old and Middle Irish so sometimes you have to fiddle the letters around to find them in the dictionary. Even then, Old Irish had very loose spelling conventions so even then it can be a pain to find them.
Otherwise, I am fine. My flatmate returns on Wednesday.
posted by Chris #6:43 PM | 0 comments |
