What do you think?
Rate this book
Irish Studies, Syracuse University Press
Sengoidelc: Old Irish for Beginners
Sengoidelc( Old Irish for Beginners) <> Paperback <> DavidStifter <> SyracuseUniversityPress
Paperback
First published June 30, 2006
15 people are currently reading
89 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 5, 2018
Also saved me for my old Irish midterm
June 12, 2018
Okay, I can't really say I've *read* this book because it's an instructional and reference book on old Irish. I've used the book, and found it fascinating. A few years ago my daughter took it over and I've pretty much just given it to her. A terrific book for linguaphiles.
February 22, 2021
One of my favorite books on language! I love learning about historical language reconstruction, and this book somehow made it fun to go step by step and learn how they think Old Irish was pronounced. Highly recommend for language lovers.
January 26, 2011
I'm having a great time with this! It gets difficult quite quickly, but the chapters are laid out logically, and I'm finding it easy enough to break down into manageable chunks.
October 18, 2025
this book is obviously the standard, but it is very very philological and an awful lot of the conjugations are being provided for the purposes of taxonomising endings rather than what I presume anyone reading this book outside of an academic context would be doing, which is trying to read sagas in the original, or deepening their understanding of the ancestry of the language as spoken. I can't imagine anyone would ever have a use for the dual prepositional case of the word 'ounce' or the vocative of 'prayer' for example.
all to say that even with decent Irish and some knowledge of the grammar I found it very hard going. presume people who can read that pronunciation notation would have an easier time. fascinating to see those many instances in which old Irish writing reads more like the way native speakers (of Gaeilge 'nua') today use it, e.g. 'calideb' for sword, 'dénum' for doing
all to say that even with decent Irish and some knowledge of the grammar I found it very hard going. presume people who can read that pronunciation notation would have an easier time. fascinating to see those many instances in which old Irish writing reads more like the way native speakers (of Gaeilge 'nua') today use it, e.g. 'calideb' for sword, 'dénum' for doing
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews