You guys...

[highlyeccentric]

This language is going to drive me mad¹. I think modern German may have been designed to bamboozle whatever weird people learn Anglo-Saxon first.

Consider the matter of first person pronouns:

1. Anglo Saxon: Ic - pronounced "ick" or "ich", there might even be a rule to which one you use, but I've forgotten it (Sorry, Venerable Alex.)
2. Middle English: Ich - pronounched "ich" or "i-ch", depending on who you're listening to.
3. German: Ich - prounounced some way I can't possibly reproduce, but which is most definitely not "ich" or "i-ch".

And then tonight, because I'm weird, I was reading the grammar at the back of my dictionary, and discovered that the past participle is formed by whacking 'ge-' onto the present tense. I HAVE BEEN TRAINED TO IGNORE RANDOM GE- prefixes, people!
... although, glod, what wouldn't I give to know what this wandering ge- thing did in Proto-Germanic...

~

1. For those new to the world of Me Learning New Languages, this is my battle-cry and expression of glee.

Comments

[kayloulee.livejournal.com]

In Middle Welsh (dunno about Modern), f is v, ph is f, u is u or v, w is oo, ll is hl, ff is f, dd is like OE thorn, th is like OE eth... You get the picture.

The first letters of words change if they're preceded by words that end in vowels, or if there's a feminine singular noun after the article, or [one of a thousand different reasons]. This means that if you don't know a word, and you look it up in the dictionary, it might not be there because it actually starts with a different letter.

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

dd is like OE thorn, th is like OE eth

I think you mean ON. ;)

At least at Sydney, no one makes a distinction between thorn and eth in OE. Apparently there are SOME people still holding out for a distinct pronunciations, but I've seen nothing yet to suggest that there's a difference.

[kayloulee.livejournal.com]

Hey, I do Welsh, not English or Norse. We don't even use the extra characters, we just drive ourselves crazy using the ones we've got. Although we DO have an alternate W-character.

[(Anonymous)]

try Old Irish. I've done OI and MW, and trust me, MW pronunciation is a walk in the park once you get used to all the strange letter combos. OI grammar, on the other hand...