Rudiments of Anglo-Saxon

Sure, half of English on the whole may come from Latin, but the lion's share of everyday conversation--the real meat of our language--comes from Anglo-Saxon. If you want prose with a backbone, you should be studying the rumbling tongue of Anglo-Saxon. It was the language of Alfred the Great, and it gave us the tale of Beowulf. It's the source of vivid English words like ache, inkling, limber, lynch, and marshmallow. Simply put, Rudiments of Anglo-Saxon is a distillation of the more academic and abstracted Old English grammars. Rudiments won't bury you in verbiage or leave you feeling like you should have been a linguist. In Unit One, the beginner will learn step-by-step basics of Anglo-Saxon grammar, from new letters like thorn and eth to strong and weak adjectives and beyond. Unit Two, while guiding the student through much of Mark's Gospel and Beowulf, introduces the fundamentals of translation from getting the right dictionary to deciphering poetry. Altogether, the textbook contains enough material for thirty-two happy weeks spent ransacking the Anglo-Saxon word-hoard.