This handbook was written specifically for beginning students. It presents twenty-seven graded readings, each accompanied by a vocabulary and an explanation of grammatical details; the final chapter provides a sample of the Codex Argenteus. Among the readings, the first seven are in effect preliminary exercises. The remaining twenty readings represent the Gothic Bible and the Skeireins. The external history of the language is also outlined, as well as the elements of phonetics, and the essentials of phonologic and analogic change.

This book is designed to cover one year's work in Hebrew leading up to a full understanding of the language. It has been used by the author with his students for many years and the published text is the result of testing and refining over these years.Every attempt has been made to make the grammar clear and simple. For example, all Hebrew words are transliterated, as well as being given in the original for the first three-quarters of the book. The grammatical discussion is made as unsophisticated as possible for it is the author's intention that this book should also be of use to those who study Hebrew without a teacher.

The Gothic Language: Grammar, Genetic Provenance and Typology, Readings, now in its second edition, is designed for students and scholars of the oldest known language with a sizeable corpus, belonging to the English, German, Dutch, and Scandinavian language clade. The Gothic language is seminal to the history of the study of each of these languages. Gothic grammar is a standard text in courses on Indo-European and general linguistics since Gothic serves as the prototype Germanic language in the study of historical comparative world language typologies. Particularly pan-Germanic is the innermost core of the grammar, the genetic phonology, which is reconstructed within the most recent approaches of laryngeal and glottalic theories. Most challenging to traditional viewpoints is the total novel restructuring of Gothic synchronic phonology via current theoretical approaches such as underspecification theory and optimality theory. While the Gothic inflectional morphology is rendered in full paradigmatic display, its understanding is enhanced by the application of underspecification theory and the use of inheritance networks, a computational linguistic concept. Brief "Syntactic Considerations" concluding the grammar present a network of head-driven phrase structures. This book also brings the reader into the ambience of the fourth-century Goths. Readings from the Wulfilian Bible, the extant eight pages of the Skeireins, together with a glossary, definitions of linguistic technical terms, a bibliography, and an index complete this volume.

This accessible introductory reference source surveys the linguistic and cultural background of the earliest known Germanic languages and examines their similarities and differences. The Languages covered include:Gothic Old Norse Old SaxonOld English Old Low Franconian Old High German Written in a lively style, each chapter opens with a brief cultural history of the people who used the language, followed by selected authentic and translated texts and an examination of particular areas including grammar, pronunciation, lexis, dialect variation and borrowing, textual transmission, analogy and drift.

The Gothic is wildly diverse. It can refer to ecclesiastical architecture, supernatural fiction, cult horror films, and a distinctive style of rock music. It has influenced political theorists and social reformers, as well as Victorian home décor and contemporary fashion. Nick Groom shows how the Gothic has come to encompass so many meanings by telling the story of the Gothic from the ancient tribe who sacked Rome to the alternative subculture of the present day. This unique Very Short Introduction reveals that the Gothic has predominantly been a way of understanding and responding to the past. Time after time, the Gothic has been invoked in order to reveal what lies behind conventional history. It is a way of disclosing secrets, whether in the constitutional politics of seventeenth-century England or the racial politics of the United States. While contexts change, the Gothic perpetually regards the past with fascination, both yearning and horrified. It reminds us that neither societies nor individuals can escape the consequences of their actions. The anatomy of the Gothic is richly complex and perversely contradictory, and so the thirteen chapters here range deliberately widely. This is the first time that the entire story of the Gothic has been written as a continuous history: from the historians of late antiquity to the gardens of Georgian England, from the mediaeval cult of the macabre to German Expressionist cinema, from Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy to American consumer society, from folk ballads to vampires, from the past to the present. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

This book presents linguistic evidence for many aspects of pre-Christian and early medieval European culture.

Gothic novels tell terrifying stories of patriarchal societies that thrive on the oppression or even outright sacrifice of women and others. Donna Heiland’s Gothic and Gender offers a historically informed theoretical introduction to key gothic narratives from a feminist perspective. The book concentrates primarily on fiction from the 1760s through the 1840s, exploring the work of Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, Charles Maturin, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, John Polidori, James Malcolm Rymer, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Smith, and Charles Brockden Brown. The final chapter looks at contemporary fiction and its relation to the gothic, including an exploration of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and Ann-Marie Macdonald’s Fall on Your Knees A Coda provides an overview of scholarship on the gothic, showing how gothic gradually became a major focus for literary critics, and paying particular attention to the feminist reinvigoration of gothic studies that began in the 1970s and continues today. Taken as a whole the book offers a stimulating survey of the representation of gender in the gothic, suitable for both students and readers of gothic literature.