Ebook: A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic

Oxford, 1910. 354 с.
Древнеисландско-английский словарь.The Scandinavian influence was the earliest, and one of the strongest, of those outward forces which have gone to the making of modern English, and for the proper investigation and appreciation of this a knowledge of Icelandic is of the first importance. Not only does it supply a linguistic basis for such a study; it is also the source of much of the information necessary for the understanding of that period of British history.This important language and literature first became easily accessible to the English student with the publication (in 1869-74) of the Icelandic Dictionary begun by Richard Cleasby, and completed for the Clarendon Press by Gudbrand Vigfusson. This still remains the fullest record of Icelandic as a whole, although some portions of the older vocabulary have been more fully dealt with in later works. For beginners, however, and for those whose interests chiefly centre in the old Icelandic prose-writings, some more convenient and cheaper work has been greatly needed, and the present volume is intended to supply this want. In the main it is founded on the Oxford Dictionary, and has been compiled on the general principle of including all those words which the ordinary student of Icelandic is likely to meet with in the course of his reading. With the exception of the Edda poems, the purely poetic vocabulary has for the most part been omitted, as well as a number of compounds occurring only in legal, theological, or technical works. The line has not been very strictly drawn, however, and in doubtful cases insertion has been preferred to omission, especially where space readily admitted of this course. In the English renderings of the Icelandic words it has usually been possible to follow the larger work, but changes have been freely made wherever they seemed to be required. To make the precise meaning of the word still more evident, a short phrase or sentence has frequently been inserted after the English equivalent, and the student will find the usefulness of these illustrations increase as his knowledge of the language improves. The more difficult examples have been translated, entirely or in part, especially those illustrating the idiomatic uses of common verbs, which even in a concise dictionary must be treated with considerable fullness.