| The Online Old English
Paradigm Project (OOEPP) is designed to guide students
as they form the foundations of linguistic knowledge in Old English.
As a supplementary resource for these students, it is not intended
to replace those existing handbooks already in use for the study of
Old English. The OOEPP offers neither grammatical nor technical
instruction, but assumes that students can master these concepts through
the use of available resources.
The project consists of multiple online sample quizzes covering
pronouns, nouns, adjectives, and verbs. The goal of this site is
to help train students to learn the proper inflexions, vowel mutations,
and basic paradigm patterns necessary for success in a college-level
introductory Old English course. Each quiz section has two modes:
the standard paradigm progressing through all the forms, and an
assessment paradigm that asks for forms in a random order and appearance.
The makers of the OOEPP recognize the dialectical deviations,
spelling inconsistencies, and other variations that can challenge
students as they try to master these paradigms. Quizzes of the
OOEPP are based on the normalized syntax and spelling following
standard West-Saxon dialectic forms. The top three variants from
the corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature, however, have also been allowed
to provide some flexibility for linguistic differences. Special
characters, such as the thorn – þ and ash – æ,
as well as those vowels editorially marked as long, are all retained
in OOEPP quizzes. Special buttons have been provided to
allow students to insert these characters into their answers. While
the shape of the thorn and ash can be easily retained in modern
typeface, allowances were necessary for the software to recognize
the long vowels. Umlauted vowels have, therefore, been substituted
in the place of long vowels within the actual answer boxes.
A note on the procedure of creating verb paradigms: Many
Old English verb forms have variant spellings in the corpus. Some
even have more than four variants. Due to the limitations of Dreamweaver,
the web design tool used in creating the paradigms, we were able
to include a maximum of three variants. In order to determine which
variants to use, simple searches of the Dictionary of Old English:
Electronic Corpus were performed. The criteria for inclusion
of variants were as follows:
The variant form must
account for approximately 10% of the instances of the word.
The variant form must be one of the three most frequent spellings
of the form.
If a form of the verb
occurs multiple times within the paradigm, no distinction was made
between the two for purposes of counting frequency (e.g. Beo is
the 1st person present indicative and subjunctive of Beon, as well
as the Imperative, its 2494 instances are counted when calculating
frequency for the 1st person present indicative, again for the subjunctive,
and a third time for the imperative). If both of these conditions
were met, the form is included in the paradigm. To see a list of
verbs for which frequency searches were performed (and the frequency
of their variants) click here. Certain high frequency verbs (Beon/Wesan)
may have additional paradigms so that users may quiz themselves
on all forms of the verb.
To use the OOEPP,
students must first download the free Flash Player software from
Macromedia/Adobie Studios found at this website http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/
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