Highly dependent on passage and writer imo, for anything before 1500
Some people I've had say middle english is easy enough to read now, and that's sometimes true, but if you drop some passages of Gawain or Pearl in front of people they'll be convinced it's an extra 2-300 years older. Anything non-London dialect is harder
As a native German speaker, I can at least say that knowing both German and English doesn't really help in understanding the text. Not even the most "dumbed down" version - ok, he's apparently saying something about his wife, but no idea what exactly. And when I read "shyne (Modern English "sheen" but German cognate is closer)", I was even more confused. "Sheen" is the property of an object that is shiny, which in German would be "Schein", but because it is applied to a woman, I assume that the "cognate" he refers to is "schön" (beautiful)?
Knowing German would mostly be helpful for understanding the grammar of Old English. The three genders and four cases, participles prefixed with ge-, verbs like sindon (=sind). There are tons of cognates with German (like þurh = durch) but they're hard to recognize immediately unless you know the kinds of sound changes that are common.
I guess the concepts and some of the vocab are important (though I feel compelled to point out that þurh is cognate with through as well).
But Old English inflecting nouns, rather than relying on indefinite and definite articles, gives the language a very different quality to German. Also stuff like negative concord.
I, too, find it confusing. The "German cognate is closer" is not helpful!
I think the ö is significant. It could correspond to English ē, but not ei, -ine.
Under sʜᴇᴇɴ, Partridge [1] states that OE scēne, scȳne are related to G schön, from PIE *skauniz "Ultimately, to E sʜᴏᴡ."
I think we have two compartments here:
1. ö/ē words - schön, E shown, shewn. Under Partridge [1] sʜᴇᴇɴ
2. ei words - G schein and E shine. OE scīnan, under Partridge [1] sᴄᴇɴᴇ
[1] My favorite reference: Eric Partridge: _Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of English_. More concise than the OED, and you can carry it.
As an English speaker, I'm delighted by the borrowing "ser schön". It is the highest grade in English catalogs of ancient coins. "Shiny" is not a good quality in ancient coins!
It is not helpful because comparing English from 1000 AD with Modern High German is the wrong premise to start off with.
The correct and more interesting comparison would be with Old High German from around the same time although it did not indicate the umlaut in the spelling at the time (which would happen 400-500 years later) – even though the i-umlaut had already developed.
So «schön» was «scōni» (or «sconi») in OHG. Also, ö and ü developed from /o/ and /u/, so juxtaposing them with English ē is likely incorrect.
It is not helpful because comparing English from 1000 AD with Modern High German is the wrong premise to start off with.
I hear this premise repeated time and time again. Search the internet. I believed this premise, and actually started studying German again while waiting for my Old English textbook to arrive. It did not help.
Also knowing (archaic?) Scandinavian helps a little more.
"swa" is like a contraction of german "so wie". sindon is probably like german "sind": is/were.
soþ - sweet? gefeohte - past-tense born/nurtured/raised. ƿælfæst - wellfed. sƿylce - equivalent to modern "swole"? andƿlite - cognate with "anlete" which means face. ƿynsum - "finesome". searocræftum: specially-forceful (fantasy modern swedish cognate "särkraftigt"). "for þy" - since/because ("fördi"). forlætan: forgive.
ƿifode - wifed (strangely modern)
ofslean: probably closer to modern "avslå or "Abschlagen" than "slain". Defeat?
Ac - maybe like "ach"?
naƿiht: antonym to "evig"?
geƿitan - go/leave/escape/flee? (Scandinavian "vidd" means expansive landscape, cognate with "width" and "weit")
Nefne - negation of efne: "not even"?
stede - meaning is probably "farms" or "smallholdings"
gebunden - cognate with "bound", but the meaning is probably closer to "enserfed".
gefultumige - feels like past-tense of a verb that means "filled with"?
Squinting:
"And what she said was all sweet. I wifed her, and she was fully? beautiful wife, wise and wellfed . Not met I ever "swoler" woman. She was born so bold as any man, and though-whatis her face was fine and fair.
"Alas we never free were, since we never might from Wulfsfleet left, and never that Hlaford find and him defeat. That Hlaford had these places with such force bound, that no man may him forgive. We are here like birds in net, like fishes in weir.
"And we him secaþ git, both together, man and wife, through the dark strife this grim place. Whathere God us filled-with!"
That's a nice reconstruction. My old dead-tree Webster's Collegiate Dictionary has an essay in its foreword that covers the evolution of English in reverse order, ending with texts in Old Anglo-Saxon. The further back, the more alien it seemed. I'd need a lot of help with Middle English, and anything older would require the sort of major effort/rewriting discussed here. William the Conqueror set a huge linguistic change in motion with his little dust-up.
Really, even early Modern English (e.g. Shakespeare or the King James Bible) is pretty thick for today's English speakers.
For a while, I mistakenly thought that “Germanic” meant related to German specifically. Old English makes more sense if you’re aware of Frisian, Dutch, and other non-Scandinavian Germanic languages, since that’s the area it originated from. German and Spanish make this distinction explicit (Deutsch/Germanisch and Alemán/Germánica).
I think it was earlier this week, or maybe last week, that someone on one of the frontpage posts recommended "The History of English Podcast".
I haven't finished the first episode yet, but it's already seeming promising and I know I'm going to continue with it.
In that first episode (which is basically an introduction), the host explains that the history of the English language can be divided into three periods: Old English, Middle English, and New English.
After establishing that there are three periods, he asks where we think Shakespeare falls, and I immediately thought it had to be Middle English.
Then the host proceeded to say he wouldn’t be surprised if most listeners guessed Old or Middle English—and that he wouldn’t be surprised at all if nobody guessed correctly. Because Shakespeare’s plays are actually classified as New English!
I smiled in surprise.
But he explained that if you can more or less understand the English being written or spoken, then it still falls under New English. The King James Version of the Bible is considered New English too.
Keep in mind, Shakespeare wrote his plays between 1589 and 1613.
The King James Bible was published in 1611.
So when I opened that link in this thread’s header and realized I couldn’t understand a damn thing, it all suddenly made sense!
"Stede", besides German Stadt, Swedist stad, etc. is cognate to English stead, fossilized and now only occuring in the adverb "instead"/"in (someone's) stead" and a few compounds such as "farmstead" and "steadfast" (literally meaning "standing firmly (in place)"). "Steady" is of course also related.
It is interesting that Google translates the first paragraph of the text like this>>
"And the word he spoke was all like this. He was a hired hand, and he was full of malice, and he was in ƿælfæst. He didn't remember the man's name. He was in gefeohte(...)"
I've got a relatively early printed book, from 1575. It's a book about plants [1]. It's in old french and although I'm a native french speaker it is definitely not an easy read. Now it's as alien as the old english text in TFA but then it's from 1575, not 1000. If you take "french" from 1000, I take it it'd basically as unreadable for a native french speaker as that "english" text is for a native english speaker.
[1] btw my daughter loves that book because we gave her the name of a plant and that plant is described in that old book... But I only found that out way after she was born.
Well that's simply not true. There's lots of shared history ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognate ), common ancestor-words, and of course modern loans like "lacquer" and "crimson", but the "parents" of Sanskrit and Germanic languages diverged before Sanskrit appeared around 1500 BCE (earliest assumed date of Vedic Sanskrit, same time as Mycenaean Greek), there's lots of language trees online that make this clearer
27 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 59.8 ms ] threadSome people I've had say middle english is easy enough to read now, and that's sometimes true, but if you drop some passages of Gawain or Pearl in front of people they'll be convinced it's an extra 2-300 years older. Anything non-London dialect is harder
But Old English inflecting nouns, rather than relying on indefinite and definite articles, gives the language a very different quality to German. Also stuff like negative concord.
I think the ö is significant. It could correspond to English ē, but not ei, -ine.
Under sʜᴇᴇɴ, Partridge [1] states that OE scēne, scȳne are related to G schön, from PIE *skauniz "Ultimately, to E sʜᴏᴡ."
I think we have two compartments here:
1. ö/ē words - schön, E shown, shewn. Under Partridge [1] sʜᴇᴇɴ
2. ei words - G schein and E shine. OE scīnan, under Partridge [1] sᴄᴇɴᴇ
[1] My favorite reference: Eric Partridge: _Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of English_. More concise than the OED, and you can carry it.
As an English speaker, I'm delighted by the borrowing "ser schön". It is the highest grade in English catalogs of ancient coins. "Shiny" is not a good quality in ancient coins!
It is not helpful because comparing English from 1000 AD with Modern High German is the wrong premise to start off with.
The correct and more interesting comparison would be with Old High German from around the same time although it did not indicate the umlaut in the spelling at the time (which would happen 400-500 years later) – even though the i-umlaut had already developed.
So «schön» was «scōni» (or «sconi») in OHG. Also, ö and ü developed from /o/ and /u/, so juxtaposing them with English ē is likely incorrect.
I hear this premise repeated time and time again. Search the internet. I believed this premise, and actually started studying German again while waiting for my Old English textbook to arrive. It did not help.
"swa" is like a contraction of german "so wie". sindon is probably like german "sind": is/were.
soþ - sweet? gefeohte - past-tense born/nurtured/raised. ƿælfæst - wellfed. sƿylce - equivalent to modern "swole"? andƿlite - cognate with "anlete" which means face. ƿynsum - "finesome". searocræftum: specially-forceful (fantasy modern swedish cognate "särkraftigt"). "for þy" - since/because ("fördi"). forlætan: forgive.
ƿifode - wifed (strangely modern)
ofslean: probably closer to modern "avslå or "Abschlagen" than "slain". Defeat?
Ac - maybe like "ach"?
naƿiht: antonym to "evig"?
geƿitan - go/leave/escape/flee? (Scandinavian "vidd" means expansive landscape, cognate with "width" and "weit")
Nefne - negation of efne: "not even"?
stede - meaning is probably "farms" or "smallholdings"
gebunden - cognate with "bound", but the meaning is probably closer to "enserfed".
gefultumige - feels like past-tense of a verb that means "filled with"?
Squinting:
"And what she said was all sweet. I wifed her, and she was fully? beautiful wife, wise and wellfed . Not met I ever "swoler" woman. She was born so bold as any man, and though-whatis her face was fine and fair.
"Alas we never free were, since we never might from Wulfsfleet left, and never that Hlaford find and him defeat. That Hlaford had these places with such force bound, that no man may him forgive. We are here like birds in net, like fishes in weir.
"And we him secaþ git, both together, man and wife, through the dark strife this grim place. Whathere God us filled-with!"
Really, even early Modern English (e.g. Shakespeare or the King James Bible) is pretty thick for today's English speakers.
I haven't finished the first episode yet, but it's already seeming promising and I know I'm going to continue with it.
In that first episode (which is basically an introduction), the host explains that the history of the English language can be divided into three periods: Old English, Middle English, and New English.
After establishing that there are three periods, he asks where we think Shakespeare falls, and I immediately thought it had to be Middle English.
Then the host proceeded to say he wouldn’t be surprised if most listeners guessed Old or Middle English—and that he wouldn’t be surprised at all if nobody guessed correctly. Because Shakespeare’s plays are actually classified as New English!
I smiled in surprise.
But he explained that if you can more or less understand the English being written or spoken, then it still falls under New English. The King James Version of the Bible is considered New English too.
Keep in mind, Shakespeare wrote his plays between 1589 and 1613.
The King James Bible was published in 1611.
So when I opened that link in this thread’s header and realized I couldn’t understand a damn thing, it all suddenly made sense!
[0]: https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-u...
"And the word he spoke was all like this. He was a hired hand, and he was full of malice, and he was in ƿælfæst. He didn't remember the man's name. He was in gefeohte(...)"
It says Icelandic.:)
It's fun for modern Dutch/Frisian speakers, most likely the same for German speakers. I think English won't be enough though.
[1] btw my daughter loves that book because we gave her the name of a plant and that plant is described in that old book... But I only found that out way after she was born.
https://jacklynch.net/language.html
https://learn.kids4alll.eu/sites/default/files/unit/oer/doc/...
https://www.theguardian.com/education/gallery/2015/jan/23/a-... is a beautiful one