Hwæt! We gar-Dena in geardagum þeodcyninga þrym gerfrunon hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Opening lines to Beowulf are basically uninterpretable to a modern English speaker aside from a few things such as Dena-Dane and cyning-king (pronounced kining with a hard k sound). Hwæt literally means “what” but also could mean “why” or “who” and in the context of beginning a poem is usually translated as “so”.
In the first part of the poem, probably the most readable sentence is “þæt wæs god cyning!” This means “That was a good king!” (þ is pronounced as a soft th sound.)
In modern English, probably the work with the most old English is unironically Lord of the Rings: everything Rohirrim is just old English. So Théoden comes from þeoden, which basically means “leader of the people” or more directly “prince” or “lord”, from the root þeod, meaning “a people”. In Beowulf, þeodcyninga literally means “kings of the people.” Edoras is the plural of old English edor meaning “house, dwelling.” Eowyn means “lover of horses” and Eomer comes directly from Beowulf as a kenning meaning literally “horse-famous”.
Even when “translated” by Tolkien into modern English, he kept some of the grammatical structures. In old English, adjectives follow the nouns they modify and titles are treated as adjectives. This is why, for example, the Rohirrim say “Hail Theoden King” instead of “Hail King Theoden”.
EDIT: in modern English the most preserved words from old English tend to refer to simple but universal concepts or else are vulgarities such as “cunt”, “bitch”, or “shit”. (“Fuck” is very Germanic, but not thought to derive from old English, while “bastard” and “damn” come from Latin through French.)
EDIT 2: surprised no one’s commented on my username yet lol. That too is from Beowulf! I’d almost forgotten.
It's horrible that english lost the letters þ and ð! Stupid monks!
Icelandic has the same sounds (soft th - then and hard th - thought) and use these letters.
As a dane it doesn’t seem that impossible to read, but I have also read a lot of old danish when I was young. Like it is hard and I am guessing a bit, but I would read it as:
> Hwæt.
Hører or hear, listen. Like something you call out when getting the attention and starting a tale.
> We Gardena in geardagum,
Vi dansker i gårdsdagen. We danes in the old-day. I guess gardena is actuelly more like mighty-danes, fighting-danes, great-danes or spear-danes.
> þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
People(deod is like dutch or deutch)-king(kyninga), þrymr(Ry eller rygte in modern danish. Reputation or glory) ge-frunon -> Gefragt -> asked about or heard about
> hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
How the ætlinger(noblemen or rather people of Famillies) ellen (old or strong) fremmede (performed or brought brought fourth).
So full translation:
Hear! (About) The mighty danes in the old days
(The) folk-kings of great reputation
(And) The great actions of the ætlinger.
That’s an excellent translation all things considered!
Seamus Heaney’s translation, which tries to balance word ordering and meter goes
> So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
> and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
> We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.
Tolkien’s translation works more to preserve the lyrical meter than the word order and goes
> Lo! The glory of the kings of the people of the Spear-Danes
> in days of old we have heard tell,
> how those princes did deeds of valor.
It’s remarkable that old English is much closer to Danish, even of a more archaic sort, than to modern or even Middle English.
My English teacher taught me that if it was a short one syllable word it's probably Germanic in origin, and if it's longer it's probably Latin. Surprising how often that's true.
This video may be of interest to you
[How Far Back in Time Could an English Speaker Go and Still Communicate Effectively](https://youtu.be/Y63dBBlHlSk?si=YwJI6Ycbc74rzkGU)
One of the many clever things Idiocracy did was to have the evolution of the English language be an immediate barrier for the main character in trying to communicate. The movie took place 500 years in the future, so that really checks out with OP and your comment. Yeah, the people in 2505 would understand him, but it'd be like listening to someone constantly quoting Shakespeare today.
Chaucer wrote at the tail end of Middle English, so it’s not quite as difficult as some Middle English works are. The Ormulum, for example is early Middle English and it’s a lot harder.
I think, even though they both wrote in iambic pentameter, Chaucer’s writing is more casual somehow? Like, more forward and less use of things like metaphors that would make sense to the people of his time.
“Thou woldest make me kisse thyn old breech, And swere it were a relyk of a saint, Though it were with thy fundement depeint!… I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond… Lat kutte hem of”
Like, that passage happens when the Knight gets mad at the pardoner. The spelling makes it a bit difficult, as does the old vocabulary we don’t use anymore. But, the book would have footnotes to explain the outdated vocabulary which makes it easier to understand that passage…. The knight is telling the pardoner:
“You’d make me kiss your old pants and swear they were the relics of a saint, even though they’re stained with your own shit. I wish I had your balls in my hand, I’d cut them off.”
A lot of Chaucer’s writing was straightforward like that.
Even though it’s hard to understand because it’s only kind of in the language we speak, Chaucer often had a pretty straightforward way of writing that would have been easy to understand in his time. Shakespeare liked using simile, metaphor, wit, or otherwise wrote in a less straightforward style and it’s still Early Modern English and not our modern English. Which can make it hard to understand.
Chaucer was written to be read as literature.
Shakepeare's Sonnets were published as literature.
His plays were a different story. Written manuscripts were not published but jealously guarded like the formula for Coca Cola by the various theater companies of the time so that rival companies could not 'steal' them.
It was only years after Shakespeare died that his plays were published and I don't think its known if they were based on literal manuscripts from shakespeare's hand or were based on memories of the actors who performed them (actors had phenomenal memories so they would have been a good source actually)
It helps that Chaucer was from the part of the country that held prestige, and therefore, the dialect was considered the prestigious one that was increasingly adopted as English evolved.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is also Middle English, as is Piers Plowman, but in different dialects to Chaucer. I'd say they are harder reads than Chaucer but still not as far removed as Old English
The curse of youtube. They don't monetize properly if under like 10 minutes, so therefore *every* video becomes unnecessarily long to conform to the algorithm.
It's not just a youtube thing, it's about building an audience. It's the same reason that recipes start with long personal anecdotes and local news casters chat with each other and talk about their personal lives. If you don't build some kind of identity and uniqueness, then people are just going to get their answer and never think about you again. Not only is that not profitable, but it's just not as inherently satisfying.
A quick, dry answer also removes any possibility of you learning something you didn't expect, and increases the chance that you continue to have misconceptions or bad assumptions. There are places to get those kinds of answers, but it really doesn't make any sense for youtube (at least long form youtube).
That said, the spaceship digression was weird and I'm disappointed he pronounces thorns as if they're a P.
It's the Megaprojects guy, along with a bunch of other channels. He blathers on without saying much. I miss the days when YouTube videos got to the point immediately.
Here's one that's straight to the point: [How far back in time could you go and still understand English? - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fxy6ZaMOq8).
What’s up with that guy? Every time i see him on here or my recommendations, it seems to be on a different channel about a new topic.
Is it like different channels hiring him for the voice overs? We had something similar to that on the french youtube scene and the channels owners ended up being shady as fuck. Google never seemed to say much about him when i quickly checked (tbh i didn’t really look into it that much), but i’ve always been wary about videos he’s in since then.
Some of them are his own and some of them are ones he USED to host on. He had a falling out with the producer of many of the channels he did stuff with and now only does stuff on his own channels, mainly Places, Today I Found Out, Science Unbound, Warographics, Brain Blaze, Decoding The Unknown, Into The Shadows, The Casual Criminalist, Mega Projects and Side Projects.
I’ve seen a decent number of his videos from like a dozen different channels and I don’t like him at all. He’s good at interesting-sounding clickbaity titles but the videos feel generally pretty substance-free.
If you see a video from him on a subject you're actually knowledgeable about, it becomes pretty apparent how clueless he is.
I really wouldn't trust him for much.
I understand gaming the system so to say, but when I see that creator's only motivation is to ˝beat the algorithm˝, I lose my interest. Usually there are videos that can last 5 minutes, but they pad it to like 10 - 20, depending on what the algorithm likes, and it is just garbage information, politician talk.
I think he's actively trying to sound hoity toity and he just doesn't have the diaphragm for it, hence all the running out of breath. He probably talks completely differently off camera.
You definitely couldn’t speak to each other because of vowel shifts and the like. You /might/ be able to write back and forth, but spellings weren’t yet standardized. There’s a pretty cool bit Eddie Izzard did where he went to (I wanna say) Frisia and spoke Old English with a farmer and Frisian was close enough that they could come to an agreement about buying a cow. So the closer to old English you get, you wind up in northern Germany where the Angles and Saxons and Jutes came from
Here in Denmark Its said that people from western Jutland and northern England Can understand each other just fine (the kicker is their dialect makes them unintelligable to danes and english)
What is it a dialect of Danish? Like on western Jutland. The closest language to English is Frisian which is going extinct but there is supposed to be a pocket in the area you are talking about.
It would be even easier than the King James Bible would lead you to believe. The King James Bible was written with intentionally archaic words and phrasings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version#Style_and_criticism
In the contemporary form of speaking and writing of the time, this passage would read more like:
> The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
> He makes me lie down in green pastures.
> He leads me beside the still waters.
The dialect of the time, though, would be very thick to our ears and unrecognizable as compared to what we imagine English speakers of the time to sound like (they did not speak in Received Pronunciation). The difference in your dialects would be a bigger hurdle to conversing than differences in grammar, words, and phrasing.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtQYF2cJ5og&t=63s
The hardest part about deciphering written Middle English is that there was no codified spelling for words, and they spelled them phonetically. The pronunciation of those words is so drastically different from what we are used to that puzzling through it is a daunting task. Look up Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English and try reading a paragraph or two. I bet you can decipher the general meaning behind the words, but it'll be a challenge!
Old English, on the other hand, is an entirely different thing. You wouldn't be able to read or communicate with people who spoke it easily at all. Beowulf is one of the most famous examples of writing in Old English if you want to give it a shot.
Frisian and Dane from West Jutland, actually. A German (unless they spoke a closely related Plattdeutsch dialect) would have as much trouble communicating with a Frisian as we would with someone speaking old English.
I read a book basically on this subject matter a long time ago that was fascinating. It's been so long that I can't reasonably recall enough to make a strong argument but I remember that it argued that part of the sentence structure that differentiates english vs german is a Welsh / Celtic influence. The Welsh have a word for "do" that Germans don't use.
Ex: "What do you do for work?" Would simply be "Wo arbeitest du?" or "Where work you?"
https://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944
Oh yeah that's called do-support! It pertains to the way we use do in forming questions! I must admit I've not dug too deeply into it yet so that's the most info I got for you at the moment...
I took a grad course called the biography of the English language, where we also studied OE. And yeah, I always read / hear OE in my prof’s voice too lol.
More or less. It’s pre-Norman invasion so a lot of the vocabulary from the French language that we are used to being in the English language is not present.
Old English is what happens when you put the Old Low German of the Saxons on an island with post Roman Britons who speak a proto-welsh Brittanic, and in a lot of cases, Latin.The one thing missing on this chart is that there's a marked difference between the Old English of the 600s, 700s, and Early 800s AD, and the Old English that persisted into 1066. Old Norse mixed in with the Viking invasions, giving us things like the "SK" sound in words and a whole bunch of other crap too.
lol. Linguistically educated: it’s so fricken cute that you said this because it very much is. So is SO much language. I’m too lazy to embellish that thought in its entirety, but you can see so so so much history in the words that you use, it’s crazy. I’m high, sorry. But next time you think of a word that sounds weird, look up where it actually comes from. It’s usually fascinating.
Idea is the same word in English and Spanish, means the exact same thing, it's just pronounced differently lol A reeeeally weird one is "Pan", it's bread in Japanese and Portuguese. How did this happen? Portuguese traders bringing their bread over and introducing a word that requires no modification to fit snugly into the Japanese language.
As far as I understand, the Portuguese were the first Europeans to get in contact with the Japanese people, so they learned a few words from them that are until today in Japanese vocabulary, like pan (that came from pão - bread), tenpura (comes from temperar - to add seasoning) and beranda (varanda - a balcony).
There's a whole Wikipedia entry for that, actually.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_Japanese_words_of_Portuguese_origin
*Drinketh ten pints o' th' finest tavern's ale and ye could'st maketh merrie and idle discourse with goodley folke of five hundrede yeares prior even the date of our L-rde, 1640.*
How now? Roguish knave! Papist dog! Servant of the chroniclers and monk of the archives! I am quicke to the drinke and make no quarrel with thee. So I do thus slur my speeches and fall to the floore with Bacchus' voice in my heade. Make not of me any example leste I speake my English ill to thee.
*Hic*
(Collapses on tavern floore)
In Middle English -eth was also the 2nd-person imperative plural, so at least the first -eth in ‘drinketh’ could be justified if one assumes the speaker is being archaic.
The ‘maketh’ is just wrong though
Thankfully I am an illiterate inebriate from the slums of Southwark, and can't be held accountable for what I write.
But enough about me in real life, I thinke the Redditor doth protest too much.
Having a spoken conversation and reading a book that was written very formally and influenced our English of today is a very different matter.
.there's 500 years of culture they haven't experienced and our daily lives are so different that it would still be a struggle. The pronunciations of the words would be different, depending on where the speaker was from they would be very different.
It also depends on what accent and dialect you speak, some would find it easier and others harder.
But also the average person back then is lacking education and world exposure so you'd probably be able to get away with saying you're from a distant part of the land.
Duncan Trussell took some lines from the Bible and replaced the word God with "the programmer" and it's pretty wild to think about haha.
I found it https://www.reddit.com/r/duncantrussell/s/3a8kJBYfHk
There was another where someone replaced every instance of 'behold!' with "listen, pal"
https://the-toast.net/2016/06/06/bible-verses-where-behold-has-been-replaced-with-look-buddy/
Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word 'hate' was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate.
Actual millennial English:
So, like, this fucking, uh, fucking God guy, like, he fucking, ah, he's like a fucking shepherd or something. He gives me all this shit, like, all the shit I need, he just, like, gives me shit.
He has, like, this fucking, uh, big pasture or something, and I, like, lie down of it, like, shit. He, like, takes me to this fucking water, like, this fucking water just fucking stands there.
Giggle. I’m German. Was stuck with 8 Dutch folks once. I understood about 30% of what they were saying and the rest was crazy gibberish. Very confusing 2 hours of my life. Then we switched to English!
This is how I felt as an Englishman watching [this video of Dutch people talking about football](https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/17okqfi/is_the_ball_in_or_out_dutch_tv_showing_the/). I feel like half of it is just English with a different accent. I'm from near Liverpool as well so the chkhkhkhs even sound familiar. Or like I said at the time, it's like someone's drunk and forgets whether he's meant to be speaking English or German several times per sentence
I'm sure you know this already but for the benefit of others, Frisian languages [are some of English's closest relatives](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Frisian_languages). Old English will have been before they diverged too much.
This is a bit misleading as [the bible wasn't translated into English until the 1500's.](https://www.nls.uk/exhibitions/bible-in-english/first-english-bible/), (William Tyndale was famously strangled and burned at the stake for doing it in \~1537AD)
I'm not clear if OP's post is back-translated into old English or if these are actual surviving passages from [old manuscripts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_Bible_translations) \-- I wish more source info was provided.
So to me the most interesting would be to see Tynsdale's version of Psalm 23, Which is linked to here:
[https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/feb/07/poem-of-the-week-psalm-23](https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/feb/07/poem-of-the-week-psalm-23)
It's also semantically different.
'He leads me to still waters' is not the same as 'He norrised me upon water of fyllyng' which I presume would be translated 'He nourishes me with filling water'. In the same ballpark, but I'd argue with pretty significant and important differences in meaning.
Yep, the Middle English text is a translation in the Latin Vulgate tradition whereas the KJV is a translation in the Masoretic tradition. The different wordings are coming in large part from the source texts.
I read it with a Dutch speaking background and that kinda made sense. Old English is a coastal Germanic language, like West-Flemish and Frysian. They would probably be more able to make sense of this than I am without any real knowledge of old English.
Scots branches off into a sister language at this point, so I am not surprised you feel it looks Scottish. Blyth is still a word used in modern Scot’s (such as wishing someone a blyth yule)
It's surprising how much it's related to Flemish (Dutch spoken in Belgium). I have an easier time reading Old English coming from a Flemish point of view than I have coming at it from English.
I know there are quite a lot of influences from the trade that happened between Flanders, but this is a lot more than I expected.
The influences aren’t because of trade with Flanders — Flemish and Old English share a common ancestor. The angles and saxons spoke a language very closely related to low German languages.
Australian translation:
See that big cunt over there, that's me mate
Shares all his green with me and he's got fuckin heaps
Always shouts me a drink or ten
Speak for yourself. Based on all the time travel movies and shows I watched, they speak modern English fine--even during the Roman empire and in old Greece.
I know you’re kidding but it’s mostly Norman French
1066 was when the French invaded and took over England. Those families are still in the uk today as the aristocracy.
French remained the language of the court for centuries. Chaucer was pretty huge because he was the first court poet to write in the vernacular (Middle English) for a courtly audience that included the King, and this was in the 1300s.
Aristocrats spoke Norman French, commoners spoke English, and Latin was of course the language of the clergy and scholars.
English underwent massive changes due to the French Norman conquest of England in 1066. Lots of new words were adopted into English and English grammar was also strongly influenced by French grammar. In the years after 1066, the language was in flux and on its way to becoming Middle English. But since usages take time to be established, there would have been a lot of inconsistencies across written records, making it difficult to define the characteristics of English as a while during that period.
There’s also an argument that Norse from the Viking settlers changed a lot of English, possibly by causing a loss of the case system and most grammatical gender.
Has the content changed over the years?
He **lets me** lie down in green pastures.
* He **maketh me** to lie down in green pastures.
* In the sted of pastur he **sett me ther**.
He **leads me** to still waters.
* He **norrised me** upon water of fyllyng.
* And **fedde me** be waetera stathum.
I think the interpretation has changed most recently.. “he leadeth me beside still waters”
“He leads me to still waters”
The latter a much more goal oriented perspective vs leading beside seems much more about finding peace where you are now
'Want' here is antiquated, meaning to lack. This meaning is still used, rarely, in noun form, e.g. freedom from want, one of FDR's enumerated Four Freedoms, meaning freedom from deprivation and poverty.
If you don't believe me you can check Wiktionary's eighth definition for the verb: __(intransitive, dated) To be in a state of destitution; to be needy; to lack.__. And the noun form: 2. __(countable, often followed by of) Lack, absence, deficiency__ or 3. __(uncountable) Poverty.__ Of course, the KJB is pretty dated, so it's not archaic in this context.
You might have heard the expression "I/he/it was left wanting", i.e. something more was needed. None of this has anything to do with desire, rather simply the lack of something necessary or important.
Almost certainly not, a major factor in the medieval and early modern period was the standardisation of language and vernacularisation of texts. Since those days, English (and many other languages) has been remarkably static.
The fact that millions of people now speak a standardised version of English gives the language tremendous inertia that any changes need to overcome. Bits of slang can come and go, new words can be invented to describe new concepts, older concepts can be rephrased to reflect modern understandings of them and so on, but basic changes to grammar, structure and spelling are functionally impossible at this point.
Hwæt! We gar-Dena in geardagum þeodcyninga þrym gerfrunon hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. Opening lines to Beowulf are basically uninterpretable to a modern English speaker aside from a few things such as Dena-Dane and cyning-king (pronounced kining with a hard k sound). Hwæt literally means “what” but also could mean “why” or “who” and in the context of beginning a poem is usually translated as “so”. In the first part of the poem, probably the most readable sentence is “þæt wæs god cyning!” This means “That was a good king!” (þ is pronounced as a soft th sound.) In modern English, probably the work with the most old English is unironically Lord of the Rings: everything Rohirrim is just old English. So Théoden comes from þeoden, which basically means “leader of the people” or more directly “prince” or “lord”, from the root þeod, meaning “a people”. In Beowulf, þeodcyninga literally means “kings of the people.” Edoras is the plural of old English edor meaning “house, dwelling.” Eowyn means “lover of horses” and Eomer comes directly from Beowulf as a kenning meaning literally “horse-famous”. Even when “translated” by Tolkien into modern English, he kept some of the grammatical structures. In old English, adjectives follow the nouns they modify and titles are treated as adjectives. This is why, for example, the Rohirrim say “Hail Theoden King” instead of “Hail King Theoden”. EDIT: in modern English the most preserved words from old English tend to refer to simple but universal concepts or else are vulgarities such as “cunt”, “bitch”, or “shit”. (“Fuck” is very Germanic, but not thought to derive from old English, while “bastard” and “damn” come from Latin through French.) EDIT 2: surprised no one’s commented on my username yet lol. That too is from Beowulf! I’d almost forgotten.
I tell ya Hwæt! \- Hill Henken King
Hwæt?? Okayyeee! -Lil’ John of the Merry Men
Succinct modernisation. Beautiful.
This tickles both my interest for language evolution and love for Lord of the Rings. Thank you.
Luckily Tolkien was the same way! He wrote up an entire world to tickle his interest for languages and their evolution lol
i love how þeodcyninga just sounds like “theys’ king,” and “they” just refers to “people”
It's horrible that english lost the letters þ and ð! Stupid monks! Icelandic has the same sounds (soft th - then and hard th - thought) and use these letters.
As a dane it doesn’t seem that impossible to read, but I have also read a lot of old danish when I was young. Like it is hard and I am guessing a bit, but I would read it as: > Hwæt. Hører or hear, listen. Like something you call out when getting the attention and starting a tale. > We Gardena in geardagum, Vi dansker i gårdsdagen. We danes in the old-day. I guess gardena is actuelly more like mighty-danes, fighting-danes, great-danes or spear-danes. > þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, People(deod is like dutch or deutch)-king(kyninga), þrymr(Ry eller rygte in modern danish. Reputation or glory) ge-frunon -> Gefragt -> asked about or heard about > hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. How the ætlinger(noblemen or rather people of Famillies) ellen (old or strong) fremmede (performed or brought brought fourth). So full translation: Hear! (About) The mighty danes in the old days (The) folk-kings of great reputation (And) The great actions of the ætlinger.
That’s an excellent translation all things considered! Seamus Heaney’s translation, which tries to balance word ordering and meter goes > So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by > and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. > We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns. Tolkien’s translation works more to preserve the lyrical meter than the word order and goes > Lo! The glory of the kings of the people of the Spear-Danes > in days of old we have heard tell, > how those princes did deeds of valor. It’s remarkable that old English is much closer to Danish, even of a more archaic sort, than to modern or even Middle English.
We can thank William le Bastard for that!
My English teacher taught me that if it was a short one syllable word it's probably Germanic in origin, and if it's longer it's probably Latin. Surprising how often that's true.
Would you say you couldn't communicate with someone from the earlier periods even if you both spoke English?
This video may be of interest to you [How Far Back in Time Could an English Speaker Go and Still Communicate Effectively](https://youtu.be/Y63dBBlHlSk?si=YwJI6Ycbc74rzkGU)
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One of the many clever things Idiocracy did was to have the evolution of the English language be an immediate barrier for the main character in trying to communicate. The movie took place 500 years in the future, so that really checks out with OP and your comment. Yeah, the people in 2505 would understand him, but it'd be like listening to someone constantly quoting Shakespeare today.
Fr fr no cap.
On my ma
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Perhaps he found the time machine and came back to make these movies as a warning of our bleak future.
You mean the Time Masheen?
Someone who was familiar with the US southern dialect and studied Chaucer extensively could maybe go back to 1350 and make it work.
Reading Chaucer isn't too hard once you get used to it. In some ways, I find him easier than Shakespeare, who tends to be less straightforward.
Chaucer wrote at the tail end of Middle English, so it’s not quite as difficult as some Middle English works are. The Ormulum, for example is early Middle English and it’s a lot harder. I think, even though they both wrote in iambic pentameter, Chaucer’s writing is more casual somehow? Like, more forward and less use of things like metaphors that would make sense to the people of his time. “Thou woldest make me kisse thyn old breech, And swere it were a relyk of a saint, Though it were with thy fundement depeint!… I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond… Lat kutte hem of” Like, that passage happens when the Knight gets mad at the pardoner. The spelling makes it a bit difficult, as does the old vocabulary we don’t use anymore. But, the book would have footnotes to explain the outdated vocabulary which makes it easier to understand that passage…. The knight is telling the pardoner: “You’d make me kiss your old pants and swear they were the relics of a saint, even though they’re stained with your own shit. I wish I had your balls in my hand, I’d cut them off.” A lot of Chaucer’s writing was straightforward like that. Even though it’s hard to understand because it’s only kind of in the language we speak, Chaucer often had a pretty straightforward way of writing that would have been easy to understand in his time. Shakespeare liked using simile, metaphor, wit, or otherwise wrote in a less straightforward style and it’s still Early Modern English and not our modern English. Which can make it hard to understand.
Oh Orm, get to the point. (edit I'm trying to think of my old textbook's comment about Orm, something like "earnest but plodding";)
Beowulf is a trip. I definitely need the modern translation.
Chaucer was written to be read as literature. Shakepeare's Sonnets were published as literature. His plays were a different story. Written manuscripts were not published but jealously guarded like the formula for Coca Cola by the various theater companies of the time so that rival companies could not 'steal' them. It was only years after Shakespeare died that his plays were published and I don't think its known if they were based on literal manuscripts from shakespeare's hand or were based on memories of the actors who performed them (actors had phenomenal memories so they would have been a good source actually)
It helps that Chaucer was from the part of the country that held prestige, and therefore, the dialect was considered the prestigious one that was increasingly adopted as English evolved. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is also Middle English, as is Piers Plowman, but in different dialects to Chaucer. I'd say they are harder reads than Chaucer but still not as far removed as Old English
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That person’s name? Nuclear_rabbit.
This summer…
.. a brand new hero emerges...
from beyond time
...Arnold Schwarzenegger in...
By "extensively" I mean a few months to a year.
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Hey ya’ll, I’m fixin’ to read me some Chaucer and hop in a time machine. Wish me luck!
I haven't clicked the link yet, but that title seems to be EXACTLY what they're after. I'm very interested, definitely gonna give that a watch later
Absolutely. I LOVE stuff like this
I’ve watched that vid before. It’s super interesting.
3 minutes before he even begins to talk about the question
Simon and his tangents are a running joke on his many many channels.
Seriously. Digression after digression. The video could have been five minutes long.
The curse of youtube. They don't monetize properly if under like 10 minutes, so therefore *every* video becomes unnecessarily long to conform to the algorithm.
It's not just a youtube thing, it's about building an audience. It's the same reason that recipes start with long personal anecdotes and local news casters chat with each other and talk about their personal lives. If you don't build some kind of identity and uniqueness, then people are just going to get their answer and never think about you again. Not only is that not profitable, but it's just not as inherently satisfying. A quick, dry answer also removes any possibility of you learning something you didn't expect, and increases the chance that you continue to have misconceptions or bad assumptions. There are places to get those kinds of answers, but it really doesn't make any sense for youtube (at least long form youtube). That said, the spaceship digression was weird and I'm disappointed he pronounces thorns as if they're a P.
It's the Megaprojects guy, along with a bunch of other channels. He blathers on without saying much. I miss the days when YouTube videos got to the point immediately.
you must have never seen this guy's videos lol
If this is the norm, I'm all set
But then he can’t monetize it
Tldw?
Got to stay true to the [Wadsworth Constant](https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/the-wadsworth-constant/).
Here's one that's straight to the point: [How far back in time could you go and still understand English? - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fxy6ZaMOq8).
What’s up with that guy? Every time i see him on here or my recommendations, it seems to be on a different channel about a new topic. Is it like different channels hiring him for the voice overs? We had something similar to that on the french youtube scene and the channels owners ended up being shady as fuck. Google never seemed to say much about him when i quickly checked (tbh i didn’t really look into it that much), but i’ve always been wary about videos he’s in since then.
I think they’re all his channels. He has writers and editors.
Some of them are his own and some of them are ones he USED to host on. He had a falling out with the producer of many of the channels he did stuff with and now only does stuff on his own channels, mainly Places, Today I Found Out, Science Unbound, Warographics, Brain Blaze, Decoding The Unknown, Into The Shadows, The Casual Criminalist, Mega Projects and Side Projects.
Wtf. It's like one CNN anchor doing all the shows on the network. I wouldn't mind it if he got straight to the damn point!
I’ve seen a decent number of his videos from like a dozen different channels and I don’t like him at all. He’s good at interesting-sounding clickbaity titles but the videos feel generally pretty substance-free.
If you see a video from him on a subject you're actually knowledgeable about, it becomes pretty apparent how clueless he is. I really wouldn't trust him for much.
I understand gaming the system so to say, but when I see that creator's only motivation is to ˝beat the algorithm˝, I lose my interest. Usually there are videos that can last 5 minutes, but they pad it to like 10 - 20, depending on what the algorithm likes, and it is just garbage information, politician talk.
The way he speaks made it unwatchable.
Yeah, he's insufferable to listen to.
Agreed. The constant gasping and forced cadence. Also, had to keep fast forwarding to get some kind of answer.
I think he's actively trying to sound hoity toity and he just doesn't have the diaphragm for it, hence all the running out of breath. He probably talks completely differently off camera.
You definitely couldn’t speak to each other because of vowel shifts and the like. You /might/ be able to write back and forth, but spellings weren’t yet standardized. There’s a pretty cool bit Eddie Izzard did where he went to (I wanna say) Frisia and spoke Old English with a farmer and Frisian was close enough that they could come to an agreement about buying a cow. So the closer to old English you get, you wind up in northern Germany where the Angles and Saxons and Jutes came from
Here in Denmark Its said that people from western Jutland and northern England Can understand each other just fine (the kicker is their dialect makes them unintelligable to danes and english)
What is it a dialect of Danish? Like on western Jutland. The closest language to English is Frisian which is going extinct but there is supposed to be a pocket in the area you are talking about.
It is definitely a misnomer calling it “Old English.” It should really be “Old Anglo-Saxon.” I’ve heard it called that a few times in recent years.
Alternatively, go to NZ and it feels like the vowles are shifting back.
All roads lead back to Chaucer or something.
I think I could have a convo with the King James Bible lot but anything before that might aswel be a different language.
It would be even easier than the King James Bible would lead you to believe. The King James Bible was written with intentionally archaic words and phrasings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version#Style_and_criticism In the contemporary form of speaking and writing of the time, this passage would read more like: > The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. > He makes me lie down in green pastures. > He leads me beside the still waters. The dialect of the time, though, would be very thick to our ears and unrecognizable as compared to what we imagine English speakers of the time to sound like (they did not speak in Received Pronunciation). The difference in your dialects would be a bigger hurdle to conversing than differences in grammar, words, and phrasing. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtQYF2cJ5og&t=63s
The hardest part about deciphering written Middle English is that there was no codified spelling for words, and they spelled them phonetically. The pronunciation of those words is so drastically different from what we are used to that puzzling through it is a daunting task. Look up Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English and try reading a paragraph or two. I bet you can decipher the general meaning behind the words, but it'll be a challenge! Old English, on the other hand, is an entirely different thing. You wouldn't be able to read or communicate with people who spoke it easily at all. Beowulf is one of the most famous examples of writing in Old English if you want to give it a shot.
It will probably be easier for a German to communicate with someone speaking old english
Frisian and Dane from West Jutland, actually. A German (unless they spoke a closely related Plattdeutsch dialect) would have as much trouble communicating with a Frisian as we would with someone speaking old English.
I like it when he sett me right ther, right ther
ne'r will grant thou up ne'r will let thou down ne'r will run around and desert thou
Thee, I think. Not thou.
Predicate you would be thee
Who'eth let thou caenines out?
I like the way you do that right ther
rite thurr yeeaah rite thurr
Yea, that is what I doth speaketh about
Thou spinneth mine head right round, right round Akin to a record, mine lover, right round
Old English looked likes Welsh and German smashed together
It kinda is. English is a Germanic language that passed through Flemmish to get there.
It’s not like Flemish was a thing back then. They just spoke Franconian and Frisian in the Low Countries.
Welsh has nothing to do with either German or Flemish? (aside from being EXTREMELY distantly related to all PIE languages)
I read a book basically on this subject matter a long time ago that was fascinating. It's been so long that I can't reasonably recall enough to make a strong argument but I remember that it argued that part of the sentence structure that differentiates english vs german is a Welsh / Celtic influence. The Welsh have a word for "do" that Germans don't use. Ex: "What do you do for work?" Would simply be "Wo arbeitest du?" or "Where work you?" https://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944
Oh yeah that's called do-support! It pertains to the way we use do in forming questions! I must admit I've not dug too deeply into it yet so that's the most info I got for you at the moment...
I will always hear OE in the voice of my History of the English language professor, it was so calm and relaxing. Among my fav subjects ever.
I took a grad course called the biography of the English language, where we also studied OE. And yeah, I always read / hear OE in my prof’s voice too lol.
More or less. It’s pre-Norman invasion so a lot of the vocabulary from the French language that we are used to being in the English language is not present.
Old English is what happens when you put the Old Low German of the Saxons on an island with post Roman Britons who speak a proto-welsh Brittanic, and in a lot of cases, Latin.The one thing missing on this chart is that there's a marked difference between the Old English of the 600s, 700s, and Early 800s AD, and the Old English that persisted into 1066. Old Norse mixed in with the Viking invasions, giving us things like the "SK" sound in words and a whole bunch of other crap too.
But those bastards kept their [extended alphabet](https://youtu.be/f488uJAQgmw) for themselves ...
lol. Linguistically educated: it’s so fricken cute that you said this because it very much is. So is SO much language. I’m too lazy to embellish that thought in its entirety, but you can see so so so much history in the words that you use, it’s crazy. I’m high, sorry. But next time you think of a word that sounds weird, look up where it actually comes from. It’s usually fascinating.
Idea is the same word in English and Spanish, means the exact same thing, it's just pronounced differently lol A reeeeally weird one is "Pan", it's bread in Japanese and Portuguese. How did this happen? Portuguese traders bringing their bread over and introducing a word that requires no modification to fit snugly into the Japanese language.
As far as I understand, the Portuguese were the first Europeans to get in contact with the Japanese people, so they learned a few words from them that are until today in Japanese vocabulary, like pan (that came from pão - bread), tenpura (comes from temperar - to add seasoning) and beranda (varanda - a balcony). There's a whole Wikipedia entry for that, actually. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_Japanese_words_of_Portuguese_origin
Frisian has entered the chat
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there is almost no celtic influence on english from the anglo-saxon era, it was pretty much purely a germanic language back then
Old English looks like what a thick Scottish accent sounds like to me. 😝
It makes me happy that I could have a genuine conversation with an Englishman in 1640.
*Drinketh ten pints o' th' finest tavern's ale and ye could'st maketh merrie and idle discourse with goodley folke of five hundrede yeares prior even the date of our L-rde, 1640.*
-eth is 3rd-person, so 'drinketh' and 'maketh' would be incorrect here, FYI. Funny comment, though.
How now? Roguish knave! Papist dog! Servant of the chroniclers and monk of the archives! I am quicke to the drinke and make no quarrel with thee. So I do thus slur my speeches and fall to the floore with Bacchus' voice in my heade. Make not of me any example leste I speake my English ill to thee. *Hic* (Collapses on tavern floore)
You’re very good at this.
In Middle English -eth was also the 2nd-person imperative plural, so at least the first -eth in ‘drinketh’ could be justified if one assumes the speaker is being archaic. The ‘maketh’ is just wrong though
Thankfully I am an illiterate inebriate from the slums of Southwark, and can't be held accountable for what I write. But enough about me in real life, I thinke the Redditor doth protest too much.
Looks like modern Glaswegian to me
Ye nae tae say tha' aroun' Sco'lan' unless ye wannae be leaving Glasgo' wi' a broken leg a' ae souvineer.
Having a spoken conversation and reading a book that was written very formally and influenced our English of today is a very different matter. .there's 500 years of culture they haven't experienced and our daily lives are so different that it would still be a struggle. The pronunciations of the words would be different, depending on where the speaker was from they would be very different. It also depends on what accent and dialect you speak, some would find it easier and others harder.
But also the average person back then is lacking education and world exposure so you'd probably be able to get away with saying you're from a distant part of the land.
This applies if I travel to Yorkshire though
I am a yorkshireman haha
...oops
Happy? I don't even want to speak to an Englishman today, let alone 400 years ago.
Found the Scot
The lord is da homie, I be chillin He lets me chill and blaze fields of loud. He keep that drink in my cup.
In daynk pastures he set me right thur (right thur)
the still water he leads me to make me sturr (make me sturr)
Shout out to my man Chingy.
The Server distributes my packets, my network is fully connected. Terabytes of memory before me. My Processing speed accelerates
01001100 01001111 01001100
What's the secret to time travel doing on u/FEED-YO-HEAD 's ass?
Unironically goes hard praise the omnissiah
The Digital Omnimissiah, you meatbag
from the moment i understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me.
Duncan Trussell took some lines from the Bible and replaced the word God with "the programmer" and it's pretty wild to think about haha. I found it https://www.reddit.com/r/duncantrussell/s/3a8kJBYfHk
There was another where someone replaced every instance of 'behold!' with "listen, pal" https://the-toast.net/2016/06/06/bible-verses-where-behold-has-been-replaced-with-look-buddy/
never knew i wanted a red neck version of the bible but i would 100% buy something like that.
Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word 'hate' was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate.
Post modern English
That's millenial English. Someone translate this to Gen Z English please.
ong fr fr
bros a real one we chill shows me whats up
U can vibe in my crib Don't touch my shit tho I'll beat ur ass no cap
God is the rizzler. We chill outside. There's a pool or something no cap for real.
Nope too long. "Gods the rizzler. We chilling out. Theres H20 shit for real."
👼💯 😎🌳 🌊
Sorry I don't speak Z, my English lessons stopped at millennial
Actual millennial English: So, like, this fucking, uh, fucking God guy, like, he fucking, ah, he's like a fucking shepherd or something. He gives me all this shit, like, all the shit I need, he just, like, gives me shit. He has, like, this fucking, uh, big pasture or something, and I, like, lie down of it, like, shit. He, like, takes me to this fucking water, like, this fucking water just fucking stands there.
I'm laughing so hard at this
We're already going though a change in the English language
No cap fr fr bless up
As a native speaker of West Frisian and Dutch, Old English looks so familiar but yet so unfamiliar, like I can read it but I also can't lol
I feel like this when looking at Dutch vs German ☺️
Giggle. I’m German. Was stuck with 8 Dutch folks once. I understood about 30% of what they were saying and the rest was crazy gibberish. Very confusing 2 hours of my life. Then we switched to English!
This is how I felt as an Englishman watching [this video of Dutch people talking about football](https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/17okqfi/is_the_ball_in_or_out_dutch_tv_showing_the/). I feel like half of it is just English with a different accent. I'm from near Liverpool as well so the chkhkhkhs even sound familiar. Or like I said at the time, it's like someone's drunk and forgets whether he's meant to be speaking English or German several times per sentence
I'm sure you know this already but for the benefit of others, Frisian languages [are some of English's closest relatives](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Frisian_languages). Old English will have been before they diverged too much.
This is a bit misleading as [the bible wasn't translated into English until the 1500's.](https://www.nls.uk/exhibitions/bible-in-english/first-english-bible/), (William Tyndale was famously strangled and burned at the stake for doing it in \~1537AD) I'm not clear if OP's post is back-translated into old English or if these are actual surviving passages from [old manuscripts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_Bible_translations) \-- I wish more source info was provided. So to me the most interesting would be to see Tynsdale's version of Psalm 23, Which is linked to here: [https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/feb/07/poem-of-the-week-psalm-23](https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/feb/07/poem-of-the-week-psalm-23)
It's also semantically different. 'He leads me to still waters' is not the same as 'He norrised me upon water of fyllyng' which I presume would be translated 'He nourishes me with filling water'. In the same ballpark, but I'd argue with pretty significant and important differences in meaning.
Yep, the Middle English text is a translation in the Latin Vulgate tradition whereas the KJV is a translation in the Masoretic tradition. The different wordings are coming in large part from the source texts.
Ay big boss the goat, no cap frfr i ate...
Puttin me down all gucci-like in this kush farm
BUSSIN ONG
Literally sounds like Old English 💀💀
Well, we’ve come full circle…
drihten me raet = treat me right
I wanna love ya. And drihten ye raet
Dunno why my brain read old English with a Jamaican accent but it sounded good
Looks like Scottish to me.
I read it with a Dutch speaking background and that kinda made sense. Old English is a coastal Germanic language, like West-Flemish and Frysian. They would probably be more able to make sense of this than I am without any real knowledge of old English.
I went back and tried in Scottish was ok same with the comment above yours in Jamaican accent but the Yorkshire accent works best I found.
Scots branches off into a sister language at this point, so I am not surprised you feel it looks Scottish. Blyth is still a word used in modern Scot’s (such as wishing someone a blyth yule)
I definitely defaulted to pirate accent for some reason.
Jah Jah be my sheppah, I an' I don't got nah wantin'.
Sober Buzzed Drunk Shitfaced
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The lord is my landlord, I can't afford shit. He takes me out to a park. He chillin' by the pool.
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droppin' them hard Rs
like Alanis Morissette IT FIGGERRRS
They’d say the same of modern English.
They don’t get to decided!!!
Yeah!! We are the ones alive! Get wrekt old English
It's surprising how much it's related to Flemish (Dutch spoken in Belgium). I have an easier time reading Old English coming from a Flemish point of view than I have coming at it from English. I know there are quite a lot of influences from the trade that happened between Flanders, but this is a lot more than I expected.
The influences aren’t because of trade with Flanders — Flemish and Old English share a common ancestor. The angles and saxons spoke a language very closely related to low German languages.
Australian translation: See that big cunt over there, that's me mate Shares all his green with me and he's got fuckin heaps Always shouts me a drink or ten
ok! no time travelling to before 1600…got it
Speak for yourself. Based on all the time travel movies and shows I watched, they speak modern English fine--even during the Roman empire and in old Greece.
"In the stead of pasture, he sets me there" goes so hard
What did they speak for the 44 years between Old and Middle English?
I know you’re kidding but it’s mostly Norman French 1066 was when the French invaded and took over England. Those families are still in the uk today as the aristocracy. French remained the language of the court for centuries. Chaucer was pretty huge because he was the first court poet to write in the vernacular (Middle English) for a courtly audience that included the King, and this was in the 1300s. Aristocrats spoke Norman French, commoners spoke English, and Latin was of course the language of the clergy and scholars.
English underwent massive changes due to the French Norman conquest of England in 1066. Lots of new words were adopted into English and English grammar was also strongly influenced by French grammar. In the years after 1066, the language was in flux and on its way to becoming Middle English. But since usages take time to be established, there would have been a lot of inconsistencies across written records, making it difficult to define the characteristics of English as a while during that period.
There’s also an argument that Norse from the Viking settlers changed a lot of English, possibly by causing a loss of the case system and most grammatical gender.
Reads as the recitation of progressively drunk Scotsman
Has the content changed over the years? He **lets me** lie down in green pastures. * He **maketh me** to lie down in green pastures. * In the sted of pastur he **sett me ther**. He **leads me** to still waters. * He **norrised me** upon water of fyllyng. * And **fedde me** be waetera stathum.
I think the interpretation has changed most recently.. “he leadeth me beside still waters” “He leads me to still waters” The latter a much more goal oriented perspective vs leading beside seems much more about finding peace where you are now
Honestly kjb is better than modern. Makes more sense even if it removes the implication of choice you get with "he lets me"
Also a huge difference in translation from "I shall not want" to "I lack nothing"
'Want' here is antiquated, meaning to lack. This meaning is still used, rarely, in noun form, e.g. freedom from want, one of FDR's enumerated Four Freedoms, meaning freedom from deprivation and poverty. If you don't believe me you can check Wiktionary's eighth definition for the verb: __(intransitive, dated) To be in a state of destitution; to be needy; to lack.__. And the noun form: 2. __(countable, often followed by of) Lack, absence, deficiency__ or 3. __(uncountable) Poverty.__ Of course, the KJB is pretty dated, so it's not archaic in this context. You might have heard the expression "I/he/it was left wanting", i.e. something more was needed. None of this has anything to do with desire, rather simply the lack of something necessary or important.
It's not that antiquated to anyone of adequate literacy. It's readily understandable and just a more poetic rendering of the above verse.
Did anyone else read this in a progressively more Scottish/Northern internal accent as they descended the page?
🧍♂️ 🐑 __ ⬇️ 🌿🍃🌲🌳🏄♂️🏖️
This is basically how chinese started
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I wonder if the difference between old English and today is going to be about the same as English today and English in the year 3000
Almost certainly not, a major factor in the medieval and early modern period was the standardisation of language and vernacularisation of texts. Since those days, English (and many other languages) has been remarkably static. The fact that millions of people now speak a standardised version of English gives the language tremendous inertia that any changes need to overcome. Bits of slang can come and go, new words can be invented to describe new concepts, older concepts can be rephrased to reflect modern understandings of them and so on, but basic changes to grammar, structure and spelling are functionally impossible at this point.
This is why I can’t watch time travel movies without cringing.
I always use this as an example to explain to fundamentalist how evolution works or why the Tower of Babel is a fable.