Conversational Old English

This time it's no spoof. You never know when having taken a few elementary lessons in Old English might come in handy.

Something I find amusing: it's very likely that a native German speaker would find more of the example sentences comprehensible than one for whom the purported descendant language is a native tongue. For instance, what can you make of the following?

Ic wille þin swetmetas bitan.
Hwær sind þa cypmenn?

Also note the way in which minor sound shifts make the following perfectly comprehensible modern German.

Hu hatte þu? Ic hatte Ælfræd.

Hint: think "tt" -> "ss".

Comments

[Andrew Reeves]

"Something I find amusing: it's very likely that a native German speaker would find more of the example sentences comprehensible than one for whom the purported descendant language is a native tongue."That's what happens when your ruling class is almost exclusively Francophone for close to three hundred years. You're language winds up being a mish-mash that is split about 60/40 between being Romance and Germanic.

[Andrew Reeves]

One other thing that relates to an ongoing argument on medieval sophistication. If you've started doing Old English for enjoyment, in a few months (and it really only takes a few months to pick OE) up, you should check out Aelfric's De Temporibus Anni, which, though mainly concerned with reckoning of time, is pretty scientifically sophisticated. Especially fun are the glosses on the signs of the zodiac, with entries like like "Cancer, þæt is crabba," and "Aquarius, þæt is wæter gyt," followed by (I forget the precise wording) words to the effect of "that is, the man that gets the water."Actually, if you'd like to check out Old English medical and scientific texts, you might also find interesting that there's a pretty decent collection of Old English medical books (leechbooks) that were edited in the 19th century.

[Mrs Tilton]

Hmmm. I'm a Germanophone but not a native one. Still, I'll have a go:

'I want to bite thy sweetmeats. Where are the cup-men?'

(or more freely:)

'Hey baby, let's get busy. Where's that damned waiter with my drink?'

Sounds like old Anglo-Saxon singles bars were not very different to our own.