Learn to read Middle English
blog.plover.com
blog.plover.com
It's still "schulden" (to owe) in German, and "trybut" is still "tribut", and "alle" is still "alle", and "hoppen" (or "hopfen") is still used in some German dialects as "jump"/"dance", and "alwey" (or "alleweil" / "ällweil") is still used in southern Germany for "always" - my grandfather still uses it. "Ȝelde" is very close to the modern German "vergelten" (repay) or "abgelten" (compensate), and even to "Geld" (money).
The only word that seems strangely out of context is "dettes", and as it turns out, this word is French.
As a German, when I read Middle English, I always have the strange feeling that someone tried to "correct" or clarify a Modern English text, but only partly succeeded.
I would not say it is lost. What else does "you should" mean but "you owe"? You can exchange "You should..." for "You ought to..." (ought is a past tense of owe).
"You should attribute..."
Unfortunately, he then decides to back the wrong (loosing) side durng some such part of the War of the Roses. They get at him and try to jail him for this. Also a bunch of murdering and raping and pillaging for good measure. He gets captured and, well, just walks out and swims the moat. Nothing really comes of that escape, legally speaking. Everyone was like, good for you.
As he is still backing the wrong side, they try and get him again. This time they do their jobs and capture him. The jury convicts him and he, well, maybe they convict him. No one really knows. So they let him go. This pattern repeats itself a few times, yes really. Malory finds that cattle rustling on the Scottish border is more his cup of tea anyway.
Eventually he gets on the right/winning side of the war. Unfortunately, they still don't really like him, all that pillaging you know, so the general pardons that come along when a new king comes into power, well, those skip him. Finally, he gets into a prison that really has some bars behind it. There he gets really bored reads a bunch of French and English stuff borrowed from a bleeding heart Noble next to the Tower of London. It's all about King Arthur so he writes 'Le Mort d'Arthur'. He dies in prison.
A frogge biþ a smol beaste wiþ foure leggys, whyche liueþ booþ in watyre and on londe. It cuoþ bee broune or grene or yelowe, or be it tropyckal, he may haue dyuers coloures. It haþ longys and guilles booþe. Eet haccheþ from an ey and it þan ys a tadpolle. It groweþ to ben a frogge, if it þan ne be noght aetoen.
From https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=egg:
"""
This Norse-derived northern word vied in Middle English with native cognates eye, eai, from Old English æg, until finally displacing the others after c. 1500. Caxton (15c.) writes of a merchant (probably a north-country man) in a public house on the Thames who asked for eggs:
And the goode wyf answerde, that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coude speke no frenshe, but wolde have hadde egges, and she understode hym not.
"""
_ A frog beeth a small beast with four legs, which liveth both in water and on land. It could be brown or green or yellow, or be it tropical, it may have diverse colors. It hath lungs and gills both. It hatcheth from an egg, and it then is a tadpole. It groweth to be a frog, if it then be not eaten._
"A frog is a small beast with four legs, which lives both in water and on land. It could be brown or green or yellow, or be it tropical, he may have diverse colors. It has lungs and gills both. It hatches from an egg and it then is a tadpole. It grows to be a frog, if it by then be not eaten."
Here is a free course that only focuses on reading German, I found it quite fun to play with. https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/
There’s a constructed dialect called “Anglish” that attempts to be this more literally.
Isn't this because the language we're reading in OP and speak now is the pidgin that developed between Viking settlers and English incumbents? Doesn't that also explain why our pronouns are Scandinavian rather than the ones found in Old English or old Norman?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothes...
I think only the third person plural (they/their/them) is of Old Norse origin (ON þeir supplanting OE hie). Interesting, we still use 'em which probably derives from the original English pronoun, not a shortening of "them" (we don't normally chop "th" off the beginning of a word).
Compare for example:
he: OE "he" / ON "hann"
your: OE "eower" / ON "yðar"
it: OE "hit" / ON "þat" (note: still "hit" in some modern dialects)
her: OE "hire" / ON "hennar/henni"
This is not a strong point; "them" is not a normal word. We freely reduce all the pronouns.
There is this old joke where two students sit in a lesson and one asks the other, "What did the professor just say?" and the other student answers, "I don't know yet, let's wait for the verb".
Another consequence of this flexibility is that stylistic devices that depend on the word order, like the anastrophe, don't work that well in German.
> Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
Edit: I mean wouldn’t they have used “deer” rather than “beaste” for modern “animal”.
Old English "deor" actually meant "beast/animal" in the broader sense (cognates include German "Tier") but began to specialize after being pushed out by Norman French "beste" (sp?) during the Middle English period.
The text, with modern orthography, is here: http://www.skeltonproject.org/spekeparott/
Being able to recite monologues from Canterbury Tales was also a good party trick that apparently piqued the interest of this girl who later decided to marry me. So there you go.
I'm guessing not the Knights Tale
> apparently piqued the interest of this girl who later decided to marry me
I waited until after the first date before trying this one (Millers Tale). Reader - she married me!
The reason is silly. One of the first times I heard any of it read out loud, it was an English prof with an extreme Southern drawl reading Monk's Tale. I got a real kick of it, and always gave the Monk a little hint of the Blue Ridge Mountains in his honor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary
English "heart" is in French, "coeur", and in Greek, "kardia". Unrelated? No! In Proto-Indo-European we think it was "k̂erd"! Soften the leading k, stop voicing the final d, jiggle the vowel, and you get "heart". Lose the final d and you get "coeur". Jiggle the vowel, add a trailing vowel for streamlining, and you get "kardia".
Better yet, soften the leading k and you get "hṛd", the Sanskrit word. Add a trailing vowel, and you get "hŕday", the Hindi word in use today (or so wiktionary tells me).
Its relative, "quick", has some weird historical attachments as well -- it can mean both "rapid" and "alive" (as in "quicksand" or the "quick" of a nail).
The most common example of this sense today would be "fasten".
Likely also "quicksilver"?
In general, poetry is a great component to any language learning (enhanced by the fact they're often published in dual language version), but it's essential for dead languages.
Poetry is actually much worse for learning a language than prose is, because the language used in poetry is usually not typical and not uncommonly fairly strained. Any advantage of poetry comes from how much the student enjoys it.
> but it's essential for dead languages.
Why would dead languages be any different in this regard from living ones?
As to poetry in general: Poetic language is challenging, diverse in vocabulary, and because of meter it is memorizable, which I find puts more of the language "in my head". Poetry is also an essential part of most national literatures, and so a big component of really learning a language beyond being conversational.
Nothing in my answer disparaged prose, or that poetry is more important than prose; any language learning consists of repeated, effortful exposure to many language sources, as well as speaking and writing the language. I'm just emphasizing that studying poems in other languages can really help learning those languages, so a savvy student should include it. The tone of your response is puzzling to me.
This is a matter of taste.
> I have never had a conversation in any dead language.
This is also a matter of taste.
> Prose literature is actually a more recent development, so if you want to read ancient stories in the original, which are awesome, you will be reading poetry.
This is more of a matter of which language you're studying.
> because of meter [poetic language] is memorizable
This is bizarre. Your claim is quite correct as to speakers of the original language, but we've stipulated that the language is dead. In general, students cannot identify or even notice poetic meter in the dead languages they study. I really enjoyed scanning Latin verse, but that is because I enjoy math. To more "normal" students, scansion is infamous for being painful and difficult.
I responded to the perceived suggestion that studying poetry is an effective method of learning a language. I don't agree with that: poetry is more difficult to read than prose, and the lessons you may draw from it are often specific to the genre, not the language. For example, if you want to read Latin poetry, you will want a working knowledge of Greek grammar, which is sometimes used in preference to Latin grammar. The Roman poets could count on their audience to know Greek. But learning Greek grammar is not actually a particularly valuable step in studying Latin grammar.
You don't read poetry in order to learn a language. You learn the language in order to read the poetry.
def speke_parott():
# many machinations...
trybut = "squwak"
return trybuteIn German itself, the word apparently transformed from "skulan" at around the year 0 over "skuld" at around 700 to "schult" around the year 1000.
"to him that ye schuleth tribute, tribute" becoming "to him that you should tribute, tribute."
It is a bit odd to modern ears but the second tribute is clearly a shortened exhortation for emphasis. Should in English often implies an obligation and owe falls out from that. "You should apologise for that" -> "You own an apology for that".
Incidentally, thorn and yogh are still occasionally used today: thorn (written as y) at the beginning of some pub names, e.g. "Ye Olde Mitre Inn", and yogh (written as z) in some Scottish surnames: Menzies (traditionally pronounced "mingus"), Dalziel (pronounced "dee-el"), Mackenzie (derived from Gaelic MacCoinnich, but now with a spelling pronunciation in English).
* (ab)uses of mathematical notation (three dots - ∴/∵ - for therefore/because; definition/solution/information become def^n/sol^n/inform^n; iff for if and only if)
* print but using ƒ for f and a cursive/rounded k
* 7 and Z have a bar (like Ƶ, to aid in distinguishing from 1/2)
* 1.8K becomes 1K8 (mostly for resistors, but occasionally 1800 in any context becomes 1K8 and 1,800,000 1M8, particularly when writing fast)
* there's an occasional touch of Japanese (mostly mo/も for as well, and ya/や for a non-exhaustive and)
From German to Dutch to Frisian to Scots to English is a great way to train your ear and language sense.
The great golden era blog 'Making Light' would post old English of various ages.
> The only strange word is schuleþ itself
it makes me think Middle English is not easy at all. Out of the entire sentence I unambiguously recognize "to," "that/þat" and "men", and I can guess but can't be sure that "alle" means "all" by recognizing that "alles" is German for all and supposing that English lost the trailing e recently. None of these words have high semantic meaning and I am unable to make a guess at any of the remaining words in the sentence based on context, since I have no context.
I'm not a dumb man, nor do I have a small vocabulary. I probably know more about linguistics and especially historical linguistics than the vast majority of the population due to my interest in conlanging. But the fact that some people think that the meaning of the rest of the words in the sentence is so obvious as to serve as an example for how obvious Middle English is, is probably the reason why I've failed or nearly failed every English class where we've had to read Shakespeare, and never garnered any sympathy from teachers who are so certain that "trybut" is obviously "tribute" as anyone can plainly see.
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/intros/atlas_preface.html
I helped with programming for processing/typesetting of the various texts and the production of "dot maps" and other maps for the data of the corpus of some 320 words which were (manually) collected from thousands of manuscripts.
E.g. text 1423, (maybe with a known scribe, usually with a location), spelled such and such a word in the following N ways (scribes often had a preferred spelling, but weren't always consistent).
With such maps, among other thints, you could start to place unknown texts by doing some simple Venn diagrams for spellings it contained.
The original (referenced above) was printed, subsequently, it was put online.
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme.html
Maybe when I retire I can help them tidy it up :)
>Here are a couple of common words that come to mind:
>eke — “also”
>wyf — “woman”
Wyf shouldn't be that hard to guess: it eventually became "wife".
Sounds Yiddish:)
Can we not do better than this? This is factually incorrect. I'm sure the author knows better, and just thought readers weren't "smart" enough to be able to understand "English is part of the Germanic language family" or "German and English are related", but instead this is just ... no... I don't think I'm being pedantic by complaining about this... But this is like saying that "Spanish started out as French" or "Romanian started out as Italian"
German refers to the language descended from Old High Franconian. English is descendended from the Anglo-Saxon dialects, the languages of peoples who invaded Britain from the western coast of what is now Denmark and the northeast coast of what is now the Netherlands. And then modified with a whole bunch of old Norse influence from Danish and Norwegian invaders. And then with a whole bunch of Old Norman French influence... etc.
If you look for a _modern_ Germanic language that English is most closely related to it would be the low Germanic languages, low Saxon, Frisian, even Dutch more so than German proper. Low and high refers to altitude -- not class or prestige or anything -- the "high" German languages are those that underwent a softening/changing sound shift which came out of the highlands in southern Germany. English, like Dutch, never underwent that sound shift. Hence we say "School" with a "k" for the sch instead of a soft "sch" like in German.
Edit: removed accidental condemnation of sodomy.
So, the Strawman is realer than one would like, albeit still lacking a brain.
What's interesting is the gap of time between our last written Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and the time that Middle English was written down. In-between is a couple hundred years of time where the aristocracy spoke and wrote in Old Norman French. Interesting things happened phonetically in that time but we know little of it.
If you believe this isn’t true you’re wandering into a territory of objectively demarcated language and dialect classification to little benefit. Pedagogically useful I’m sure, but to what semantic end? Hell I thought this was the type of problem linguistics intended to solve.
(Though, as to your point about England and Saxony: (1) mutual intelligibility is not the same as being the same language (2) Old Saxon isn't the same as Old High German.)
[But, you're right about demarcating language: it gets tricky pretty quickly. E.g., from a certain perspective, English (and German, and French, and Hindi) don't exist in the first place. A bunch of people have some sort of instantiations of formal grammars + lexicons in their brains and the output of these is such that some sort of more or less effective communication takes place and so we say these people 'speak the same language'.]
So yeah there would have been mutual intellegibility, because at that point there was likely high mutual intelligibility between all Western Germanic languages. But like you said that doesn't make them the same language. And like you aluded to, it's kind of a lumpers vs splitters thing.
These intuitions that I held about language change are not right, and they did allow me to confusedly use "Germanic" and "German" pretty much interchangeably. (After learning more linguistics and modern Germanic and Romance languages, I can now return to my old intuition and see it as a useful metaphor.)
I think you and other people in this thread are right to actively try to correct this misconception, because it's a real misconception that people, including me, have held literally instead of metaphorically.
[Even ca. 700-1000 A.D., Old English and the ancestors of modern German (modern 'Hoch Deutsch') were pretty different, if obviously related, e.g.:
Old English:
============
Fæder ūre, ðū ðē eart on heofonum,
Sī ðīn nama gehālgod.
Tō becume ðīn rice.
Gewurde ðīn willa
On eorþan swā swā on heofonum.
Urne gedæghwamlīcan hlāf syle ūs tōdæg.
And forgyf ūs ūre gyltas,
Swā swā wē forgyfaþ ūrum gyltendum.
And ne gelæd ðū ūs on costnunge,
ac alȳs ūs of yfele.
* * * *
Old High German (Bavarian):
===========================
Fater unser, du pist in himilum.
Kauuihit si namo din.
Piqhueme rihhi din,
Uuesa din uuillo,
sama so in himile est, sama in erdu.
Pilipi unsraz emizzigaz kip uns eogauuanna.
Enti flaz uns unsro sculdi,
sama so uuir flazzames unsrem scolom.
Enti ni princ unsih in chorunka.
Uzzan kaneri unsih fona allem sunton.
Is there a continental European Germanic language that was closer to English at that time? An ancestor of modern Frisian or something?
Fadar usa firiho barno,
thu bist an them hohon himila rikea,
geuuihid si thin namo uuordo gehuuilico,
Cuma thin craftag riki.
UUerða thin uuilleo oƀar thesa werold alla,
so sama an erðo, so thar uppa ist
an them hohon himilo rikea.
Gef us dag gehuuilikes rad, drohtin the godo,
thina helaga helpa, endi alat us, heƀenes uuard,
managoro mensculdio,
al so uue oðrum mannum doan.
Ne lat us farledean leða uuihti
so forð an iro uuileon, so uui uuirðige sind,
ac help us uuiðar allun uƀilon dadiun.
[these are all of course translations from Latin, so there are also differences in translator choices as well.]
Thanks for the Old Saxon example. Very interesting!
So again, why does this apparent misunderstanding matter? It certainly doesn’t detract from the article that a less precise colloquialism was used.
Both share a common ancestor. A lot further back than the 16th century. At the time that the branch that became English came into existence, German didn't exist either. It was just Frankish, or Alemannic.
At the time the Angles Saxons and Jutes left the continent, what eventually became German looked like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergakker_inscription
And it was already a separate language from the Angles' language
Full context: "English started out as German. Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon, really is a foreign language, and requires serious study. I don't think an anglophone can learn to read it with mere tricks."
> Can we not do better than this?
Can you just stop copying and pasting things out of context?
> But this is like saying that "Spanish started out as French" or "Romanian started out as Italian"
It's more like saying spanish started as latin given the context.
> English is descendended from the Anglo-Saxon dialects
So english started out as german?
Did you even read what I wrote?
German and English started from a common ancestor yes. About at least 2500 years ago, probably. But English did not start out as German any more than German started out as English. They are cousins. The ancestor they share in common is/was not called German. By anybody.
"Full context: "English started out as German. Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon, really is a foreign language, and requires serious study. I don't think an anglophone can learn to read it with mere tricks."
> Did you even read what I wrote?
Yes, I even responded on a point by point basis. Did you read what I wrote?
> German and English started from a common ancestor yes
It is clear the author was talking about german as in germanic. Hence why he referred to old english and anglo-saxon. Nobody is saying that english came from the modern german language.
You sneakily copied one sentence out of context to argue nonsense - that the author claimed english came from modern german. You built up a silly straw man and you got called out.
Once again. The author wasn't claiming the modern english language came from modern german. But the language that english descended from was german. Just like the anglo-saxon people were german. As in germanic. Okay?
So you either misunderstand what Germanic is, or you're choosing to read the author's sentence substituting "Germanic" for German, or you're being deliberately hostile.
... Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, socrates is mortal... but not all men are socrates.
"English started out as German. Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon, really is a foreign language, and requires serious study. I don't think an anglophone can learn to read it with mere tricks."
I can only copy and paste the full context so many times...
> So you either misunderstand what Germanic is, or you're choosing to read the author's sentence substituting "Germanic" for German, or you're being deliberately hostile.
No you are being intentionally obtuse. You knew fully what the author meant but you intentionally cherrypicked one sentence and misrepresented his entire point.
The author CLEARLY stated : "English started out as German. Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon, really is a foreign language, and requires serious study. I don't think an anglophone can learn to read it with mere tricks."
> ... Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, socrates is mortal... but not all men are socrates.
You might want to look up what a syllogism is.
The easiest way to end your nonsense. Lets end it once and for all. So you are claiming that the author is saying that english came from the modern german language right?
"English started out as German. Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon, really is a foreign language, and requires serious study. I don't think an anglophone can learn to read it with mere tricks."
To you, the author is saying english came from the modern german language with the statements above? Of course not. You are so full of shit, I don't know why you keep pushing your nonsense. Of course you won't answer but go off on a tangent. People can see through your nonsense. Have a nice day.
The word German means something else. Something different than the author implies, and what you imply as well.
Why does this matter? Because this history is actually fascinating and beautiful for both German and English. And the common ancestry is a lovely story in and of itself. And in many ways a reader could be led astray by thinking of English as a form of German when it is in fact its own lineage... many words have entirely different forms and meanings, and in fact English preserves things that were changed entirely in continental Germanic and vice versa.
Not to mention the influence of Old Norse, Norman French, and Brittonic languages on English as well. It's a lovely and poetic mix.
Please stop creating accounts to break HN's rules with. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.