New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome
tcd.ie
tcd.ie
"Now we must praise the protector of the heavenly kingdom the might of the measurer and his mind’s purpose, the work of the father of glory, as he for each of his wonders, the eternal Lord, established a beginning. He shaped first for the sons of the earth heaven as a roof, the holy maker; then the middle-world, mankind’s guardian, the eternal Lord, made afterwards, solid ground for men, the almighty Lord."
via https://imagejournal.org/article/caedmons-hymn-the-first-eng...
Reading Old English as a Scandinavian is always interesting, because if you squint hard enough, you can easily see how the languages are so deeply related. So many modern Scandinavian words have what seem to be lost cognates in Old English, and I suppose vice versa.
That said, I wish translations into contemporary English went further to preserve the etymology of certain words and the grammatical structure of the poem, even if it would make for a much more awkward text. For example, this text translates "middangeard" as "middle-world", which is correct, but it is cognate with "Midgård", which is the Norse mythological name for Earth. (In Scandinavian translations of J.R.R. Tolkien, "Middle Earth" is translated as "Midgård".) I think this lets us understand more about how writers of Old English understood the world, and how it was connected to the broader mythological landscape in North/Western Europe around this time, how Christian and Pagan belief systems were interacting through language as the region was in the process of christianization.
In the center, humans inhabit Midtgård. The gods in Valhall and the Jotun in Jotunheim.
Then there's also Helheim or Hel - for the dead, Alfheim for the elves, Svartalfheim for the dwarves...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Locations_in_Nor...
- Vanaheim, home of the Vanir, a group of gods associated with fertility.
- Asgård, home of the Aesir, the big-name gods (Thor, Odin, Freya, etc.).
- Jötunheim, home of the Giants.
- Alfheim, home of the elves.
- Helheim, the underworld ("Hell").
- Svartalfheim / Nidavellir, home of the dwarves.
- Midgård, home of the humans.
- Muspelheim, home of fire elementals.
- Niflheim, world of mists.
(This is the commonly accepted list, but it's always worth mentioning that surviving literary sources of Norse mythology are very scarce. Much of the lore was reconstructed in the 19th century.)
Freyja, along with her brother Freyr and their father, Njörðr, is one of the Vanir.
And of course, English develops organically (unlike, say, French), allowing new words to emerge, and for old words to take on new meanings. I love it.
As an Englishman, I always find it interesting that there is this weird defined notion of "Englishness" in language, culture, whatever, when our entire history is one of mashing and remixing ideas over at least 2,000 years, and recent discoveries at Stonehenge push that back potentially by 3,000-5,000 years more.
I particularly like the irony of the far-right going on about English identity on a march in London before going to have a lager and chicken tikka masala before heading home to a bungalow and putting on their pyjamas... :)
I think the Scandinavian roots you talk about trace back to common Germanic roots perhaps, but also the Viking aspect will influence a lot. I think English has been "dipped into" by those roots a few times in history, as has Latin.
On the need to keep the etymology aligned in translation: I think this is a routine challenge of the translator's skill, and why so many people have different views of different translations of the same texts.
The Bible could easily be translated in many different ways, but the "King James" version is considered the standard within the Anglican churches in the UK (and seems to be the common root for US church bibles too), but a more modern translation would be possible, as would one that has a closer etymological meaning to the original sources.
It's all interpretative. If people are building entire belief systems and ways of life (and arguably, laws for society), around a translation, and getting it off in a few places, it's likely we're going to run into the same problems even more when translating Tolkien or an ancient poem...
My understanding is that Old English vocabulary mostly predates Viking invasion, but even then the colonizers would have a large shared vocabulary with (non-Celtic) British natives, who would be the descendants of Anglo-Saxon settlers a couple of centuries earlier.
I don't find this to be true. Even at high mass ('bells & smells' type communion) you get more modern versions. To my recollection NIV would be most common. Obviously not a representative survey. Also, it might be at traditional/formal services you get [N]KJV as I've been to less of those.
Amongst very old people you see strong support for KJV because that's what they learnt 70 years ago. It sounds very archaic to modern ears. I'd say KJV hasn't been favoured this side of the millennium.
Just my impression.
NIV is the preferred translation for the low-church side, the evangelicals, so definitely won't be used by the bells-and-smells high church crowd. KJV is preferred by a niche who also prefers the Book of Common Prayer liturgy over Common Worship. Usually this is either an older population, a certain ethnic subgroup with calcified traditions, or old-school low church folks (so not modern evangelicals) who prefer the old ways and even the Thirty-Nine Articles.
And even then, only written at IIRC ninth-grade level (don't know the UK term; ages 14-15). I bought one in college because it was the highest-reading-level Bible they had at Barnes and Noble (major US bookseller; think Waterstones) and I wanted a decent text for some religion classes.
Stewart Lee had a good bit about this:
> [..] > ‘Bloody Beaker folk. Coming over here, rowing up the Tagus Estuary from the Iberian Peninsula in improvised rafts. Coming here with their drinking vessels. What's wrong with just cupping up the water in your hands and licking it up like a cat?’
Racism always tends towards the silly, of course, but British ethnic nationalism particularly so, given the history. What’s ’British’, anyway?
Latin influences English as a learned tongue, used by clerics and academics. Other than that most of it comes via French, when the Normans brought it.
Recent research, namely an article by Lars Nooij & Peter Schrijver [0], suggests that a population speaking Latin/Romance may have remained present in Britain until the late first millennium. Granted, the effect of this local Latin would have been on Welsh more than English.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%B3%DB%8C#Pers...
There are loads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_words_of_Port...
(I do not actually speak Manx, but 2026 is the Year of the Manx Language. I should learn some.)
> evidence indicates arigatō has a purely Japanese origin
I remain suspicious, though. Maybe what happened was the popularization of an existing Japanese term under the influence of Portuguese Jesuits, since it sounded similar to obrigado?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reborrowing
For example, katsu from cutlet, is borrowed back into English to mean… cutlet.
And when combined with “curry” as in “katsu curry” the journey meanders all the way through Tamil, Portuguese, Japanese and English, following sailors where they went.
Lithuanian and Celtic had no direct contact with each other AFAIK, although Celtic was in contact with Vasconic, Romance, Germanic and Slavic... And Lithuanian was in contact with Slavic and Germanic, maybe Finno-Ugric...
Obviously numbers...
Sniegas - Sneachd — Snow
In — An(n) — In
Najas — Nuadh — New
Marios — Muir (genitive mara) — Sea
Srūti (to flow) — Sruth (stream)
Mirti (to die) — Murt/mort (murder)
klausytis (to hear) – cluas (ear), cluinntinn (listen)
sekla — sìol — seed
Senas — Sean — Old
Vyras - Fear (plural Fir)- Man (wer(e))
Dantas (tooth) - Deudag (toothache)
Ugnis (fire) — Aigeann (fireplace)
Raudonas — Ruadh — Red
Dienas (day) — Di- (day in day names) – Day
Pilnas — Làn — Full
Kaire — Ceàrr — Left
Dešinė — Deas — Right
It is a very great thing that so many peoples now speak languages with clear common roots buried behind the deviations of use; and outmost interesting to recognize the plan and the deep thought in those radixes.
https://muyinteresante.okdiario.com/historia/60526.html
Well, let's see:
Perro, guerra, mes, pagar, ver, fuego, tierra, cima, perro, clero, altar, tribunal, rey... lots more. Tapa, dardo, ganso, ropa, guardia, sala, cama, barro, guijarro, zarza... more than anyone would think. Aspa, espía, brotar... and the -engo suffix. Visicothic and Celtic cultures are more ingrained in the North/Middle of Spain more than anyone would think despite everyone pictured it as a 100% Mediterranean culture.
Rico/rich, fresco/fresh, Blanco/blank, ganar/win... is not a coincidence.
Heck, tons of Medieval lore in the Castilles use a Gothic typeface...
Engo/enco suffix in words, related to -ingos in Gothic.
On names and surnames... Alonso, Alfonso, Guillermo, Fernando, Hernando, Hernández, López, -everything ending with -ez-, Leovigildo, Rodrigo and tons more.
It would be a gargantuan effort just alone to devise a language that would unify historic language origins roots in a contemporary time. The objective would be to stop the death and eradication of languages, e.g., Welsh, German, or any of the numerous other smaller languages and dialects that are all under varying states and types of endangerment or extinction risk, but also prevent an ignoble, unstable, and inadequate language like contemporary English from dominating the whole world.
But these days, Slovio would help me more.
I've tried Slovio on Slavs of about 10 nationalities. None had ever heard of it. All of then, no exceptions, could just understand it perfectly well, to their great surprise.
Straight from the Slovio website:
>Slovio es novju mezxunarodju jazika ktor razumijut cxtirsto milion ludis na celoju zemla.
>Slovio is a new international language that 400 million people on the planet understand
I am a Russian speaker so the copula "es" being written is strange but obviously I speak other languages that use their copula in the present tense so that's not so bad, but to 100% of slavic speakers "jazik" (tongue/language) is masculine, yet the adjectives here are reminiscent of ones for a feminine noun in the accusative case which is doubly weird as that case would also make no sense here. The second half of the sentence isn't so bad aside from "ludis" (-s plural is alien to the entire family) and "na celoju zemla" (more confusion where my brain expects a different case form). It's just odd that it completely drops noun cases on the floor when almost all the Slavic languages still have healthy productive inflection systems.
How is German, a langauge natively spoken in two nation states and quite a few neighboring regions, being eradicated?
What I’m personally curious about is the goal to prevent extinction of languages. Isn’t that fully at odds with the goal to unify languages? In a single language, we can’t possibly keep enough of even just the Germanic languages for anyone to feel like their language was preserved, and we’re talking about something that also has to work for all the wildly different language families is Asian, African, Slavic, Indian, and South American countries, just to name a few. I’m not sure it’s possible to borrow from languages in any way that preserves them. The thought I keep having is that maybe the goal to preserve languages is working against us. Yes it’s sad to lose some languages, but I think it was sad for the languages to split in the first place, and it would be amazing if there was a common language.
What about the idea of archiving all the languages we have, so the history is there, and then after that dropping the objective to preserve any of them? Still a gargantuan effort, but maybe being able to focus on unification and ignore preservation would help us get there? This is a hypothetical, of course, pie in the sky dreaming… but I share at least part of your dream. Language will continue to evolve as it always has, and maybe geopolitics will drive us toward one or a few languages being super common.
I guess one thing that leads to divergent attitudes about multilingualism and language planning is people's different intuitions about whether bilingualism is easy or hard. Some people feel bilingualism is literally automatic (just have children regularly spend time in different language environments), while some people feel it's expensive or prone to failure modes where some children favor one language or another, suffer cross-linguistic interference (which might not harm their intelligibility at all in their own immediate environments, but might be at odds with language planning goals), or become less than fully fluent or less than fully literate in one or more languages.
I was taught the "bilingualism is automatic" view and I know there's a lot of scientific consensus behind it, but it also seems like the fine details are complicated: not all children and not all adults will be enthusiastic about achieving and maintaining equal fluency in languages they use in different contexts, or necessarily about following a national or international standard to maximize understanding with outsiders!
My father's family (in New York) stopped speaking German in his generation, so I'm not a native German speaker, as my grandfather was. I've been sad about this, especially with the intuition that I could "easily" have been a fluent native German bilingual speaker "for free" with no adverse consequences to my English proficiency. But maybe that's not literally true (maybe my English would have been more idiosyncratic and less standard, maybe I would have lost interest in German as a child and become bad at it, maybe I would have divided my reading time between languages and ended up with a slightly smaller English vocabulary?).
What I know less about is how much time or effort that multilingualism took, whether peer pressure forced some reluctant kids to stick with languages they were otherwise less interested in, and whether there are any hidden costs.
An example could be replacement of some native vocabulary by English vocabulary (which is happening in many languages). This is a benefit for many people who work internationally, but it probably harms intergenerational understanding on some topics. For example, a Brazilian friend of mine gave a computing history lecture where he noted that Brazilians briefly used Portuguese vocabulary for computer engineering in the 1970s before it was supplanted by English loanwords. That change might mean that older speakers would understand younger speakers less well on some technical topics, or that younger speakers would have a harder time reading older technical documentation. From the point of view of monolingual Portuguese speakers, the internationalization of that vocabulary might not seem like a pure advantage.
I also know that some majority language speakers in Finland (who probably expect to speak English with non-Finnish speakers) greatly resent having to spend a lot of time studying Swedish, the "other national language", if they don't anticipate using it in their day-to-day lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_Swedish
In that case, it feels to some of them like the government is requiring them to be multilingual in a specific way that isn't their own preference or that doesn't align with their existing sense of ethnolinguistic identity. It doesn't seem like it's doing any kind of long-term harm, but I guess having any mandatory school subject that you don't enjoy can be pretty unpleasant, and maybe give you a more negative experience of formal education in general.
Some of the Swedish minority there doesn't prefer a future in which Finnish speakers only speak English to them (a phenomenon that already exists and that I think is growing over time). Even though it's officially legally protected, the practical status of their local minority language is being eroded by international culture.
I also have a native Finnish-speaking friend who enjoyed learning Swedish as a foreign language as a child, and ended up moving to Sweden and becoming a university lecturer (who usually teaches in Swedish). Foreign language learning can always be a benefit to anyone of any background.
To again brainstorm trade-offs, it's possible that that outcome is a bit disagreeable to her family back in Finland (who might have preferred her to stay closer to where she grew up, which might have been more likely if she had been more monolingual).
For something completely different, try learning Mandarin.
This is how the Icelandic sagas were translated into English in the nineteenth century. Translators then almost always chose the English cognate of the Old Norse world, even if that English cognate was obsolete or its meaning had changed. Far from helping immerse readers in the medieval world, the effect (at least for modern sensibilities) is offputting and goofy, and in the twentieth century publishers like Penguin replaced those translations by new ones with a very different approach. More judicious use of the Germanic lexicon in English, à la Tolkien, provides a more appealing atmosphere of olden times.
Oh my. I find the reverse. It's spooky and enchanting because once I know all the cognates I feel like I can magically understand the original.
https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Guide_to_the_Names_in_The_Lo...
that this was in _A Tolkien Compass_ which was one of the first books I purchased w/ my own money (along w/ _A Tolkien Reader_) is arguably a big part of why I chose to study languages early on in my life.
Tolkien's "Middle-Earth" is itself a "folksy mistranslation"
Closer translation-- "Middle-Yard"
Old English word eardgeard =Earth-Yard
/ ˈæ͜ɑrdˌjæ͜ɑrd / "ardyard" /
https://www.theundergroundmap.com/article.html?id=104937
https://english.nsms.ox.ac.uk/oecoursepack/wanderer/notes/no...
I went straight to metric and Middle Metre approximate and is wrong.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6D54D1C7DAE31B36&si=Kw3J...
or "The History of English" series:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV50II2XzmY-9GLZWAuieOp27...
In the second series, there is a weather report in Frisian that vaguely sounds like English.
Actually, here is the full text with the modern English inserted:
Nu scilun herga hefenricæs uard
Now let us praise Heaven-Kingdom's guardian,
metudæs mehti and his modgithanc
the Maker's might and his mind's thoughts,
uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuæs
the work of the glory-father—of every wonder,
eci dryctin or astelidæ.
eternal Lord. He established a beginning.
he ærist scop ældu barnum
He first shaped for men's sons
hefen to hrofæ halig sceppend
Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator;
tha middingard moncynnæs uard
then middle-earth mankind's guardian,
eci dryctin æfter tiadæ
eternal Lord, afterwards prepared
firum foldu frea allmehtig
the earth for men, the Lord almighty.https://librivox.org/caedmons-hymn/
The text is read in the Early West Saxon dialect. Same version found here (incl. OGG Vorbis format):
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/19677
Nu scilun herga hefenricæs uard
metudæs mehti and his modgithanc
uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuæs
eci dryctin or astelidæ.
he ærist scop ældu barnum
hefen to hrofæ halig sceppend
tha middingard moncynnæs uard
eci dryctin æfter tiadæ
firum foldu frea allmehtig
hefenricæs = himmelrikes (no)
uerc = werk (nl)
eci = evig (no) / eeuwig (nl)
ærist = eerst (nl)
barnum = barn (no)
sceppend = schepper (nl)
EDIT: Hearing the poem read also gives dutch / germanic vibes: https://gutenberg.org/files/19677/ogg/19677.ogg
uuldurfadur = alfader (all-father)
uundra = under (wonder)
halig = hellig (holy)
I recently tried some light research (ok, i ddg'ed) recently on this topic as it wasn't that long between the Viking invasions and settling down in claimed territory, "how continuing-to-be-Norse were the Normans?" I was looking at a similar idea to another comment/statement here from a Scandinavian, "would the Normans have maintained enough knowledge of Norse language to have seen connections to Anglo Saxon/Olde Ænglish? (ok, i just wanted to use a ligature)
I didn't find it easy to to find specifics in great detail, but interestingly in William the Conquerer's family tree, his great^n-grandparents and their cohort were frequently marrying French noble women for local connections and prestige, but also having children with their "soulmate" Norsewoman side piece, made more convenient because the Norse marriage practice was more akin to "common law marriage" anyway.
I'm not reading or judging anything into this (what noble of any culture wouldn't pursue extramarital relations, hell the peasants do it too) except from variety of partners they were clearly maintaining connections to their heritage at least as Italian- or Irish-Americans frequently do in the current day.
There is still an entire Medieval European world out there in the archives still waiting to be discovered. Sadly, there are not many of us who have the skills to do this and we are not paid very well or often not at all.
Old books aren't that neat, you tend to have a lot of notes and other documents, translations, scribal annotations from different eras interleaved or in the margins. You need to make decisions about that stuff as you go, which requires being informed about the context and meaning of those documents, that may well be in another language, or from hundreds of years before or after the document you're trying to process. For any given physical object it's quite likely that no single scholar has all the information necessary.
It is also extremely important to preserve all the context, things like which exact pages a fragment is stuck between, even its orientation, can be critical information to later scholars. And then in all of this you're handling ancient & precious one of a kind paper documents. It's just slow going, and well beyond what I would even consider "skilled labor" this very much is the work of research & scholarship. By the time you get a camera pointed at a page you're at the easy part.
As for imaging, there is Irish Scripts on Screen (https://www.isos.dias.ie/) which covers many different places and time periods.
Answering the grandparent comment, LLMs are not good at Old Irish. Seriously, they are awful at it. There is just too little data for it to work. I wrote a very little bit about text clustering in Old/Middle Irish (see https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110680744-005). I think the better place to start is transcription and there are some tools out there which help, like Transcribus (https://www.transkribus.org/), which I haven't used but it looks useful.
edit:typos
And of course, title pages are a later invention so the only way to know what’s in a manuscript is to actually read it.
That said, I've found the recent LLMs will happily accept an entire book of scanned pages (just the images) and summarize the complete contents in one single go, which definitely has a very useful purpose in cataloging and indexing publications. For a project I'm doing I have millions of documents in hundreds of languages where only images of the pages exist, so I'm trying to get a good idea of the contents, then a user can choose to open the document and read the full text in its original format and layout.
Nu scilun herga hefenricæs uard
metudæs mehti and his modgithanc
uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuæs
eci dryctin or astelidæ.
he ærist scop ældu barnum
hefen to hrofæ halig sceppend
tha middingard moncynnæs uard
eci dryctin æfter tiadæ
firum foldu frea allmehtig
hefen: heaven
uerc: work
uard: guard/ward
hrofæ: roof
æfter: after
middingard: Earth, to Marvel
allmehtig: almightyAlthough The Poetry Foundation still promises to track all your content
The OP article, published by Trinity College Dublin, and the original, and the photograph, are expressly CC-BY-ND 4.0. This is not a "free license", but it is a Creative Commons License.
https://theconversation.com/we-found-a-lost-copy-of-the-earl...
Edit: "The newly-discovered manuscript in the National Central Library of Rome of Caedmon’s Hymn dates from between the years 800 and 830, making it the third oldest surviving text of the poem." So... 1.2k then?
So you can write it down to tech brainrot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Conventions_...
https://colingorrie.com/books/osweald-bera/
Basically it’s a full blown story/graded reader with no modern English apart from vocabulary. You build an understanding of the language as you read the book and what is initially gibberish becomes quite clear as you progress . It does help if you’ve had a lot of exposure to German ( vocab and grammar), or barring this any case inflected language.
What’s noticeable is that it’s about 200 pages long, so the story gets quite sophisticated , and rather unexpectedly the book is a bit of a page-turner !
Familia Romana by Hans Orberg is a great one for Latin. I frequently see people call it the gold standard for this kind of book, but they're all Latin enthusiasts, so they're not exactly unbiased.
Also worth pointing out that the Old English version at each of those dates probably varied quite a bit. This was the time period over which Old English was being influenced by external factors such as Norse and Latin.
The sign above the door at the primary school outside Karlstejn Castle is unreadable to a speaker of modern Czech.
School website: https://www.skolakarlstejn.cz/
Better pics can be found easily.
It's quite rare for a language to remain close enough to be intelligible.
English is a mongrel, with influences from old French and ancient Saxon and Norse and Celtic. Every few centuries you go back, you strip away whole layers of additional vocabulary left by the descendants of successive invasions.
What? No it's not. It looks no more than ~100-150 years old, and is perfectly readable if you've ever seen a long s (like ſo).
It's obvious that today's connected society - leading to any single language being very widespread for mutual intelligibility - bears no resemblance to the way things were many centuries ago. But we're conditioned to think in terms of our own experience until we really think about it or have it pointed out. Back then, the UK was split into many different dialects, largely consolidated later by the use of the printing press. Those dialects had so much difference in some ways, that snippets of them could sound like related-but-different languages.
(And there's very little relative difference between modern English and "middle English", which is easy for us to read, notwithstanding differences in the not-yet-standardised spelling.)
And most importantly, across history, the literary language has always been the language of the elites, the ruling class, which is often not the same language spoken by the plebs. Since the language they spoke is therefore missing from the historical record, it's sometimes open to interpretation and guesswork. Many historical linguists try to make it known that middle-to-modern English can't have come directly from the dialect of Anglo-Saxon we now call Old English, but overturning (or even clarifying) dogma from the early days of any field, against years of written encyclopedias, is very difficult.
This was in a modern library that was built recently (1975), by historical standards. This book would have been, at minimum, catalogued, packed, and unpacked to verify it made the trip. It was't missing. It wasn't unearthed. It was just never read.
https://www.cenl.org/library/the-central-national-library-of...
Now let us praise Heaven-Kingdom's guardian, the Maker's might and his mind's thoughts, the work of the glory-father—of every wonder, eternal Lord. He established a beginning. He first shaped for men's sons Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator; then middle-earth mankind's guardian, eternal Lord, afterwards prepared the earth for men, the Lord almighty.
- I'll get my coat...
There was a Bohemian monk
Who went to bed in a bunk
He dreamt that Venus
Was sucking his elbow
And woke up all covered in perspiration.
kick ’em in the knee
Sis boom bass
kick ’em in the other knee.