Se Þræd Eald Englisċes (The Old English Thread)

[Western Vale Confederacy]

English speakers attempting to learn Old English is like me attempting to learn Old Spanish or Mozarabic.

[Hrythingia]

Gotta say, I respect people spending their free time to learn old languages, keeping them alive.

How hard is it to learn Old English?

Well it is in my University course so its not entirely my 'free-time' but its not too hard if you are already English or even Germanic speaking. As with all languages, wrap your head around the grammar and orthography then slowly ease in the vocab. Just read parallel texts and become more familiar with it.

Gotta say, I respect people spending their free time to learn old languages, keeping them alive.

How hard is it to learn Old English?

Adding to what I said with my puppet nation, I'll say that it's pretty difficult, but mostly because the sources are lacking.

Unlike Latin, you don't see Old English being used in any subject or topic, save from history of linguistics classes. Latin had the pleasure of being in legal terms and whatnot, while Old English doesn't have that privilege.

Most likely you have to be self-taught with a book or two, because AFAIK there are no online courses, and the amount of people proficient enough to teach it are a rare one.

I did quote an online vocabulary resource but it is not a course. If anyone needs some help I could potentially lend a hand where possible.

[Lyrical International Brigade]

My main attraction to Anglo-Saxon is the use of the letters thorn, eth, and æ (sorry, only one of those has Android keyboard support ). I would love the entirely impossible event that we go back to using them for actual writing:

So long, ænd þænks for all ðe fish!

[Auze]

Oddly enough, the dialect of French that combined with Anglo-Saxon-Jute to form modern English is still spoken today as a native language.

[Xmara]

When I was in AP Lit back in high school, we read Beowulf and watched a video of a guy reading it in Old English. It sounded like backwards German to me.

[Duhon]

English speakers attempting to learn Old English is like me attempting to learn Old Spanish or Mozarabic.

As someone who's been engaged in building fictional protolanguages based on Proto-Indo-European for the last six months or so, I understand the appeal completely.

[LiberNovusAmericae]

Why is it called old english? i can understand middle english but this doesnt look english at all. It looks like some bizarre hybrid of German and Welsh.

It is very much Old English (I actually just started learning it this earlier week). The spelling is funny, but it's actually not as different as it looks from Middle English. The main stumbling block is that there a lot more word forms, because that's how grammar works in Old English. The letter þ is "th" as in loath, and ð is th as in "loathe". "Sc" is pronounced like "sh" (for example, "scip"), although otherwise "c" is pronounced like "k" or German "c" (as is "h" in some contexts). "Girnan" for example means "desire", and that might look funny, but "g" before "i" is typically pronounced "y", so you read it aloud and suddenly you see the connection. Although there are obsolete words used, for example in the above Lord's Prayer, kingdom is "rice" (pronounced ree-keh), which is obviously nearer to "reich" than current use of "kingdom", although "kingdom" itself also comes from Old English ("cyningdom").

It's a pretty language, I'm enjoying learning it.

What resources do you use to learn it? I'm asking this because my college doesn't offer old English as a course.

[El-Amin Caliphate]

If we're bringing Old English back we should bring the runes back as well.

[Western Vale Confederacy]

English speakers attempting to learn Old English is like me attempting to learn Old Spanish or Mozarabic.

As someone who's been engaged in building fictional protolanguages based on Proto-Indo-European for the last six months or so, I understand the appeal completely.

Mozarabic is bloody bullshit though.

You can clearly see and hear the Latin/Romance in it, but it's polluted by so much Arabic loanwords.

[El-Amin Caliphate]

As someone who's been engaged in building fictional protolanguages based on Proto-Indo-European for the last six months or so, I understand the appeal completely.

Mozarabic is bloody bull though.

You can clearly see and hear the Latin/Romance in it, but it's polluted by so much Arabic loanwords.

Andalusi Arabic is better. I wish it were still alive.
Also, Mozarabic isn't 1 language, it's an umbrella term for the Arabic (and Amazigh?) influenced Romance languages spoken during Al-Andalus.

[Technocratic Uganda]

Doesn't Old English have grammatical case? How much of a pain is that?

[Hrythingia]

It is very much Old English (I actually just started learning it this earlier week). The spelling is funny, but it's actually not as different as it looks from Middle English. The main stumbling block is that there a lot more word forms, because that's how grammar works in Old English. The letter þ is "th" as in loath, and ð is th as in "loathe". "Sc" is pronounced like "sh" (for example, "scip"), although otherwise "c" is pronounced like "k" or German "c" (as is "h" in some contexts). "Girnan" for example means "desire", and that might look funny, but "g" before "i" is typically pronounced "y", so you read it aloud and suddenly you see the connection. Although there are obsolete words used, for example in the above Lord's Prayer, kingdom is "rice" (pronounced ree-keh), which is obviously nearer to "reich" than current use of "kingdom", although "kingdom" itself also comes from Old English ("cyningdom").

It's a pretty language, I'm enjoying learning it.

What resources do you use to learn it? I'm asking this because my college doesn't offer old English as a course.

I provided some resources in the OP but feel free to wang me over a telegram for more detailed help.

If we're bringing Old English back we should bring the runes back as well.

I didn't say anything about bringing it back as a vernacular ha ha, we are well over that waterfall. Also Old English was rarely written in Futhorc Runic as the only literates with few exceptions were monks and they preferred the Roman Alphabet.

Doesn't Old English have grammatical case? How much of a pain is that?

Many many languages have grammatical cases and in fact this makes the language easier to deal with since you can place a lot of information inside a word and thus sentences can be treated like a simple equation rather than relying on word order alone which is highly restrictive for verse composition. Or even prose for that matter.

The word for wood: ƿudu declines like so as a noun:
singular -plural
Nominative -ƿudu -ƿuda
Accusative -ƿudu -ƿuda
Genitive -ƿuda -ƿuda
Dative -ƿuda -ƿudum

Verbs are fairly straight foward, they have a tense and a person though unlike in Latin the person is often expressed seperately.

[Treadwellia]

It's been some years, but, hey, B. A. and M. A. in English, here, with heavy emphasis on British literature, so I definitely ran into a good deal of Old English in my time.

[Crylante]

How do you express future in Old English? Only I know the verbs only conjugate for past and present, and I'm not sure if all the extra grammatical words we use for tenses in Modern English were used back then.

[Aellex]

We really did a charitable act when we removed that abomination and replaced it by one of our patois.
Three cheers for Guillaume le Bâtard, I guess ?

[The Blaatschapen]

What resources do you use to learn it? I'm asking this because my college doesn't offer old English as a course.

I provided some resources in the OP but feel free to wang me over a telegram for more detailed help.

If we're bringing Old English back we should bring the runes back as well.

I didn't say anything about bringing it back as a vernacular ha ha, we are well over that waterfall. Also Old English was rarely written in Futhorc Runic as the only literates with few exceptions were monks and they preferred the Roman Alphabet.

Doesn't Old English have grammatical case? How much of a pain is that?

Many many languages have grammatical cases and in fact this makes the language easier to deal with since you can place a lot of information inside a word and thus sentences can be treated like a simple equation rather than relying on word order alone which is highly restrictive for verse composition. Or even prose for that matter.

The word for wood: ƿudu declines like so as a noun:
singular -plural
Nominative -ƿudu -ƿuda
Accusative -ƿudu -ƿuda
Genitive -ƿuda -ƿuda
Dative -ƿuda -ƿudum

Verbs are fairly straight foward, they have a tense and a person though unlike in Latin the person is often expressed seperately.

I just realized that Monty Python is using Old English:

Always look on the bright side of life
Puda
Puda Puda Pudum

[Hurdergaryp]

We really did a charitable act when we removed that abomination and replaced it by one of our patois.
Three cheers for Guillaume le Bâtard, I guess ?

Visited his grave at the Abbey of Saint-Étienne in Caen. Not that a lot of his remains survived the centuries, but there's still a bit of him underneath the tombstone.

[Hrythingia]

How do you express future in Old English? Only I know the verbs only conjugate for past and present, and I'm not sure if all the extra grammatical words we use for tenses in Modern English were used back then.

The future in old English is the same as modern English, either expressed as a stative verb like ‘will be going’ or just by throwing in a time indication like ‘I do my exam on Monday.’

We really did a charitable act when we removed that abomination and replaced it by one of our patois.
Three cheers for Guillaume le Bâtard, I guess ?

There are many good things about modern English but Old English in and of itself a very fine language and I’m sorry to see it gone as vernacular. It sounds very nice too... almost soothing.

[Trollzyn the Infinite]

We really did a charitable act when we removed that abomination and replaced it by one of our patois.
Three cheers for Guillaume le Bâtard, I guess ?

See, this is why nobody likes France.

England would have been better off under Hardrada.

[Hrythingia]

We really did a charitable act when we removed that abomination and replaced it by one of our patois.
Three cheers for Guillaume le Bâtard, I guess ?

See, this is why nobody likes France.

England would have been better off under Hardrada.

To be fair that would likely have sealed England’s fate to be a Scandi nation in perpetuum.

[Aellex]

We really did a charitable act when we removed that abomination and replaced it by one of our patois.
Three cheers for Guillaume le Bâtard, I guess ?

See, this is why nobody likes France.

England would have been better off under Hardrada.

Shush, better for English to have become !notFrançais rather than !notNorwegian, old English was doomed to go anyway.

[Minyaveli]

[quote="Hrythingia";p="35009164"]
Ƿes hál, hú gǽþ?

In other words: Wees Heel, Hoe Gaat (het)?

Wow, that is very Germanic, and particularly very much like Dutch.

[Trollzyn the Infinite]

See, this is why nobody likes France.

England would have been better off under Hardrada.

To be fair that would likely have sealed England’s fate to be a Scandi nation in perpetuum.

Nah. Hardrada was, like, in his 70s by then. Plus, England's history with Vikings would probably have been enough to drive a major revolt against the Norwegian Yoke.

See, this is why nobody likes France.

England would have been better off under Hardrada.

Shush, better for English to have become !notFrançais rather than !notNorwegian, old English was doomed to go anyway.

French is a horrible language. It's disgustingly flamboyant; bringing shame to it's fellow Romance languages.

[Aellex]

French is a horrible language. It's disgustingly flamboyant; bringing shame to it's fellow Romance languages.

This is why no one like you Germanics, absolutely no taste and in top of that mistaking strengths for flaws, smh.

[Hrythingia]

To be fair that would likely have sealed England’s fate to be a Scandi nation in perpetuum.

Nah. Hardrada was, like, in his 70s by then. Plus, England's history with Vikings would probably have been enough to drive a major revolt against the Norwegian Yoke.

Shush, better for English to have become !notFrançais rather than !notNorwegian, old English was doomed to go anyway.

French is a horrible language. It's disgustingly flamboyant; bringing shame to it's fellow Romance languages.

I think the Normans did well to start creating ‘Britain’ as we might understand it today, creating a hegemony over all the isles slowly and in part.

French is a nice language in and of itself but Old English was doomed? No, it was a strong and sturdy language with a good corpus of literature.