Of course the article is about the archaeological discovery, but if you're curious (as I was) what the poem is, it's "Caedmon’s Hymn":
"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...
Thanks, came to the comments for this!
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.
Yes, but J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a guide on this (after seeing a couple of really bad quality translations) which later translations benefited from:
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.
Pedantry:
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 guess that's where Tolkien's "Arda" comes from as well then.
Or even garden.
'garden' came into English via Old French but it's ultimately Frankish (another Germanic language) so 'yard' and 'garden' are cognates. Interestingly they have a close sense.
Thank you. I’m not American and was trying work that out.
I went straight to metric and Middle Metre approximate and is wrong.
"Nasty, British, and Small," screams the Hanging Yards of
wish the link would let itself be read
_A Tolkien Compass_ is pretty affordable, and _The Lord of the Rings: A Readers Companion_ is quite a worthwhile text which is readily available --- see if your local library can provide?
As someone with native command over Hindi and, unless it's spoken by folks from certain UK countries, English, who also spoke and read Sanskrit quite well during school, I had a period of a few months when I went down the rabbit-hole of wonderful general linguistic history and the interrelation among them. I was shocked beyond imagination to see how we might actually have been more the same than different, if we go back far enough (not even prehistoric 'far enough') in each case (even the languages which are geographically distant currently). But then, of course, civilisation happened.
The Lithuanian Swadesh list includes the following words and I was able to find numerous relatives to Gaelic. I could be wrong about some. Obvious similarities to Latin in some cases too, maybe loanwords. But one can see the Indo-European connections.
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
Baltic and the older layers of Celtic languages are known to be pretty conservative, if not archaic, within the context of IE languages. If you look at Old Irish the ressemblance will be blatant.
Yes. There is a reason why a family of languages is known as Indo-European.
For something completely different, try learning Mandarin.
My father in law is a Persian speaker. I was very surprised to learn that thank you (mersi) is the same as in French, and OK/indeed (baleh) is the same as in Spanish.
Persian mersi is actually a direct borrowing from the French [1]. Not sure about the other one, but I guess it’s just a coincidence, as happens so often in language [2].
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%B3%DB%8C#Pers...
Spanish vale and English value have the same Latin origin. Persian bale is an Arabic loanword.
Arigato in Japanese is said to be a borrowing from Portuguese Obrigado (might want to verify that!).
Japanese is fascinating to me as a language freak for the enormous amount of borrowing. As an English speaker, as long as you can decode katakana (easy to learn) you can probably walk around the streets of Tokyo and read half the signs.
No, it's documented, as is tempura. It's like pancakes: you make them before the time of fasting. "The Time of X" in Spanish is "tempora X" and I would bet Portuguese is similar.
There are loads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_words_of_Port...
It's listed there under False cognates.
> 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?
Perfectly possible. I think I've seen evidence elsewhere of similar but unrelated words influencing each other. For example, round about where I live the Romany word "shan" is used meaning "mean" or "worthless", but it seems to have been influenced by the unrelated "sean" in Gaelic (also pronounced "shan") which means "old". So it's come to mean something worn out as well.
In general, I think this phenomenon is called "phono-semantic matching": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phono-semantic_matching.
Gura mie eu.
She dty vea. :-)
(I do not actually speak Manx, but 2026 is the Year of the Manx Language. I should learn some.)
I know a little. I was taught by Brian Stowell many years ago and have his novel here along with a Manx Bible.
Oh, fantastic!
Even more interesting is when words are borrowed back!
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.
I’ve long thought about how wonderful it would be to create a contemporary new hybrid language whose objective was to unify communication along the very common linguistic origins at least some language clusters have. The core challenge of course is that it would be contrived in a time when top down imposition does not work as effectively. It’s a dream I have nonetheless.
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.
> 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
How is German, a langauge natively spoken in two nation states and quite a few neighboring regions, being eradicated?
Yes I’ve been having similar thoughts - how amazing would it be to have a common global tongue. Last time I looked, Chinese and the Spanish were the two most spoken languages, at least counting native speakers - there are other legit ways to measure this! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...)
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.
The official position of modern IAL advocates like Esperantists is that everyone should be bilingual in a local or family language as well as in the world language. There is someone on HN who has pointed out (I forgot exactly when) that this is actually not the historical tradition in Esperanto, but it's extremely strong nowadays.
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?).
That is a more reasonable position than trying to imagine or push a single language. And yes, acknowledging it’s not everywhere necessarily, it does seem like multilingualism is fairly automatic out of necessity in much of the world. As an American, I’m sad that the US scores so poorly on multilingualism. I’m very impressed when I travel how many people speak multiple languages. There are so many places where even entry level jobs require 2 or 3 languages.
Yeah, I know people's intuitions are also different there, as almost everyone I've met from Europe speaks 2-4 languages fluently and doesn't consider this exceptional. That makes multilingualism feel very attainable, because it's socially normal. From the U.S. point of view this is amazing, because it's taken for granted there, where it might be a celebrated achievement here.
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).
I’m sure you are aware of Esperanto.
I preferred Interlingua...
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.
I find slovio to be jarring. It's like someone took vaguely slavic words and slammed Esperanto-inspired grammar onto them. Something like Interslavic at least has noun/verb morphology that is much more familiar to all Slavic language speakers. I could imagine myself actually speaking Interslavic, but not the case for Slovio. It's simply too strange.
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.
Very interesting. Thanks. Those are good points...
You are both more involved than I am. I only brought up Esperanto because it seemed as if there was no awareness of effort in this type of language development.
Brother! I hope you have have also studied a bit of Latin and Greek, to see the great similarities, and paths like that of "jñāna, gnō̃́sis, gnosco, knowledge".
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.
"Conocimiento, conocer" in Spanish (to know).
isn't Spanish some form of Latin (being colonized by Rome for centuries), what I would be interested in, if there are some Vandal leftovers in nowadays Spanish
Guerra, perro, more that I can't remember, and a good chunk of names (in Spanish):
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.
sorry, it was the Visigoths, not the Vandals
It's all about Proto-Indoeuropean. You can get tons of words from Latin and Sanskrit and compare them.
There was a UK TV show years ago that I've always remembered where the presenter tried to buy a cow using Old English with a Frisian speaking farmer in Holland:
You'd probably enjoy "The Story of English" series:
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.
I suspect a lot of people in the UK today would pronounce "brown cow" as "broon coo" - certainly I would have when I was a wee loon ;-)
'The presenter' here being Eddie Izzard :)
> I wish translations into contemporary English went further to preserve the etymology of certain words
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.
> the effect (at least for modern sensibilities) is offputting and goofy.
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.
Out of curiosity, what are the other two realms? (I assume it’s two)
In Norse mythology "the nine realms" encompass the entire world - but there's no definive list of what realms constitute the nine.
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...
There's actually nine:
- 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.)
> - Asgård, home of the Aesir, the big-name gods (Thor, Odin, Freya, etc.).
Freyja, along with her brother Freyr and their father, Njörðr, is one of the Vanir.
Yes, but lives in Asgård.
This is exactly the kind of thing that makes Old English fascinating even if you don't know the language properly
English is claimed as being influenced heavily by every nation that conquered England, because of course it was: Latin via the Romans; Anglo-Saxon/Gemanic; then Viking; and, then the Latin/Romance influence again via France/Normandy.
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...
>the "King James" version is considered the standard within the Anglican churches in the UK
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.
A bit of correction: the version you'll most likely see being used across the Church of England nowadays is NRSV. It's the scholarly translation.
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.
> It's the scholarly translation
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.
You're right re [N]RSV in CoE. But I think of Anglican - perhaps wrongly - as extending outside CoE to encompass a range of reformed Protestant communions. I've seen NIV used in CoE too, but yes NRSV too and more often.
> 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... :)
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?
Yeah, I share your fascination.
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.
Well you had the Norman invasion; acquired lots of Norman French words yet fought the French several times over the centuries. One thing doesn’t have to do much with the other.
The Roman influence is limited mostly to place names. Otherwise Latin had basically disappeared from the island.
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.
> The Roman influence is limited mostly to place names. Otherwise Latin had basically disappeared from the island.
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.
This was archival research, not archaeology though. This book was located in an archive, and it's mostly in Latin with the Old English content being quite incidental, which explains why it was not noticed until now.
The article has a link to the poem under the text [Caedmon’s Hymn] (unsurprisingly).
This is the text in Old English for anyone looking: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47296/caedmons-hymn-5...
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.Knowing both Norwegian and Dutch, most words here is surprisingly similar to modern words:
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
If it weren't for the Norman invasion, English would probably still have the same levels of semi-mutual-intelligibility as the other Scandinavian languages.
well, if the Normans had simply spoken Norse as one would expect Norsemen to do...
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.
thanc = tanke (thought)
uuldurfadur = alfader (all-father)
uundra = under (wonder)
halig = hellig (holy)
It's a bit unconnected to all-father. My impression would be that uuldurfadur would be literally "world-father". But it actually means "glory-father"[1]. It's more commonly spelled wuldorfæder. (Also unrelated to the word "wundor" meaning wonder.)
Public Domain audio:
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
Oh, what? Is "eci" (eternal?) the origin of "Ecki Thump" - Yorkshire version of OMG?
And indeed the ancient and mysterious Lancashire martial art, of course.
Which has nothing on the secret Welsh art of self-defense, Llap Goch.
Oh my god is that where Icky Thump comes from
My degree is in Celtic Studies. This kind of discovery may be surprising to those not versed in it but not those who have studied these languages. Some of the best preserved Old Irish, for instance, is in St. Gallen in what is now Austria and Milan.
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.
Oh that's interesting! In my mind we are now on the cusp of being able to scan all these archives and have them be read by LLMs (in a first pass). Do you agree with that assessment, or am I being naive here?
I'm not in this field but I know someone who used to be and we've talked about it a fair bit. A quick overview of what's needed from what I understand:
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.
This is pretty true in general. Many have spent entire careers doing cataloguing of manuscripts and what is in them. The Royal Irish Academy did that in the early to mid part of the 20th century. The National Library of Scotland also has done theirs. It is painstaking and often unappreciated work.
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
Yes, it is really hard to digitize a lot of these documents in a way that retains all of the information where it should belong. It's easy to scan modern books because the text runs in neat blocks and the output is neat blocks. But some texts just don't want to be wrangled like that into neat sentences and paragraphs that we expect, and all the gloss gone.
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.
Indeed, and then there’s the fact that a single codex may contain multiple works, often unrelated (at least to modern eyes—copying of manuscripts was the old school way of adding a book to one’s library, so an abbot in one monastery, learning that another monastery had works X, Y and Z might request they be copied or send a monk to copy them and even though X was a work of theology, Y a poem by Virgil and Z an account of the best way to raise green beans in poor soil, they’d end up together, possibly not even starting a new page when one work ends and the next begins.
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.
Even digitizing sources this old entails quite a lot of manual labor.
Here's the old English poem! https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47296/caedmons-hymn-5... Should be in the public domain by now eh?
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: almightyDespite what The Poetry Foundation claims, and despite the Modern English translation by one of their own, the Early West Saxon text is Public Domain.
Although 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...
It looks to me like Poetry Foundation did it right. The modern translation has a copyright notice, the Early West Saxon version has none. I was being a little coy as anything older than Mickey Mouse is fair game. It's not a particularly marginal call, if you know what I mean
I think also there's barnum = bairn's (as in children), and foldu = fold (as in sheepfold). Or just field, same thing.
Huh, we don't have bairn in the US. I totally missed "foldu". The literal translation is that god made earth a pasture, then?
1,3k years ago is such a weird way to write it. Makes sense if we are talking millions of years, but why not write "in 700" or just "1300 years ago"
The title is from the HN user, the actual post uses 1,300 everywhere.
So you can write it down to tech brainrot.
it was 1.3e-6 billion years ago!
Century would be plenty. And having Rome mentioned with some weird negative number leads to first thought being English in Roman era? How does this deduct...
Probably a German or French speaker forgetting that , is never a valid decimal separator in English.
Most countries use the decimal comma, including English in South Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Conventions_...
Yeah, I felt the same. Especially since 1300 uses the same numbers of characters as 1.3k
Probably they mean to convey significant digits, though I feel it's safe to assume people would read "1300" as an approximation, not pointing to the year 726. I found it odd too.
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?
The manuscript is ~1200 years old, but the poem was composed earlier. The Venerable Bede, who died in 735, includes it and the story of its composition in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People: according to that story, it was composed while Saint Hilda was abbess of Whitby, c.660-680.
Another commentator mentions that the poem may have been published 1200 years ago, but authored much earlier.
For those interested in learning old English, I’ve been going through Oswald Bera by Colin Gorrie -
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 !
This is super interesting! I wonder if there is something like this for other languages!
There's tons, if you look up "[language] graded reader" or "[language] nature method."
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.
Familia Romana is the first part of Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata.
I didn’t find that many - you can find graded readers, but very few ‘graded novels’ ( as in a full novel where chapters are progressively harder, not multiple independent tiny stories ) if I may say so
Article could benefit from some editing: the poem is from variously the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries! After reading a few times I get that one date is the supposed composition date, the second is the publication date of Beade, and the last is the date of transcription for the copy in Rome.
Yeah, that threw me as well.
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.
Roman here. We have a joke that we cannot dig a hole in the ground without finding a piece of our past, and that makes us hard to progress. Now we are also finding pieces of someone else's past. We are doomed.
I absolutely love post-Roman, pre-Norman British writing because it's so rare it gives the era a sense of mystery. This is of course the time when King Arthur is supposed to have lived. In the absence of contemporary records, the impulse to fill it with wizards and dragons is understandable.
You might enjoy this YT channel:
Yes, that "thinness" of the record is a huge part of the appeal
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It's absolutely amazing to me that we're still discovering things that are held by major libraries. This wasn't discovered in a limestone tomb, accidentally preserved. It wasn't in the basement of some hoary building that was once the personal library of the Medici.
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...
It really baffles (and amazes) me that Old English is practically unintelligible to modern day English speakers.
If you go back half a millennium, most languages are the same.
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.
Anglo-Saxon + Norman French + Latin + Greek. Surprisingly few words from Celtic languages.
> The sign above the door at the primary school outside Karlstejn Castle is unreadable to a speaker of modern Czech.
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 really not.
After a lot of searching I found... my own post from Reddit 3Y ago!
https://www.reddit.com/r/czech/comments/17stwmi/can_anyone_r...
It has a relatively clear photo.
That's perfectly readable to me as a speaker of modern Czech, and it appears to have been readable to all the commenters on your post too.
> W téchto se dozwédá sjnjch pilné robé, Bohu čjm povinné, bratřjm, wlasti, sobě.
This is almost modern Czech, with j for í and w for v (which was the standard orthography for hundreds of years and would be familiar to any educated Czech).
Take the most famous poem in Czech, in its original orthography from 1836:
> Byl pozdnj wečer - prwnj mág
> Wečernj mág - byl lásky čas.
This is perfectly readable, like your sign.
One of the comments claims the sign is from 1487 - I would find this extremely unlikely. The mention of vlast (homeland) is suggestive of the era of the National Awakening (19th century), as is the orthography, font, and diacritics. (And the overall theme of education for God and country seems pretty anachronistic for 1487.)
If we go back in time, to say the Kralická Bible (1593), we're still well within the realm of readable text to modern Czechs:
> Na Počátku stwořil Bůh nebe a zemi. Země pak byla nesličná a pustá: a tma byla nad propastj: a Duch Božj wznássel se nad wodami. Y řekl Bůh: Buď swětlo: Y bylo swětlo.
Let's go back all the way to the earliest Slavic texts, about 1300 years ago, which largely predate Czech altogether:
> Iskonï bě slovo. Ï slovo bě u boga. Ï bogъ bě slovo.
A modern Czech would understand most of this, with the probable exception of iskonï ([na] konci, but used here to refer to the beginning). They would probably miss the exact tense being used for bě, but guess that it's a copula (they might see it as a portmanteau of bylo and je, which is close enough). This is probably comparably difficult for a Czech as say Chaucer is for an English speaker (ie not terribly), except it is half a millennium earlier than Chaucer.
Your overall point about language change has merit, but not all languages have changed at the same exact rate. Balto-Slavic languages are relatively conservative as a group (many linguists were very taken with Lithuanian when it was first noticed within Western academia, as it is so conservative that it has considerable utility in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European itself).
This is probably more detail than you wanted - I hope it's interesting and helpful. :)
It's fascinating, and thank you.
My Czech was terrible -- maybe just approaching B1 level when I left 3 years ago -- and it was not comprehensible to me. But it wasn't to my friend and to my (now) wife when we visited, so I took a photo and showed it to my colleagues at work and friends in the pub.
Similarly, still my favourite Czech sentence is the one that terrified me before I moved there:
Blb vlk pln žbrnd zdrhl hrd z mlh Brd skrz vrch Smrk v čtvrť srn Krč.
I memorised this (poorly) but had great fun showing it to people when I got there. Almost nobody could parse it at all.
Now, I'm an above-average English speaker. I am a very fast reader, and at school, I could cope with Chaucer just fine. Once I got my internal ear to hear it, it just made sense to me. (Beowulf, no.)
But I was the only one in my class. I can follow poetic and heavily distorted English fairly well, and it's a handy skill for a (former) professional English teacher. But I think I can follow more than most.
I certainly can't follow the ZŠ Karlstejn Czech, nor your poetic examples. I am very poor in the language. (It is my 6th foreign language, but they are all very very weak. But saying that, I've put more effort into Czech than all the rest put together, with little to show for it.)
I think you over-estimate the abilities of ordinary Czechs!
That's very cool. Don't knock yourself - congratulations on reaching a good level in such a fiendish language. My own SO hovers between A2 and B1 after many years, so I absolutely appreciate how frustrating Czech can be.
> Blb vlk pln žbrnd zdrhl hrd z mlh Brd skrz vrch Smrk v čtvrť srn Krč.
I do enjoy this one. It's all the more amusing in that it only uses fairly common vocab (though somewhat stylised inflection).
Speaking of parsing, you may be aware of the perfectly valid English sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo". Or the sentence "The horse raced past the barn fell". If not, enjoy. :)
> I think you over-estimate the abilities of ordinary Czechs!
Very possibly! I think two of the examples I provided (the poem Máj and the quote from the Kralická bible) would genuinely be comprehensible to most Czechs, but I might be being too generous with the Karlštejn quote.
If I render it into standard orthography, give or take some endings I had to guess by squinting at the image on my phone, it comes out as:
> V těchto se dozvídá síních pilné robě, Bohu čím povinné, bratřím, vlasti, sobě.
Reordered to simplify the structure, and with glosses, you can probably make it out:
> V těchto [in these] síních [halls] se pilné [diligent] robě [child; archaic] dozvídá [learns, finds out], čím [that which is] povinné [compulsory] Bohu [dative, i.e. to/for God], bratřím [to/for brothers], vlasti [to/for the homeland], sobĕ [to/for oneself].
There is some basic vocab here (Bůh, bratr, vlast), some intermediate vocab (dozvědět se, pilné), and one clear-cut archaism (robě). The overall structure is quite poetic and somewhat inorganic - e.g. the separation of těchto and síních in "V těchto se dozvídá síních" is unnatural, and makes me think of scholastic Latin.
I'm honestly not sure how an ordinary person might read this. I think if it were in standard orthography, it would probably be fairly readable, but if you layer pre-modern orthography on top of the structural acrobatics and archaisms, you're probably right that the average person may struggle.
Čapek uses pre-modern orthography (e.g. gegj for její) for stylistic effect ('ye olde... ') in small sections of Válka s mloky, and modern editions do not generally transcribe these sections into modern orthography, so I think there is at least the implication that a literate Czech ought to be able to read it. To what extent that expectation has a relationship to reality I'm honestly unsure. The Czechs can be (far too) normative when it comes language, as you probably know, so perhaps the literati insist it be printed as is, and everyone else is just too scared to admit they can no longer read it. :P
That's because we're fed the massively oversimplified idea that English was one language, spoken all over the UK, and developing in a single straight line from Old English, to Middle English, to modern English.
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.
Not sure why they classified this language as 'old English'. It's so far removed (from all perspectives including a fundamentally different grammatical system) from modern or even early modern English, it's a completely different language altogether. I find "old English" to be a highly a misleading name as it implies continuity that simply isn't there in the same way it exists in say German.
Here is the translation from the article. Which is slightly different from what is listed below in the comments.
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.
This is the sort of discovery that makes digitization projects feel genuinely magical
I wonder if it starts "There once was a man from Londinium..."
- I'll get my coat...
I bet it starts "Roses are red, violets are blue..."
"Thaer whunce waes e mann fromm Nantucket...."
My favourite is perfectly clean and SFW.
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.
Sis boom bee
kick ’em in the knee
Sis boom bass
kick ’em in the other knee.
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