Old English

Enkidu

I was in Hodges and Figgis the other day wandering through the linguistics and languages section. I came across a really cool looking product, the "Teach Yourself" company have a "Teach Yourself Old English" package, similar to their large French and German packages. Being a language nut and loving the literature and phonetics of Old English (particularly the authoritative sound of the language) I had a massive temptation to purchase it.

I've read Chaucer and found it fairly easy going. Despite what people say, English hasn't really changed much since that time, so Chaucer's Middle English is not that hard.

I know that some people here have gone very far in their studies of English and I basically want to know how much more difficult Old English is than Middle English. Would it require significant effort*, even if I do find Chaucer easy? Also, if anybody knows, is it as typically difficult as most Germanic languages, or easier, or harder?

Anyway, lots of questions, thanks in advance for any help!:)

*Not that I mind the effort, just to get a picture of the language.

Eliot Rosewater

Enkidu wrote: »

*Not that I mind the effort, just to get a picture of the language.

Obliged:



It looks like a completely different kettle of fish to Middle English, or, at least, to the Middle English Chaucer uses in Harold Bloom's anthology. See some examples on Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English#Examples

Enkidu

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

Obliged:

Yikes!, it does look like a bit of work. However that could be a function of the archaic orthography. In a similar manner, even though I can read Irish, some of the older Irish texts have very different orthographies and fonts which can give them the appearance of being more difficult than they really are.

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

It looks like a completely different kettle of fish to Middle English, or, at least, to the Middle English Chaucer uses in Harold Bloom's anthology. See some examples on Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English#Examples

I don't know if Bloom standarises Chaucer, but here is unaltered Chaucer for a comparison:

A Knyght ther was, and that a worthy man,
That fro the tyme that he first bigan
To riden out, he loved chivalrie,
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie.
Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre,
And therto hade he riden, no man ferre,
As wel in cristendom as in hethenesse,
And evere honoured for his worthynesse;
At Alisaundre he was whan it was wonne.
Ful ofte tyme he hade the bord bigonne
Aboven alle nacions in Pruce;
In Lettow hadde he reysed and in Ruce,
No Cristen man so ofte of his degree.

Which isn't really that difficult.

What I don't really know about Old-English is how much more difficult it is than this. I shall define easy and hard as:

Easy: Middle English, but with even more archaic vocabulary. Also roughly similar grammar, but the language is synthetic and not analytic. Basically the verbs are conjugated extensively. Finally, in typical Germanic style, nouns are inflected for gender and (the most difficult thing in my mind) case.

Hard: Like learning a completely new, difficult, Germanic language. For example Icelandic.

pickarooney

From the little I've seen of Old English it seems more difficult to make anything out of it than out of modern Icelandic.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

pickarooney

I'd love to hear Old English spoken.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

mike65

That extract of Old English looks like Germanic meets Norse which wouldn't be a surprise I suppose.

Enkidu

Thanks for all the responses everybody!

donegalfella wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

This is true. Also there was significant earlier influence on the language from the Nordic languages, so pre-Norse Old English and Post-Norse Old English are quite different. The Norse languages brought the possessive pronouns, words for ships and the environment (e.g. sky), as well as words related to the household (e.g. window).
I think however, from looking at what has been posted and reading a bit, that lexical shift is only one change in the language. The other, bigger, change was a breakdown in the synthetic structure (rules of inflection and case formation).

As I suspected, it would essentially be like learning another language. I don't mind that though especially if I'm only aiming at reading comprehension. After learning Irish I would be very interested in exploring the other side of my "linguistic heritage" (a lovely idea I first encountered in Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf).

Has anybody formally studied the language? The quotes above make it obvious that the vocabulary is vastly different, but this is easy to handle, all you have to do is learn words. What I'm more curious about is that it appears to be a highly inflected language, with a lot of verbal inflections and noun cases (the most difficult thing, as I said before). In my primitive view of languages "inflections + cases = hard", but can anybody tell me if this is wrong. Perhaps the language is grammatically easier than I think.

So that would really be my question, is the grammar very hard? The lexicon I don't really mind.

Enkidu

pickarooney wrote: »

I'd love to hear Old English spoken.

Listen to this beautiful recording on youtube:
Lord's Prayer in Old English