4 ms·

There's something very charming about Middle English to me. Here's my overly etymological translation to point out the vocabulary correspondence to Modern Engli

There's something very charming about Middle English to me. Here's my overly etymological translation to point out the vocabulary correspondence to Modern English (minus the archaic -th endings): "A frog is a small beast with four legs, which lives both in water and on land. It could be brown or green or yellow, or be it tropical, he may have diverse colors. It has lungs and gills both. It hatches from an egg and it then is a tadpole. It grows to be a frog, if it by then be not eaten."

rolleiflex 6y ago
If you like this kind of phrasing, try some German. German is English that is not molested by the French of the Normans, and one of the results of this is that the language is more consistent. (This is not exactly correct, but it’s a more humane way of saying German and English share some roots in Proto Indo-European.) That allows for a wide variety of phrasings or ‘turns of the word’ that are all dead in English since Norman words do not carry inflections German words do about their location in a sentence, which gives German its flexibility to jumble almost any combination of words into a valid sentence. As a mitigation, English instead calcified a few ways to structure a sentence and called it a day - one of the things that make it easier to learn, but also much more boring. Here is a free course that only focuses on reading German, I found it quite fun to play with. https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/ https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/
- philwelch 6y ago
  > German is English that is not molested by the French of the Normans, and one of the results of this is that the language is more consistent. There’s a constructed dialect called “Anglish” that attempts to be this more literally.
  - wirrbel 6y ago
    wasn't Tolkien trying to not use French roots in the Lord of the Rings?
- diffrinse 6y ago
  >As a mitigation, English instead calcified a few ways to structure a sentence and called it a day - one of the things that make it easier to learn, but also much more boring. Isn't this because the language we're reading in OP and speak now is the pidgin that developed between Viking settlers and English incumbents? Doesn't that also explain why our pronouns are Scandinavian rather than the ones found in Old English or old Norman?
  - jeremyjh 6y ago
    That is one idea but there are problems with it, such as the many irregular verbs in English. Doubtless both Old Norse and Norman French had a very significant influence on the language we speak today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothes...
  - stevula 6y ago
    > Doesn't that also explain why our pronouns are Scandinavian rather than the ones found in Old English or old Norman? I think only the third person plural (they/their/them) is of Old Norse origin (ON þeir supplanting OE hie). Interesting, we still use 'em which probably derives from the original English pronoun, not a shortening of "them" (we don't normally chop "th" off the beginning of a word). Compare for example: he: OE "he" / ON "hann" your: OE "eower" / ON "yðar" it: OE "hit" / ON "þat" (note: still "hit" in some modern dialects) her: OE "hire" / ON "hennar/henni"
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      > Interesting, we still use 'em which probably derives from the original English pronoun, not a shortening of "them" (we don't normally chop "th" off the beginning of a word). This is not a strong point; "them" is not a normal word. We freely reduce all the pronouns.
- weinzierl 6y ago
  > That allows for a wide variety of phrasings or ‘turns of the word’ that are all dead in English since Norman words do not carry inflections German words do about their location in a sentence, which gives German its flexibility to jumble almost any combination of words into a valid sentence. There is this old joke where two students sit in a lesson and one asks the other, "What did the professor just say?" and the other student answers, "I don't know yet, let's wait for the verb". Another consequence of this flexibility is that stylistic devices that depend on the word order, like the anastrophe, don't work that well in German.
  - hwj 6y ago
    Here's another one: > Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
    - weinzierl 6y ago
      This actually is a Mark Twain quote. When I heard the story about the professor and the students it was attributed to Mark Twain too, but when I tried to look it up before posting I couldn't find a clue.

rolleiflex 6y ago

If you like this kind of phrasing, try some German. German is English that is not molested by the French of the Normans, and one of the results of this is that the language is more consistent. (This is not exactly correct, but it’s a more humane way of saying German and English share some roots in Proto Indo-European.) That allows for a wide variety of phrasings or ‘turns of the word’ that are all dead in English since Norman words do not carry inflections German words do about their location in a sentence, which gives German its flexibility to jumble almost any combination of words into a valid sentence. As a mitigation, English instead calcified a few ways to structure a sentence and called it a day - one of the things that make it easier to learn, but also much more boring. Here is a free course that only focuses on reading German, I found it quite fun to play with. https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/ https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/

philwelch 6y ago
> German is English that is not molested by the French of the Normans, and one of the results of this is that the language is more consistent. There’s a constructed dialect called “Anglish” that attempts to be this more literally.
- wirrbel 6y ago
  wasn't Tolkien trying to not use French roots in the Lord of the Rings?
diffrinse 6y ago
>As a mitigation, English instead calcified a few ways to structure a sentence and called it a day - one of the things that make it easier to learn, but also much more boring. Isn't this because the language we're reading in OP and speak now is the pidgin that developed between Viking settlers and English incumbents? Doesn't that also explain why our pronouns are Scandinavian rather than the ones found in Old English or old Norman?
- jeremyjh 6y ago
  That is one idea but there are problems with it, such as the many irregular verbs in English. Doubtless both Old Norse and Norman French had a very significant influence on the language we speak today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothes...
- stevula 6y ago
  > Doesn't that also explain why our pronouns are Scandinavian rather than the ones found in Old English or old Norman? I think only the third person plural (they/their/them) is of Old Norse origin (ON þeir supplanting OE hie). Interesting, we still use 'em which probably derives from the original English pronoun, not a shortening of "them" (we don't normally chop "th" off the beginning of a word). Compare for example: he: OE "he" / ON "hann" your: OE "eower" / ON "yðar" it: OE "hit" / ON "þat" (note: still "hit" in some modern dialects) her: OE "hire" / ON "hennar/henni"
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > Interesting, we still use 'em which probably derives from the original English pronoun, not a shortening of "them" (we don't normally chop "th" off the beginning of a word). This is not a strong point; "them" is not a normal word. We freely reduce all the pronouns.
weinzierl 6y ago
> That allows for a wide variety of phrasings or ‘turns of the word’ that are all dead in English since Norman words do not carry inflections German words do about their location in a sentence, which gives German its flexibility to jumble almost any combination of words into a valid sentence. There is this old joke where two students sit in a lesson and one asks the other, "What did the professor just say?" and the other student answers, "I don't know yet, let's wait for the verb". Another consequence of this flexibility is that stylistic devices that depend on the word order, like the anastrophe, don't work that well in German.
- hwj 6y ago
  Here's another one: > Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
  - weinzierl 6y ago
    This actually is a Mark Twain quote. When I heard the story about the professor and the students it was attributed to Mark Twain too, but when I tried to look it up before posting I couldn't find a clue.