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In the case of Beowulf, that is very not true. We have an excellent idea of what the Anglo Saxon language would have sounded like, in part because it has close

In the case of Beowulf, that is very not true. We have an excellent idea of what the Anglo Saxon language would have sounded like, in part because it has close living relatives. Anglo Saxon and Old Norse were mutually intelligible. Conveniently, Iceland was settled by the Norsemen in the 9th century. Its geographic isolation contributed heavily to the Icelandic language's slow rate of change -- to the extent that if you can read modern Icelandic, you can read the Norse Sagas from the 12th century in their original! This property of languages whose speakers are physically isolated being extremely conservative is well known to linguists via study of many, many languages. We also have other works written in the Anglo Saxon language, most notably translations of the Bible. This reasonably large textual corpus, combined with a very close, and very conservative, living linguistic relative allows us to have a very good idea of the phonetics of Anglo Saxon. Saxon poetry does not rhyme in the sense that modern English poetry does. It relies primarily on alliteration and meter, along with initial and approximate rhyme. Were you to listen to it, a recitation of Beowulf would sound more like a chant than a poem. Saxon poetry also relies heavily on a form of metaphor called a "kenning," in which usually two words, but, sometimes 3 or more, are combined in a non-literal way to replace another word. An example would be to describe a ship as "sæwudu," or "sea wood." Note the phonetic resemblance to modern English, after you take into account the vowel shifts that happened during the middle English period. If you want to hear it, you can listen to the first few lines here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH-_GwoO4xI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH-_GwoO4xI While I don't doubt that Saxon poetry could be incredibly boring if you didn't have the proper introduction, I might suggest that, if you didn't, you go back and study its structure before beginning to read the works themselves.

jfengel 6y ago
Further... Beowulf was meant to be performed. In addition to the challenge of language change, there is also the challenge of crafting a performance. It's hard to get a feel for a movie just from the script. A good performance will be much more entertaining than just reading it, though it may inspire some to learn to read it as well.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
The seemingly archaic quality of modern Icelandic is largely a myth. Over the centuries Icelandic absorbed a huge amount of Danish loanwords. That modern Icelandic has similar vocabulary to the sagas, is because the 19th-century language reformers called for restoring old words. It wasn't because Icelandic had kept them the whole time. Modern Icelandic pronunciation, too, is vastly different from Old Norse, in spite of the similar orthography. The one place where Icelandic has a legitimate claim to being archaic, is in the morphology.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  You are right, of course. I didn't want to delve into that sort of complexity, because I didn't want to confuse the issue terribly much. Nonetheless, the main point regarding Icelandic that I wanted to make was about the mutual intelligibility with Old Norse, and the fact that, as languages go, it is extremely conservative (meaning that it resisted change for a long time). For instance: > As a testimonial from those times, the author of the thirteenth century Icelandic Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu makes a reference to the spoken English language in the time of Anglo-Saxon King Ethelred (986 – 1016 AD): > Ein var þá tungu á Englandi sem í Nóregi ok í Danmörku. “One was the tongue in England as in Norway and in Denmark” [0] Interestingly, this sentence renders identically into Norwegian (Bokmål) as into Danish: Den ene var tungen i England som i Norge og i Danmark. [1, 2] In Swedish, in case you were wondering, it translates as En var tungan i England som i Norge och i Danmark. [3] In Icelandic: Ein var tungan í Englandi eins og í Noregi og í Danmörku. Notice how similar these are to the words of a man who's been dead for a millenium. Google Translate doesn't have nynorsk or Faroese available, but, I expect these would render into something between Swedish and Bokmål; and, something nearly identical to Icelandic; respectively. I also didn't mention modern English's closest living relative, West Frisian. [4, 5]. Old Frisian [6] and Old English were also mutually intelligible, even moreso than Old English and Old Norse. There is still a subset of modern West Frisian that, although written much differently from its English translation, sounds nearly identical. [7] My experience of it was that it was as if one pronounced Dutch with English vowels. So, that's a fuller exposition of the family tree of Old English. Things start getting weirder in the Middle English period, when the Normans conquer England in 1066, causing English to start accreting French loan words while, at the same time, dropping the case system and most of its inflections, and acquiring silent letters. [8] If you want to put this all together into a fuller story of how the sounds of Anglo Saxon were reconstructed, you have to know about vowel shifts [9], and, maybe a bit about consonant shifts [10]. Once you have those tools at hand, plus the rest of a graduate course in comparative linguistics, you can essentially reverse engineer the vowel and consonant shifts to reconstruct a probable phonology for Old English. But, that would have made a much longer comment, you see. ;) --- [0]: https://wordwidefx.com/en/blog/post/old-norse-and-old-english-the-languages-in-history-channel-vikings https://wordwidefx.com/en/blog/post/old-norse-and-old-englis... [1]: I used Google Translate for this, but, I did study Norwegian for a bit, and, although my norsk is a bit rusty, this looks correct to me. [2]: This is not a coincidence. Norway was essentially under Danish rule from 1523-1814. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Norway [3]: Google Translate again. But, based on my limited knowledge of Norwegian and Swedish, this, again looks right. [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Frisian_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Frisian_language [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Frisian_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Frisian_languages [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Frisian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Frisian [7]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/113646/why-is-it-that-frisian-is-considered-the-closest-related-language-to-english https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/113646/why-is-it... [8]: For instance, in Middle English, the word "knight" was spelled the same as it is today, but pronounced /kniçt/. In Old English, it was spelled variously as cniht, cneoht, cnyht, cneht, cnieht, and maybe even 1 or 2 more variants, but still pronounced the same as in Middle English. English spelling didn't start to standardize until William Caxton introduced the printing press to England in the late 15th century. [9]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_shift [10]: https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Consonant+Shift https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Consonant+Shift
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
> We have an excellent idea of what the Anglo Saxon language would have sounded like, in part because it has close living relatives. The phonology is well reconstructed; that is not the issue. The issue is that it is not just a dead language, but a dead passive language which is only read, but never written, unlike, say Latin, which is both read and written — I seriously doubt that there are more than a handful of people on this planet who can claim to have true Sprachgefühl for any period of Old English, and if they have it for 800's English, it is unlikely they have it for 1000's English. It's simply prætentious to claim that one can enjoy the æsthetics of a poem written in this language, for which one requires an intimate sense of Sprachgefühl — I can Latin myself and understand the meaning of the text, but I cannot claim to have the same sense of æsthetics I have for English, where I can decide what phrasings sound beautiful, and what sound stiff, and that's very hard to ever acquire for a dead language. > If you want to hear it, you can listen to the first few lines here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH-_GwoO4xI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH-_GwoO4xI Listening to the sounds is different from understanding the meaning and nuance, much of what you wrote seems to be about surface realization of sounds rather than appreciating the choice of words from an æsthetic standpoint. That speaker also clearly sounds as what he almost certainly is: a non-native who would certainly appear to have an heavy accent and appear stiff and wooden to actual native speakers.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  People do still write it, for fun: https://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heafodtramet https://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heafodtramet Here's a more fluent reading, if you like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CpKlEiahtI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CpKlEiahtI Enjoy it, don't enjoy it, hop in your time machine and go back to the 9th century to enjoy it; whatever floats your boat. Personally, I enjoy it, "pretentious" or not.
  - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
    And can you claim to have Sprachgefühl for 900s English and be able to feel the difference between a poetic phrasing an an ordinary phrasing in that language?

jfengel 6y ago

Further... Beowulf was meant to be performed. In addition to the challenge of language change, there is also the challenge of crafting a performance. It's hard to get a feel for a movie just from the script. A good performance will be much more entertaining than just reading it, though it may inspire some to learn to read it as well.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

The seemingly archaic quality of modern Icelandic is largely a myth. Over the centuries Icelandic absorbed a huge amount of Danish loanwords. That modern Icelandic has similar vocabulary to the sagas, is because the 19th-century language reformers called for restoring old words. It wasn't because Icelandic had kept them the whole time. Modern Icelandic pronunciation, too, is vastly different from Old Norse, in spite of the similar orthography. The one place where Icelandic has a legitimate claim to being archaic, is in the morphology.

pmiller2 6y ago
You are right, of course. I didn't want to delve into that sort of complexity, because I didn't want to confuse the issue terribly much. Nonetheless, the main point regarding Icelandic that I wanted to make was about the mutual intelligibility with Old Norse, and the fact that, as languages go, it is extremely conservative (meaning that it resisted change for a long time). For instance: > As a testimonial from those times, the author of the thirteenth century Icelandic Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu makes a reference to the spoken English language in the time of Anglo-Saxon King Ethelred (986 – 1016 AD): > Ein var þá tungu á Englandi sem í Nóregi ok í Danmörku. “One was the tongue in England as in Norway and in Denmark” [0] Interestingly, this sentence renders identically into Norwegian (Bokmål) as into Danish: Den ene var tungen i England som i Norge og i Danmark. [1, 2] In Swedish, in case you were wondering, it translates as En var tungan i England som i Norge och i Danmark. [3] In Icelandic: Ein var tungan í Englandi eins og í Noregi og í Danmörku. Notice how similar these are to the words of a man who's been dead for a millenium. Google Translate doesn't have nynorsk or Faroese available, but, I expect these would render into something between Swedish and Bokmål; and, something nearly identical to Icelandic; respectively. I also didn't mention modern English's closest living relative, West Frisian. [4, 5]. Old Frisian [6] and Old English were also mutually intelligible, even moreso than Old English and Old Norse. There is still a subset of modern West Frisian that, although written much differently from its English translation, sounds nearly identical. [7] My experience of it was that it was as if one pronounced Dutch with English vowels. So, that's a fuller exposition of the family tree of Old English. Things start getting weirder in the Middle English period, when the Normans conquer England in 1066, causing English to start accreting French loan words while, at the same time, dropping the case system and most of its inflections, and acquiring silent letters. [8] If you want to put this all together into a fuller story of how the sounds of Anglo Saxon were reconstructed, you have to know about vowel shifts [9], and, maybe a bit about consonant shifts [10]. Once you have those tools at hand, plus the rest of a graduate course in comparative linguistics, you can essentially reverse engineer the vowel and consonant shifts to reconstruct a probable phonology for Old English. But, that would have made a much longer comment, you see. ;) --- [0]: https://wordwidefx.com/en/blog/post/old-norse-and-old-english-the-languages-in-history-channel-vikings https://wordwidefx.com/en/blog/post/old-norse-and-old-englis... [1]: I used Google Translate for this, but, I did study Norwegian for a bit, and, although my norsk is a bit rusty, this looks correct to me. [2]: This is not a coincidence. Norway was essentially under Danish rule from 1523-1814. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Norway [3]: Google Translate again. But, based on my limited knowledge of Norwegian and Swedish, this, again looks right. [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Frisian_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Frisian_language [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Frisian_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Frisian_languages [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Frisian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Frisian [7]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/113646/why-is-it-that-frisian-is-considered-the-closest-related-language-to-english https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/113646/why-is-it... [8]: For instance, in Middle English, the word "knight" was spelled the same as it is today, but pronounced /kniçt/. In Old English, it was spelled variously as cniht, cneoht, cnyht, cneht, cnieht, and maybe even 1 or 2 more variants, but still pronounced the same as in Middle English. English spelling didn't start to standardize until William Caxton introduced the printing press to England in the late 15th century. [9]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_shift [10]: https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Consonant+Shift https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Consonant+Shift

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

> We have an excellent idea of what the Anglo Saxon language would have sounded like, in part because it has close living relatives. The phonology is well reconstructed; that is not the issue. The issue is that it is not just a dead language, but a dead passive language which is only read, but never written, unlike, say Latin, which is both read and written — I seriously doubt that there are more than a handful of people on this planet who can claim to have true Sprachgefühl for any period of Old English, and if they have it for 800's English, it is unlikely they have it for 1000's English. It's simply prætentious to claim that one can enjoy the æsthetics of a poem written in this language, for which one requires an intimate sense of Sprachgefühl — I can Latin myself and understand the meaning of the text, but I cannot claim to have the same sense of æsthetics I have for English, where I can decide what phrasings sound beautiful, and what sound stiff, and that's very hard to ever acquire for a dead language. > If you want to hear it, you can listen to the first few lines here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH-_GwoO4xI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH-_GwoO4xI Listening to the sounds is different from understanding the meaning and nuance, much of what you wrote seems to be about surface realization of sounds rather than appreciating the choice of words from an æsthetic standpoint. That speaker also clearly sounds as what he almost certainly is: a non-native who would certainly appear to have an heavy accent and appear stiff and wooden to actual native speakers.

pmiller2 6y ago
People do still write it, for fun: https://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heafodtramet https://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heafodtramet Here's a more fluent reading, if you like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CpKlEiahtI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CpKlEiahtI Enjoy it, don't enjoy it, hop in your time machine and go back to the 9th century to enjoy it; whatever floats your boat. Personally, I enjoy it, "pretentious" or not.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  And can you claim to have Sprachgefühl for 900s English and be able to feel the difference between a poetic phrasing an an ordinary phrasing in that language?