7 ms·
Benjamin Thorpe translated almost all Old English texts (2016)
- journogp 2y ago[flagged]
- kazinator 2y agoSo productive, we could call him Octathorpe.
- ggm 2y agoSo, little to no major works of anglo-saxon or old english were found after his lifetime? I'm surprised that there are no palimpsests or binding materials yielding new writing.
- boddu 2y agoHe did this translation as a part of his job or out of passion?
- usrnm 2y agoIn 1826, at the age of forty-four, Thorpe studied early English antiquities at the University of Copenhagen And here I am, in my late 30s, thinking that my productive age is far behind me
- brcmthrowaway 2y agoi bet this person was an aristocrat with a bunch of servants to rear their children.
- kwhitefoot 2y agoMost likely. But what was your point? It's surely well known that free time is what you need to get anything done.
- krisoft 2y ago> But what was your point? The point is that usrnm shouldn't compare their own productivity if their circumstances are different.
- Angostura 2y agoAccording to Wikipedia he started off as a banker, before switching to scholarship. He was then granted a ‘civil list pension’ - basically a government annual grant in recognition of his valuable but unpaid work
- ZaoLahma 2y agoI guess if money wasn't such a limiting factor, more of us would be productive in different ways later in life. Instead of implementing already invented ideas, we could invent now that we are at the peak of our knowledge and mental capabilities. It's really hard to justify the financial loss required to (full time) pursue novel ideas when you're middle aged. It's much easier to just put in the 8 hours per day and collect the paycheck.
- szundi 2y agoNice achievement while being a SPOF in this field is interesting.
- cm2187 2y agoIt's amusing that his translations might need their own translations to modern english in a century or two, like he uses forms that already aren't really used anymore (like ye). XVIII century French for instance, while probably being the peak of the language in term of sophistication and elegance, is hard to read without a lot of footnotes. So many words disappeared, changed meaning, or the grammar itself changed.
- netdevnet 2y agoMakes you wonder what future generations will call our English. "Old" is taken and "modern" is always the English of the living
- kwhitefoot 2y agoModern English is the English that followed the Great Vowel Shift that occurred between the late 14th century and the 17th century. So not necessarily modern in the colloquial sense. That is, Modern is also taken :-)
- usrnm 2y agoThat's assuming that the language will still be called English anything. It might as well split into American, Australian, British, etc. We don't call French or Spanish modern Latin, do we?
- kombookcha 2y agoThere's also an interesting split occurring with continental Euro-English, which is primarily being spoken by non-native speakers as a lingua franca. The divergence is presumably going to accelerate after Brexit, now that there's even fewer native speakers around to anchor it to British English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English
- wirrbel 2y agoIt's an interesting page, but I think at the moment it only summarizes common errors of english-as-second-language speakers of other European languages. But there might be a pattern there. Also I doubt that there is a continuity between the mentioned Erasmus students and staff in the European-union for example. I would assume that's a later addition to the wikipedia article when the most likely subject of Euro english is about patterns of the use of english-language in the EU bureaucracy. Maybe a better title would be EU-administrative English or something of the like. What's not so often talked about is of course that the pronunciation of english by non-native speakers is different and I do think there is tendency for some convergence among some aspects of pronunciation that I observe in meetings and zoom calls at work. Aspiration of consonants, clearer separation of individual words. The result is that native-speakers - while being more eloquent in English which puts them at some advantage - sometimes have a disadvantage because their advanced use of language is not understood well. IIRC MTV Europe realized that british hosts wouldn't be understood across europe, when english-speaking french/german/italian hosts would.
- euroderf 2y agoFWIW I note that Google Translate offers no Old English, or even Middle English.
- jhbadger 2y agoThere may not be a big enough corpus for adequate training. The problem with both is that the main people writing would either prefer Latin (or later, French). The number of people who could write and used the vernacular to do so, were small.
- nestorD 2y agoMost LLMs do well at Middle English (it is not that difficult of a task). Old English is significantly harder but I have found Claude Opus to give good results.
- kogus 2y agoEnglish today is a delightful, expressive train wreck of grammar and spelling madness. But Old English really was not. It was a much more earthy, simple, and consistent language. Old English had a total of about 40,000 words. Today's English has almost half a million. I'll take the opportunity to plug a fantastic podcast on the history of English, creatively named "The History of English Podcast". https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
- mandibeet 2y agoThe language was largely phonetic, meaning words were spelled the way they sounded. This fact is my fav
- kogus 2y agoI love that too. English was spelled phonetically all the way up until the late 1400s, I believe. One fun by-product of purely phonetic spelling is that you could tell the accent of the author by the way they spelled words.