7 ms·

Reading English from 1000 AD

123 points by LAC-Tech 8mo ago

Recent and related: How far back in time can you understand English? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061614 - Feb 2026 (400 comments)

kusokurae 7mo ago
Highly dependent on passage and writer imo, for anything before 1500 Some people I've had say middle english is easy enough to read now, and that's sometimes true, but if you drop some passages of Gawain or Pearl in front of people they'll be convinced it's an extra 2-300 years older. Anything non-London dialect is harder
rob74 7mo ago
As a native German speaker, I can at least say that knowing both German and English doesn't really help in understanding the text. Not even the most "dumbed down" version - ok, he's apparently saying something about his wife, but no idea what exactly. And when I read "shyne (Modern English "sheen" but German cognate is closer)", I was even more confused. "Sheen" is the property of an object that is shiny, which in German would be "Schein", but because it is applied to a woman, I assume that the "cognate" he refers to is "schön" (beautiful)?
- Sharlin 7mo ago
  Another Modern English cognate even closer to shyne than "sheen" is "shine" (and obviously the German "schein"). The words for "beautiful", "fair", "bright", "shining", "well-reputed", "righteous" have a long history of being related: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schinen#Middle_English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schinen#Middle_English (to shine, to appear) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skyr#Middle_English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skyr#Middle_English (clear-coloured, pale, light, luminous, radiant) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sciene#Old_English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sciene#Old_English (beautiful, fair, brilliant, shining) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/sk%C4%ABnan%C4%85 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic... *skīnaną (to shine, to appear) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/sk%C4%ABriz https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic... *skīriz (pure, clear, sheer) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/skauniz https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic... *skauniz (beautiful, shining) and ultimately the PIE https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/(s)%E1%B8%B1eh%E2%82%81y- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur... *(s)ḱeh₁y- (to shine) There are cognates absolutely everywhere in modern Germanic languages: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sk%C3%ADr#Icelandic https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sk%C3%ADr#Icelandic skír (bright, clear, pure) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skir#Swedish https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skir#Swedish (sheer, delicate, shining) And even in Slavic languages: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/sijati https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/s... *sijati (to shine, to illuminate) Skauniz was even borrowed to Proto-Finnic and highly conserved in modern Finnish, Estonian, Ingrian, etc. which all have kaunis meaning "beautiful"! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Finnic/kaunis https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Finnic/k... *kaunis
  - ChrisGreenHeur 7mo ago
    One way to say it that is understandable in modern English and Swedish: She shines with beauty/ Hon skiner av skönhet
  - readthenotes1 7mo ago
    This makes sense in the Firefly universe, too. Shiny!
  - schoen 7mo ago
    I resemble that remark! For a modern semantic parallel, we might point to the phrase "she's quite a looker". It's also interesting to see the words related to hearing and reputation; I'm thinking of Greek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleos and Slavic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs#Ethnonym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs#Ethnonym where there's a whole thing about having people talk about you loudly (or, alternatively, being able to produce intelligible speech at all).
  - thaumasiotes 7mo ago
    > The words for "beautiful", "fair", "bright", "shining", "well-reputed", "righteous" have a long history of being related Compare modern Mandarin 漂亮 ["beautiful", in most of the English senses of the word] and 亮 ["shine"].
    - Sharlin 7mo ago
      Also, I just realized that Finnish loistava can mean either "excellent" or "shining", "radiant". Of course English also has, for instance, the phrase "shining example".
- LAC-Tech 7mo ago
  Words to do with light are so subtle between German and English. Like Kraftwerk tells me neon lights are "schimmerndes" in German, which I will take their word on, but they also say they are "shimmering" in English which is definitely not true. scyn/schön/sheen are a different root from schein/shine, for what its worth. Also I realise now "forlet" is very archaic in modern english whereas "verlassen" is very common in modern german, which would have helped.
  - FarmerPotato 7mo ago
    What I just learned is that OE scīnan, to shine, gives OE scimrian, "to shine fitfully" [1]. Fascinating: Gothic skeima - torch, lantern. [1] Eric Partridge: _Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. sᴄᴇɴᴇ paragraphs 8,9. Also fascinating: "prob from Old Norse skaerr" "is English sheer, bright, hence pure, hence sole, hence also transparent, perpendicular" under paragraph 10. and further down the rabbit-hole, OHG filu-berht, full bright. Name of St. Philibert, "whose day falls on August 22 early in the nutting season". Norman French noix de filbert.
- canjobear 7mo ago
  Knowing German would mostly be helpful for understanding the grammar of Old English. The three genders and four cases, participles prefixed with ge-, verbs like sindon (=sind). There are tons of cognates with German (like þurh = durch) but they're hard to recognize immediately unless you know the kinds of sound changes that are common.
  - LAC-Tech 7mo ago
    I guess the concepts and some of the vocab are important (though I feel compelled to point out that þurh is cognate with through as well). But Old English inflecting nouns, rather than relying on indefinite and definite articles, gives the language a very different quality to German. Also stuff like negative concord.
- FarmerPotato 7mo ago
  I, too, find it confusing. The "German cognate is closer" is not helpful! I think the ö is significant. It could correspond to English ē, but not ei, -ine. Under sʜᴇᴇɴ, Partridge [1] states that OE scēne, scȳne are related to G schön, from PIE *skauniz "Ultimately, to E sʜᴏᴡ." I think we have two compartments here: 1. ö/ē words - schön, E shown, shewn. Under Partridge [1] sʜᴇᴇɴ 2. ei words - G schein and E shine. OE scīnan, under Partridge [1] sᴄᴇɴᴇ [1] My favorite reference: Eric Partridge: _Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of English_. More concise than the OED, and you can carry it. As an English speaker, I'm delighted by the borrowing "ser schön". It is the highest grade in English catalogs of ancient coins. "Shiny" is not a good quality in ancient coins!
  - inkyoto 7mo ago
    > The "German cognate is closer" is not helpful! It is not helpful because comparing English from 1000 AD with Modern High German is the wrong premise to start off with. The correct and more interesting comparison would be with Old High German from around the same time although it did not indicate the umlaut in the spelling at the time (which would happen 400-500 years later) – even though the i-umlaut had already developed. So «schön» was «scōni» (or «sconi») in OHG. Also, ö and ü developed from /o/ and /u/, so juxtaposing them with English ē is likely incorrect.
    - LAC-Tech 7mo ago
      It is not helpful because comparing English from 1000 AD with Modern High German is the wrong premise to start off with. I hear this premise repeated time and time again. Search the internet. I believed this premise, and actually started studying German again while waiting for my Old English textbook to arrive. It did not help.
      - inkyoto 7mo ago
        I do not need to search the internet as I am fluent at German as well. The knowledge of Modern High German helps little to none as far as the comprehension of Old English is concerned. From a modern German speaker's perspective, Old English – with a relatively small number of exceptions – is gibberish.
- yobbo 7mo ago
  Also knowing (archaic?) Scandinavian helps a little more. "swa" is like a contraction of german "so wie". sindon is probably like german "sind": is/were. soþ - sweet? gefeohte - past-tense born/nurtured/raised. ƿælfæst - wellfed. sƿylce - equivalent to modern "swole"? andƿlite - cognate with "anlete" which means face. ƿynsum - "finesome". searocræftum: specially-forceful (fantasy modern swedish cognate "särkraftigt"). "for þy" - since/because ("fördi"). forlætan: forgive. ƿifode - wifed (strangely modern) ofslean: probably closer to modern "avslå or "Abschlagen" than "slain". Defeat? Ac - maybe like "ach"? naƿiht: antonym to "evig"? geƿitan - go/leave/escape/flee? (Scandinavian "vidd" means expansive landscape, cognate with "width" and "weit") Nefne - negation of efne: "not even"? stede - meaning is probably "farms" or "smallholdings" gebunden - cognate with "bound", but the meaning is probably closer to "enserfed". gefultumige - feels like past-tense of a verb that means "filled with"? Squinting: "And what she said was all sweet. I wifed her, and she was fully? beautiful wife, wise and wellfed . Not met I ever "swoler" woman. She was born so bold as any man, and though-whatis her face was fine and fair. "Alas we never free were, since we never might from Wulfsfleet left, and never that Hlaford find and him defeat. That Hlaford had these places with such force bound, that no man may him forgive. We are here like birds in net, like fishes in weir. "And we him secaþ git, both together, man and wife, through the dark strife this grim place. Whathere God us filled-with!"
sgt 7mo ago
Fascinating
deleted 7mo ago
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HelloUsername 7mo ago
Related? "How far back in time can you understand English?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061614 18-feb-2026 399 comments
- dang 7mo ago
  Thanks! I've added that to the toptext as well.
flyinghamster 7mo ago
That's a nice reconstruction. My old dead-tree Webster's Collegiate Dictionary has an essay in its foreword that covers the evolution of English in reverse order, ending with texts in Old Anglo-Saxon. The further back, the more alien it seemed. I'd need a lot of help with Middle English, and anything older would require the sort of major effort/rewriting discussed here. William the Conqueror set a huge linguistic change in motion with his little dust-up. Really, even early Modern English (e.g. Shakespeare or the King James Bible) is pretty thick for today's English speakers.
us-merul 7mo ago
For a while, I mistakenly thought that “Germanic” meant related to German specifically. Old English makes more sense if you’re aware of Frisian, Dutch, and other non-Scandinavian Germanic languages, since that’s the area it originated from. German and Spanish make this distinction explicit (Deutsch/Germanisch and Alemán/Germánica).
- bgnn 7mo ago
  I don't know the German speakers, but knowing both Dutch and English this text is more readable to me than using only modern English knowledge.
- thaumasiotes 7mo ago
  > For a while, I mistakenly thought that “Germanic” meant related to German specifically. ...it does. That's why the form of the word is "Germanic". That's what it means. There are different levels at which you can be related to something. In this case the contrast is between Indo-European languages related to German and Indo-European languages not related to German (except through the shared ancestor called proto-Indo-European). > German and Spanish make this distinction explicit (Deutsch/Germanisch and Alemán/Germánica). I suspect the reason for that is that the first of each of those pairs is the native word and the second is borrowed from the English linguistic terminology.
  - FarmerPotato 7mo ago
    >the second is borrowed from the English linguistic terminology. Borrowed from Latin Germānicus, from Germāni.
    - thaumasiotes 7mo ago
      Think a little harder. You can trace the word back that far. Is that how it got into German or Spanish?
      - FarmerPotato 7mo ago
pimlottc 7mo ago
Should be “1000 AD”, not “Ad”
- Zambyte 7mo ago
  Yep, I was expecting this to include an advertisement from 1000.
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chistev 7mo ago
I think it was earlier this week, or maybe last week, that someone on one of the frontpage posts recommended "The History of English Podcast". I haven't finished the first episode yet, but it's already seeming promising and I know I'm going to continue with it. In that first episode (which is basically an introduction), the host explains that the history of the English language can be divided into three periods: Old English, Middle English, and New English. After establishing that there are three periods, he asks where we think Shakespeare falls, and I immediately thought it had to be Middle English. Then the host proceeded to say he wouldn’t be surprised if most listeners guessed Old or Middle English—and that he wouldn’t be surprised at all if nobody guessed correctly. Because Shakespeare’s plays are actually classified as New English! I smiled in surprise. But he explained that if you can more or less understand the English being written or spoken, then it still falls under New English. The King James Version of the Bible is considered New English too. Keep in mind, Shakespeare wrote his plays between 1589 and 1613. The King James Bible was published in 1611. So when I opened that link in this thread’s header and realized I couldn’t understand a damn thing, it all suddenly made sense!
- 542354234235 7mo ago
  The History of English Podcast gets much better once he gets into the groove of things and I'd definitely recommend sticking with it. I love all the random fun facts that come in most episodes, like where idioms came from, meaning behind the names of the days of the week, and how the word for hospital relates to Christians pilgrimaging to the Holy Land.
- madcaptenor 7mo ago
  I've seen this recommended a few times here, and I've listened since the beginning. I'd recommend it. But it would be hard to catch up after nearly 14 years and 187 episodes (probably averaging an hour?) - I wonder if there's a shorter history of English somewhere.
  - chistev 7mo ago
    Is it still in production? I mean are new episodes still being released? Because I haven't finished the first episode yet, but if all episodes are as interesting as the first, I'll finish all those 187 episodes in no time. Hahaha.
throwawayk7h 7mo ago
I would rather like to see a fully modern rendition of this text. Even as English-first-language, I still find this hard to understand.
- nkurz 7mo ago
  I used Claude to come up with this translation for the submission a couple days ago: And what she said was all true (And that she said was all true). I married her (I wifed on her), and she was a very beautiful woman (and she was full beautiful wife), wise and steadfast in battle. I had never before met such a woman (Not met I never before such a woman). She was in battle as bold as any man, and yet her face was lovely and fair (and though however her countenance was winsome and fair). But we are not at all free (But we nothing free not are), because we could never depart from Wulfsfleet (because we never not might from Wulfsfleet depart), unless we find the Lord and slay him (unless we the Lord find and him slay). The Lord has bound this place with cunning arts (The Lord has this place with cunning-crafts bound), so that no man may leave it (that no man not may it leave). We are here like birds in a net, like fish in a weir. And we seek him still (And we him seek yet), both together, husband and wife, through the dark streets of this grim place. May God help us nonetheless (However God us help)!
chromehearts 7mo ago
Old english using "ne" as a negative concord is definitely borrowed from the french right?
- canjobear 7mo ago
  It goes all the way back to Indo-European. There wasn’t much French influence on English before the Norman invasion.
  - alejohausner 7mo ago
    From what I’ve heard on “the history of English podcast”, after the Norman and invasion written English disappears completely for about a century. This is because the clergy and lawyers were the only literate people at the time, and they were all French. When it re-emerges, it doesn’t have much French in it yet, because only the common folk spoke English, and the norman upper class spoke French, and they didn’t interact that much. It actually took another 100 years or so for French words to percolate into the language. What I learned from the podcast was that what really changed old English into Middle English was the viking invasion around 800. Danes and anglosaxons had different grammar and as a compromise a lot of the germanic cases on nouns, which allowed for arbitrary word ordering in a sentence, got discarded, and English developed the current emphasis on strict word ordering that we have today.
- dddgghhbbfblk 7mo ago
  No, Old English is pre-Norman invasion. I think you have (understandably) misunderstood what a "negative concord" means--it's when a double negative is still a negative, ie multiple negative elements agree with each other rather than cancel out. Like "I didn't hear no bell". A lot of languages are like this (eg Spanish). In the OP article the sentence has both this "ne" and also a "never"
_emacsomancer_ 7mo ago
See Colin Gorrie's "How far back in time can you understand English?".[0] [0]: https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-understand-english https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-u...
Sharlin 7mo ago
"Stede", besides German Stadt, Swedist stad, etc. is cognate to English stead, fossilized and now only occuring in the adverb "instead"/"in (someone's) stead" and a few compounds such as "farmstead" and "steadfast" (literally meaning "standing firmly (in place)"). "Steady" is of course also related.
- bgnn 7mo ago
  It survives in modern Dutch too: in bedstede, steevast etc. Steevast mostly means always, but sometimes means firmly similar to modern English steadfast.
voxleone 7mo ago
It is interesting that Google translates the first paragraph of the text like this>> "And the word he spoke was all like this. He was a hired hand, and he was full of malice, and he was in ƿælfæst. He didn't remember the man's name. He was in gefeohte(...)" It says Icelandic.:)
bgnn 7mo ago
If you find this interesting, try Nedersaksissk (low-Saxon) Wikipedia: https://nds-nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsassisk https://nds-nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsassisk It's fun for modern Dutch/Frisian speakers, most likely the same for German speakers. I think English won't be enough though.
TacticalCoder 7mo ago
I've got a relatively early printed book, from 1575. It's a book about plants [1]. It's in old french and although I'm a native french speaker it is definitely not an easy read. Now it's as alien as the old english text in TFA but then it's from 1575, not 1000. If you take "french" from 1000, I take it it'd basically as unreadable for a native french speaker as that "english" text is for a native english speaker. [1] btw my daughter loves that book because we gave her the name of a plant and that plant is described in that old book... But I only found that out way after she was born.
swaminarayan 7mo ago
most of the english language words are derive from Sanskrit. Checkout : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Sanskrit_origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Sansk...
- internet_points 7mo ago
  Well that's simply not true. There's lots of shared history ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognate ), common ancestor-words, and of course modern loans like "lacquer" and "crimson", but the "parents" of Sanskrit and Germanic languages diverged before Sanskrit appeared around 1500 BCE (earliest assumed date of Vedic Sanskrit, same time as Mycenaean Greek), there's lots of language trees online that make this clearer https://jacklynch.net/language.html https://jacklynch.net/language.html https://learn.kids4alll.eu/sites/default/files/unit/oer/doc/lpp-total-e-2022-dois_0.pdf https://learn.kids4alll.eu/sites/default/files/unit/oer/doc/... https://www.theguardian.com/education/gallery/2015/jan/23/a-language-family-tree-in-pictures https://www.theguardian.com/education/gallery/2015/jan/23/a-... is a beautiful one
  - swaminarayan 7mo ago
    Well above articles are misleading, it depends on who writes it, nobody has concrete proof. so please don't blindly trust.

123 points by LAC-Tech 8mo ago

Recent and related: How far back in time can you understand English? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061614 - Feb 2026 (400 comments)

kusokurae 7mo ago

Highly dependent on passage and writer imo, for anything before 1500 Some people I've had say middle english is easy enough to read now, and that's sometimes true, but if you drop some passages of Gawain or Pearl in front of people they'll be convinced it's an extra 2-300 years older. Anything non-London dialect is harder

rob74 7mo ago

As a native German speaker, I can at least say that knowing both German and English doesn't really help in understanding the text. Not even the most "dumbed down" version - ok, he's apparently saying something about his wife, but no idea what exactly. And when I read "shyne (Modern English "sheen" but German cognate is closer)", I was even more confused. "Sheen" is the property of an object that is shiny, which in German would be "Schein", but because it is applied to a woman, I assume that the "cognate" he refers to is "schön" (beautiful)?

Sharlin 7mo ago
Another Modern English cognate even closer to shyne than "sheen" is "shine" (and obviously the German "schein"). The words for "beautiful", "fair", "bright", "shining", "well-reputed", "righteous" have a long history of being related: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schinen#Middle_English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schinen#Middle_English (to shine, to appear) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skyr#Middle_English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skyr#Middle_English (clear-coloured, pale, light, luminous, radiant) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sciene#Old_English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sciene#Old_English (beautiful, fair, brilliant, shining) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/sk%C4%ABnan%C4%85 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic... *skīnaną (to shine, to appear) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/sk%C4%ABriz https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic... *skīriz (pure, clear, sheer) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/skauniz https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic... *skauniz (beautiful, shining) and ultimately the PIE https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/(s)%E1%B8%B1eh%E2%82%81y- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur... *(s)ḱeh₁y- (to shine) There are cognates absolutely everywhere in modern Germanic languages: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sk%C3%ADr#Icelandic https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sk%C3%ADr#Icelandic skír (bright, clear, pure) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skir#Swedish https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skir#Swedish (sheer, delicate, shining) And even in Slavic languages: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/sijati https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/s... *sijati (to shine, to illuminate) Skauniz was even borrowed to Proto-Finnic and highly conserved in modern Finnish, Estonian, Ingrian, etc. which all have kaunis meaning "beautiful"! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Finnic/kaunis https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Finnic/k... *kaunis
- ChrisGreenHeur 7mo ago
  One way to say it that is understandable in modern English and Swedish: She shines with beauty/ Hon skiner av skönhet
- readthenotes1 7mo ago
  This makes sense in the Firefly universe, too. Shiny!
- schoen 7mo ago
  I resemble that remark! For a modern semantic parallel, we might point to the phrase "she's quite a looker". It's also interesting to see the words related to hearing and reputation; I'm thinking of Greek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleos and Slavic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs#Ethnonym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs#Ethnonym where there's a whole thing about having people talk about you loudly (or, alternatively, being able to produce intelligible speech at all).
- thaumasiotes 7mo ago
  > The words for "beautiful", "fair", "bright", "shining", "well-reputed", "righteous" have a long history of being related Compare modern Mandarin 漂亮 ["beautiful", in most of the English senses of the word] and 亮 ["shine"].
  - Sharlin 7mo ago
    Also, I just realized that Finnish loistava can mean either "excellent" or "shining", "radiant". Of course English also has, for instance, the phrase "shining example".
LAC-Tech 7mo ago
Words to do with light are so subtle between German and English. Like Kraftwerk tells me neon lights are "schimmerndes" in German, which I will take their word on, but they also say they are "shimmering" in English which is definitely not true. scyn/schön/sheen are a different root from schein/shine, for what its worth. Also I realise now "forlet" is very archaic in modern english whereas "verlassen" is very common in modern german, which would have helped.
- FarmerPotato 7mo ago
  What I just learned is that OE scīnan, to shine, gives OE scimrian, "to shine fitfully" [1]. Fascinating: Gothic skeima - torch, lantern. [1] Eric Partridge: _Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. sᴄᴇɴᴇ paragraphs 8,9. Also fascinating: "prob from Old Norse skaerr" "is English sheer, bright, hence pure, hence sole, hence also transparent, perpendicular" under paragraph 10. and further down the rabbit-hole, OHG filu-berht, full bright. Name of St. Philibert, "whose day falls on August 22 early in the nutting season". Norman French noix de filbert.
canjobear 7mo ago
Knowing German would mostly be helpful for understanding the grammar of Old English. The three genders and four cases, participles prefixed with ge-, verbs like sindon (=sind). There are tons of cognates with German (like þurh = durch) but they're hard to recognize immediately unless you know the kinds of sound changes that are common.
- LAC-Tech 7mo ago
  I guess the concepts and some of the vocab are important (though I feel compelled to point out that þurh is cognate with through as well). But Old English inflecting nouns, rather than relying on indefinite and definite articles, gives the language a very different quality to German. Also stuff like negative concord.
FarmerPotato 7mo ago
I, too, find it confusing. The "German cognate is closer" is not helpful! I think the ö is significant. It could correspond to English ē, but not ei, -ine. Under sʜᴇᴇɴ, Partridge [1] states that OE scēne, scȳne are related to G schön, from PIE *skauniz "Ultimately, to E sʜᴏᴡ." I think we have two compartments here: 1. ö/ē words - schön, E shown, shewn. Under Partridge [1] sʜᴇᴇɴ 2. ei words - G schein and E shine. OE scīnan, under Partridge [1] sᴄᴇɴᴇ [1] My favorite reference: Eric Partridge: _Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of English_. More concise than the OED, and you can carry it. As an English speaker, I'm delighted by the borrowing "ser schön". It is the highest grade in English catalogs of ancient coins. "Shiny" is not a good quality in ancient coins!
- inkyoto 7mo ago
  > The "German cognate is closer" is not helpful! It is not helpful because comparing English from 1000 AD with Modern High German is the wrong premise to start off with. The correct and more interesting comparison would be with Old High German from around the same time although it did not indicate the umlaut in the spelling at the time (which would happen 400-500 years later) – even though the i-umlaut had already developed. So «schön» was «scōni» (or «sconi») in OHG. Also, ö and ü developed from /o/ and /u/, so juxtaposing them with English ē is likely incorrect.
  - LAC-Tech 7mo ago
    It is not helpful because comparing English from 1000 AD with Modern High German is the wrong premise to start off with. I hear this premise repeated time and time again. Search the internet. I believed this premise, and actually started studying German again while waiting for my Old English textbook to arrive. It did not help.
    - inkyoto 7mo ago
      I do not need to search the internet as I am fluent at German as well. The knowledge of Modern High German helps little to none as far as the comprehension of Old English is concerned. From a modern German speaker's perspective, Old English – with a relatively small number of exceptions – is gibberish.
yobbo 7mo ago
Also knowing (archaic?) Scandinavian helps a little more. "swa" is like a contraction of german "so wie". sindon is probably like german "sind": is/were. soþ - sweet? gefeohte - past-tense born/nurtured/raised. ƿælfæst - wellfed. sƿylce - equivalent to modern "swole"? andƿlite - cognate with "anlete" which means face. ƿynsum - "finesome". searocræftum: specially-forceful (fantasy modern swedish cognate "särkraftigt"). "for þy" - since/because ("fördi"). forlætan: forgive. ƿifode - wifed (strangely modern) ofslean: probably closer to modern "avslå or "Abschlagen" than "slain". Defeat? Ac - maybe like "ach"? naƿiht: antonym to "evig"? geƿitan - go/leave/escape/flee? (Scandinavian "vidd" means expansive landscape, cognate with "width" and "weit") Nefne - negation of efne: "not even"? stede - meaning is probably "farms" or "smallholdings" gebunden - cognate with "bound", but the meaning is probably closer to "enserfed". gefultumige - feels like past-tense of a verb that means "filled with"? Squinting: "And what she said was all sweet. I wifed her, and she was fully? beautiful wife, wise and wellfed . Not met I ever "swoler" woman. She was born so bold as any man, and though-whatis her face was fine and fair. "Alas we never free were, since we never might from Wulfsfleet left, and never that Hlaford find and him defeat. That Hlaford had these places with such force bound, that no man may him forgive. We are here like birds in net, like fishes in weir. "And we him secaþ git, both together, man and wife, through the dark strife this grim place. Whathere God us filled-with!"

sgt 7mo ago

Fascinating

deleted 7mo ago

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HelloUsername 7mo ago

Related? "How far back in time can you understand English?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061614 18-feb-2026 399 comments

dang 7mo ago
Thanks! I've added that to the toptext as well.

flyinghamster 7mo ago

That's a nice reconstruction. My old dead-tree Webster's Collegiate Dictionary has an essay in its foreword that covers the evolution of English in reverse order, ending with texts in Old Anglo-Saxon. The further back, the more alien it seemed. I'd need a lot of help with Middle English, and anything older would require the sort of major effort/rewriting discussed here. William the Conqueror set a huge linguistic change in motion with his little dust-up. Really, even early Modern English (e.g. Shakespeare or the King James Bible) is pretty thick for today's English speakers.

us-merul 7mo ago

For a while, I mistakenly thought that “Germanic” meant related to German specifically. Old English makes more sense if you’re aware of Frisian, Dutch, and other non-Scandinavian Germanic languages, since that’s the area it originated from. German and Spanish make this distinction explicit (Deutsch/Germanisch and Alemán/Germánica).

bgnn 7mo ago
I don't know the German speakers, but knowing both Dutch and English this text is more readable to me than using only modern English knowledge.
thaumasiotes 7mo ago
> For a while, I mistakenly thought that “Germanic” meant related to German specifically. ...it does. That's why the form of the word is "Germanic". That's what it means. There are different levels at which you can be related to something. In this case the contrast is between Indo-European languages related to German and Indo-European languages not related to German (except through the shared ancestor called proto-Indo-European). > German and Spanish make this distinction explicit (Deutsch/Germanisch and Alemán/Germánica). I suspect the reason for that is that the first of each of those pairs is the native word and the second is borrowed from the English linguistic terminology.
- FarmerPotato 7mo ago
  >the second is borrowed from the English linguistic terminology. Borrowed from Latin Germānicus, from Germāni.
  - thaumasiotes 7mo ago
    Think a little harder. You can trace the word back that far. Is that how it got into German or Spanish?
    - FarmerPotato 7mo ago

pimlottc 7mo ago

Should be “1000 AD”, not “Ad”

Zambyte 7mo ago
Yep, I was expecting this to include an advertisement from 1000.

deleted 7mo ago

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chistev 7mo ago

I think it was earlier this week, or maybe last week, that someone on one of the frontpage posts recommended "The History of English Podcast". I haven't finished the first episode yet, but it's already seeming promising and I know I'm going to continue with it. In that first episode (which is basically an introduction), the host explains that the history of the English language can be divided into three periods: Old English, Middle English, and New English. After establishing that there are three periods, he asks where we think Shakespeare falls, and I immediately thought it had to be Middle English. Then the host proceeded to say he wouldn’t be surprised if most listeners guessed Old or Middle English—and that he wouldn’t be surprised at all if nobody guessed correctly. Because Shakespeare’s plays are actually classified as New English! I smiled in surprise. But he explained that if you can more or less understand the English being written or spoken, then it still falls under New English. The King James Version of the Bible is considered New English too. Keep in mind, Shakespeare wrote his plays between 1589 and 1613. The King James Bible was published in 1611. So when I opened that link in this thread’s header and realized I couldn’t understand a damn thing, it all suddenly made sense!

542354234235 7mo ago
The History of English Podcast gets much better once he gets into the groove of things and I'd definitely recommend sticking with it. I love all the random fun facts that come in most episodes, like where idioms came from, meaning behind the names of the days of the week, and how the word for hospital relates to Christians pilgrimaging to the Holy Land.
madcaptenor 7mo ago
I've seen this recommended a few times here, and I've listened since the beginning. I'd recommend it. But it would be hard to catch up after nearly 14 years and 187 episodes (probably averaging an hour?) - I wonder if there's a shorter history of English somewhere.
- chistev 7mo ago
  Is it still in production? I mean are new episodes still being released? Because I haven't finished the first episode yet, but if all episodes are as interesting as the first, I'll finish all those 187 episodes in no time. Hahaha.

throwawayk7h 7mo ago

I would rather like to see a fully modern rendition of this text. Even as English-first-language, I still find this hard to understand.

nkurz 7mo ago
I used Claude to come up with this translation for the submission a couple days ago: And what she said was all true (And that she said was all true). I married her (I wifed on her), and she was a very beautiful woman (and she was full beautiful wife), wise and steadfast in battle. I had never before met such a woman (Not met I never before such a woman). She was in battle as bold as any man, and yet her face was lovely and fair (and though however her countenance was winsome and fair). But we are not at all free (But we nothing free not are), because we could never depart from Wulfsfleet (because we never not might from Wulfsfleet depart), unless we find the Lord and slay him (unless we the Lord find and him slay). The Lord has bound this place with cunning arts (The Lord has this place with cunning-crafts bound), so that no man may leave it (that no man not may it leave). We are here like birds in a net, like fish in a weir. And we seek him still (And we him seek yet), both together, husband and wife, through the dark streets of this grim place. May God help us nonetheless (However God us help)!

chromehearts 7mo ago

Old english using "ne" as a negative concord is definitely borrowed from the french right?

canjobear 7mo ago
It goes all the way back to Indo-European. There wasn’t much French influence on English before the Norman invasion.
- alejohausner 7mo ago
  From what I’ve heard on “the history of English podcast”, after the Norman and invasion written English disappears completely for about a century. This is because the clergy and lawyers were the only literate people at the time, and they were all French. When it re-emerges, it doesn’t have much French in it yet, because only the common folk spoke English, and the norman upper class spoke French, and they didn’t interact that much. It actually took another 100 years or so for French words to percolate into the language. What I learned from the podcast was that what really changed old English into Middle English was the viking invasion around 800. Danes and anglosaxons had different grammar and as a compromise a lot of the germanic cases on nouns, which allowed for arbitrary word ordering in a sentence, got discarded, and English developed the current emphasis on strict word ordering that we have today.
dddgghhbbfblk 7mo ago
No, Old English is pre-Norman invasion. I think you have (understandably) misunderstood what a "negative concord" means--it's when a double negative is still a negative, ie multiple negative elements agree with each other rather than cancel out. Like "I didn't hear no bell". A lot of languages are like this (eg Spanish). In the OP article the sentence has both this "ne" and also a "never"

_emacsomancer_ 7mo ago

See Colin Gorrie's "How far back in time can you understand English?".[0] [0]: https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-understand-english https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-u...

Sharlin 7mo ago

"Stede", besides German Stadt, Swedist stad, etc. is cognate to English stead, fossilized and now only occuring in the adverb "instead"/"in (someone's) stead" and a few compounds such as "farmstead" and "steadfast" (literally meaning "standing firmly (in place)"). "Steady" is of course also related.

bgnn 7mo ago
It survives in modern Dutch too: in bedstede, steevast etc. Steevast mostly means always, but sometimes means firmly similar to modern English steadfast.

voxleone 7mo ago

It is interesting that Google translates the first paragraph of the text like this>> "And the word he spoke was all like this. He was a hired hand, and he was full of malice, and he was in ƿælfæst. He didn't remember the man's name. He was in gefeohte(...)" It says Icelandic.:)

bgnn 7mo ago

If you find this interesting, try Nedersaksissk (low-Saxon) Wikipedia: https://nds-nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsassisk https://nds-nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsassisk It's fun for modern Dutch/Frisian speakers, most likely the same for German speakers. I think English won't be enough though.

TacticalCoder 7mo ago

I've got a relatively early printed book, from 1575. It's a book about plants [1]. It's in old french and although I'm a native french speaker it is definitely not an easy read. Now it's as alien as the old english text in TFA but then it's from 1575, not 1000. If you take "french" from 1000, I take it it'd basically as unreadable for a native french speaker as that "english" text is for a native english speaker. [1] btw my daughter loves that book because we gave her the name of a plant and that plant is described in that old book... But I only found that out way after she was born.

swaminarayan 7mo ago

most of the english language words are derive from Sanskrit. Checkout : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Sanskrit_origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Sansk...

internet_points 7mo ago
Well that's simply not true. There's lots of shared history ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognate ), common ancestor-words, and of course modern loans like "lacquer" and "crimson", but the "parents" of Sanskrit and Germanic languages diverged before Sanskrit appeared around 1500 BCE (earliest assumed date of Vedic Sanskrit, same time as Mycenaean Greek), there's lots of language trees online that make this clearer https://jacklynch.net/language.html https://jacklynch.net/language.html https://learn.kids4alll.eu/sites/default/files/unit/oer/doc/lpp-total-e-2022-dois_0.pdf https://learn.kids4alll.eu/sites/default/files/unit/oer/doc/... https://www.theguardian.com/education/gallery/2015/jan/23/a-language-family-tree-in-pictures https://www.theguardian.com/education/gallery/2015/jan/23/a-... is a beautiful one
- swaminarayan 7mo ago
  Well above articles are misleading, it depends on who writes it, nobody has concrete proof. so please don't blindly trust.