Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a guide on this (after seeing a couple of really bad quality translations) which later translations benefited from: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Guide_to_the_Names_in_The_Lo... that this was in _A Tolkien Compass_ which was one of the first books I purchased w/ my own money (along w/ _A Tolkien Reader_) is arguably a big part of why I chose to study languages early on in my life.
wish the link would let itself be read
New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome
131–140 of 143 posts
Re: New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome
#132It really baffles (and amazes) me that Old English is practically unintelligible to modern day English speakers.
If you go back half a millennium, most languages are the same. The sign above the door at the primary school outside Karlstejn Castle is unreadable to a speaker of modern Czech. School website: https://www.skolakarlstejn.cz/ Better pics can be found easily. It's quite rare for a language to remain close enough to be intelligible. English is a mongrel, with influences from old French and ancient Saxon and Norse and Ce…
What? No it's not. It looks no more than ~100-150 years old, and is perfectly readable if you've ever seen a long s (like ſo).
Re: New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pedantry: Tolkien's "Middle-Earth" is itself a "folksy mistranslation" Closer translation-- "Middle-Yard" Old English word eardgeard =Earth-Yard / ˈæ͜ɑrdˌjæ͜ɑrd / "ardyard" / https://www.theundergroundmap.com/article.html?id=104937 https://english.nsms.ox.ac.uk/oecoursepack/wanderer/notes/no...
Or even garden.
Re: New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone with native command over Hindi and, unless it's spoken by folks from certain UK countries, English, who also spoke and read Sanskrit quite well during school, I had a period of a few months when I went down the rabbit-hole of wonderful general linguistic history and the interrelation among them. I was shocked beyond imagination to see how we might actually have been more the same than different, if we go b…
The Lithuanian Swadesh list includes the following words and I was able to find numerous relatives to Gaelic. I could be wrong about some. Obvious similarities to Latin in some cases too, maybe loanwords. But one can see the Indo-European connections. Lithuanian and Celtic had no direct contact with each other AFAIK, although Celtic was in contact with Vasconic, Romance, Germanic and Slavic... And Lithuanian was in c…
Re: New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome
#1351,3k years ago is such a weird way to write it. Makes sense if we are talking millions of years, but why not write "in 700" or just "1300 years ago"
Probably a German or French speaker forgetting that , is never a valid decimal separator in English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Conventions_...
Re: New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you go back half a millennium, most languages are the same. The sign above the door at the primary school outside Karlstejn Castle is unreadable to a speaker of modern Czech. School website: https://www.skolakarlstejn.cz/ Better pics can be found easily. It's quite rare for a language to remain close enough to be intelligible. English is a mongrel, with influences from old French and ancient Saxon and Norse and Ce…
> The sign above the door at the primary school outside Karlstejn Castle is unreadable to a speaker of modern Czech. What? No it's not. It looks no more than ~100-150 years old, and is perfectly readable if you've ever seen a long s (like ſo).
After a lot of searching I found... my own post from Reddit 3Y ago!
https://www.reddit.com/r/czech/comments/17stwmi/can_anyone_r...
It has a relatively clear photo.
Re: New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The sign above the door at the primary school outside Karlstejn Castle is unreadable to a speaker of modern Czech. What? No it's not. It looks no more than ~100-150 years old, and is perfectly readable if you've ever seen a long s (like ſo).
It's really not. After a lot of searching I found... my own post from Reddit 3Y ago! https://www.reddit.com/r/czech/comments/17stwmi/can_anyone_r... It has a relatively clear photo.
> W téchto se dozwédá sjnjch pilné robé, Bohu čjm povinné, bratřjm, wlasti, sobě.
This is almost modern Czech, with j for í and w for v (which was the standard orthography for hundreds of years and would be familiar to any educated Czech).
Take the most famous poem in Czech, in its original orthography from 1836:
> Byl pozdnj wečer - prwnj mág
> Wečernj mág - byl lásky čas.
This is perfectly readable, like your sign.
One of the comments claims the sign is from 1487 - I would find this extremely unlikely. The mention of vlast (homeland) is suggestive of the era of the National Awakening (19th century), as is the orthography, font, and diacritics. (And the overall theme of education for God and country seems pretty anachronistic for 1487.)
If we go back in time, to say the Kralická Bible (1593), we're still well within the realm of readable text to modern Czechs:
> Na Počátku stwořil Bůh nebe a zemi. Země pak byla nesličná a pustá: a tma byla nad propastj: a Duch Božj wznássel se nad wodami. Y řekl Bůh: Buď swětlo: Y bylo swětlo.
Let's go back all the way to the earliest Slavic texts, about 1300 years ago, which largely predate Czech altogether:
> Iskonï bě slovo. Ï slovo bě u boga. Ï bogъ bě slovo.
A modern Czech would understand most of this, with the probable exception of iskonï ([na] konci, but used here to refer to the beginning). They would probably miss the exact tense being used for bě, but guess that it's a copula (they might see it as a portmanteau of bylo and je, which is close enough). This is probably comparably difficult for a Czech as say Chaucer is for an English speaker (ie not terribly), except it is half a millennium earlier than Chaucer.
Your overall point about language change has merit, but not all languages have changed at the same exact rate. Balto-Slavic languages are relatively conservative as a group (many linguists were very taken with Lithuanian when it was first noticed within Western academia, as it is so conservative that it has considerable utility in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European itself).
This is probably more detail than you wanted - I hope it's interesting and helpful. :)
Re: New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pedantry: Tolkien's "Middle-Earth" is itself a "folksy mistranslation" Closer translation-- "Middle-Yard" Old English word eardgeard =Earth-Yard / ˈæ͜ɑrdˌjæ͜ɑrd / "ardyard" / https://www.theundergroundmap.com/article.html?id=104937 https://english.nsms.ox.ac.uk/oecoursepack/wanderer/notes/no...
Or even garden.
Re: New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome
#139Re: New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really not. After a lot of searching I found... my own post from Reddit 3Y ago! https://www.reddit.com/r/czech/comments/17stwmi/can_anyone_r... It has a relatively clear photo.
That's perfectly readable to me as a speaker of modern Czech, and it appears to have been readable to all the commenters on your post too. > W téchto se dozwédá sjnjch pilné robé, Bohu čjm povinné, bratřjm, wlasti, sobě. This is almost modern Czech, with j for í and w for v (which was the standard orthography for hundreds of years and would be familiar to any educated Czech). Take the most famous poem in Czech, in it…
My Czech was terrible -- maybe just approaching B1 level when I left 3 years ago -- and it was not comprehensible to me. But it wasn't to my friend and to my (now) wife when we visited, so I took a photo and showed it to my colleagues at work and friends in the pub.
Similarly, still my favourite Czech sentence is the one that terrified me before I moved there:
Blb vlk pln žbrnd zdrhl hrd z mlh Brd skrz vrch Smrk v čtvrť srn Krč.
I memorised this (poorly) but had great fun showing it to people when I got there. Almost nobody could parse it at all.
Now, I'm an above-average English speaker. I am a very fast reader, and at school, I could cope with Chaucer just fine. Once I got my internal ear to hear it, it just made sense to me. (Beowulf, no.)
But I was the only one in my class. I can follow poetic and heavily distorted English fairly well, and it's a handy skill for a (former) professional English teacher. But I think I can follow more than most.
I certainly can't follow the ZŠ Karlstejn Czech, nor your poetic examples. I am very poor in the language. (It is my 6th foreign language, but they are all very very weak. But saying that, I've put more effort into Czech than all the rest put together, with little to show for it.)
I think you over-estimate the abilities of ordinary Czechs!