"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.
Reading English from 1000 AD
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Re: Reading English from 1000 AD
#32As 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…
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 i…
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.
Re: Reading English from 1000 AD
#33Related? "How far back in time can you understand English?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061614 18-feb-2026 399 comments
Thanks! I've added that to the toptext as well.
Re: Reading English from 1000 AD
#34I 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…
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.
>I wonder if there's a shorter history of English somewhere.
I don't know what's a good podcast for it, but learning "linguistics/linguistic theory" I think is a more rewarding experience. Then when you listen to the history of english you'll have more insights.
Re: Reading English from 1000 AD
#35It 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.:)
Re: Reading English from 1000 AD
#36For 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).
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.
Re: Reading English from 1000 AD
#37"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.
It survives in modern Dutch too: in bedstede, steevast etc. Steevast mostly means always, but sometimes means firmly similar to modern English steadfast.
Re: Reading English from 1000 AD
#38If you find this interesting, try Nedersaksissk (low-Saxon) Wikipedia:
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.
Re: Reading English from 1000 AD
#39Old english using "ne" as a negative concord is definitely borrowed from the french right?
It goes all the way back to Indo-European. There wasn’t much French influence on English before the Norman invasion.
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.
Re: Reading English from 1000 AD
#40I'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.