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New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome

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Re: New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome

#91

Post by arethuza »

jschveibinz wrote: post #87
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a UK TV show years ago that I've always remembered where the presenter tried to buy a cow using Old English with a Frisian speaking farmer in Holland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34

You'd probably enjoy "The Story of English" series: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6D54D1C7DAE31B36&si=Kw3J... or "The History of English" series: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV50II2XzmY-9GLZWAuieOp27... In the second series, there is a weather report in Frisian that vaguely sounds like English.

I suspect a lot of people in the UK today would pronounce "brown cow" as "broon coo" - certainly I would have when I was a wee loon ;-)

Re: New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome

#92

Post by rhplus »

nephihaha wrote: post #35
walthamstow wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father in law is a Persian speaker. I was very surprised to learn that thank you (mersi) is the same as in French, and OK/indeed (baleh) is the same as in Spanish.

Arigato in Japanese is said to be a borrowing from Portuguese Obrigado (might want to verify that!).

Even more interesting is when words are borrowed back!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reborrowing

For example, katsu from cutlet, is borrowed back into English to mean… cutlet.

And when combined with “curry” as in “katsu curry” the journey meanders all the way through Tamil, Portuguese, Japanese and English, following sailors where they went.

Re: New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome

#93

Post by nephihaha »

card_zero wrote: post #79
lproven wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's documented, as is tempura . It's like pancakes: you make them before the time of fasting. "The Time of X" in Spanish is "tempora X" and I would bet Portuguese is similar. There are loads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_words_of_Port...

It's listed there under False cognates. > evidence indicates arigatō has a purely Japanese origin I remain suspicious, though. Maybe what happened was the popularization of an existing Japanese term under the influence of Portuguese Jesuits, since it sounded similar to obrigado?

Perfectly possible. I think I've seen evidence elsewhere of similar but unrelated words influencing each other. For example, round about where I live the Romany word "shan" is used meaning "mean" or "worthless", but it seems to have been influenced by the unrelated "sean" in Gaelic (also pronounced "shan") which means "old". So it's come to mean something worn out as well.

Re: New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome

#94

Post by pbhjpbhj »

celebril wrote: post #38
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the "King James" version is considered the standard within the Anglican churches in the UK I don't find this to be true. Even at high mass ('bells & smells' type communion) you get more modern versions. To my recollection NIV would be most common. Obviously not a representative survey. Also, it might be at traditional/formal services you get [N]KJV as I've been to less of those. Amongst very old people you see stron…

A bit of correction: the version you'll most likely see being used across the Church of England nowadays is NRSV. It's the scholarly translation. NIV is the preferred translation for the low-church side, the evangelicals, so definitely won't be used by the bells-and-smells high church crowd. KJV is preferred by a niche who also prefers the Book of Common Prayer liturgy over Common Worship. Usually this is either an o…

You're right re [N]RSV in CoE. But I think of Anglican - perhaps wrongly - as extending outside CoE to encompass a range of reformed Protestant communions. I've seen NIV used in CoE too, but yes NRSV too and more often.

Re: New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome

#95

Post by lproven »

nephihaha wrote: post #69
lproven wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She dty vea. :-) (I do not actually speak Manx, but 2026 is the Year of the Manx Language. I should learn some.)

I know a little. I was taught by Brian Stowell many years ago and have his novel here along with a Manx Bible.

Oh, fantastic!

Re: New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome

#96

Post by giraffe_lady »

zeegroen wrote: post #48
cyocum wrote: post #8

My degree is in Celtic Studies. This kind of discovery may be surprising to those not versed in it but not those who have studied these languages. Some of the best preserved Old Irish, for instance, is in St. Gallen in what is now Austria and Milan. There is still an entire Medieval European world out there in the archives still waiting to be discovered. Sadly, there are not many of us who have the skills to do this…

Oh that's interesting! In my mind we are now on the cusp of being able to scan all these archives and have them be read by LLMs (in a first pass). Do you agree with that assessment, or am I being naive here?

I'm not in this field but I know someone who used to be and we've talked about it a fair bit. A quick overview of what's needed from what I understand:

Old books aren't that neat, you tend to have a lot of notes and other documents, translations, scribal annotations from different eras interleaved or in the margins. You need to make decisions about that stuff as you go, which requires being informed about the context and meaning of those documents, that may well be in another language, or from hundreds of years before or after the document you're trying to process. For any given physical object it's quite likely that no single scholar has all the information necessary.

It is also extremely important to preserve all the context, things like which exact pages a fragment is stuck between, even its orientation, can be critical information to later scholars. And then in all of this you're handling ancient & precious one of a kind paper documents. It's just slow going, and well beyond what I would even consider "skilled labor" this very much is the work of research & scholarship. By the time you get a camera pointed at a page you're at the easy part.

Re: New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome

#97

Post by amdsn »

lproven wrote: post #67
detourdog wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure you are aware of Esperanto. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

I preferred Interlingua... But these days, Slovio would help me more. I've tried Slovio on Slavs of about 10 nationalities. None had ever heard of it. All of then, no exceptions, could just understand it perfectly well, to their great surprise. https://www.interlingua.com/interlingua-en/ https://www.slovio.com/

I find slovio to be jarring. It's like someone took vaguely slavic words and slammed Esperanto-inspired grammar onto them. Something like Interslavic at least has noun/verb morphology that is much more familiar to all Slavic language speakers. I could imagine myself actually speaking Interslavic, but not the case for Slovio. It's simply too strange.

Straight from the Slovio website:

>Slovio es novju mezxunarodju jazika ktor razumijut cxtirsto milion ludis na celoju zemla.

>Slovio is a new international language that 400 million people on the planet understand

I am a Russian speaker so the copula "es" being written is strange but obviously I speak other languages that use their copula in the present tense so that's not so bad, but to 100% of slavic speakers "jazik" (tongue/language) is masculine, yet the adjectives here are reminiscent of ones for a feminine noun in the accusative case which is doubly weird as that case would also make no sense here. The second half of the sentence isn't so bad aside from "ludis" (-s plural is alien to the entire family) and "na celoju zemla" (more confusion where my brain expects a different case form). It's just odd that it completely drops noun cases on the floor when almost all the Slavic languages still have healthy productive inflection systems.

Re: New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome

#98

Post by BalinKing »

nephihaha wrote: post #93
card_zero wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's listed there under False cognates. > evidence indicates arigatō has a purely Japanese origin I remain suspicious, though. Maybe what happened was the popularization of an existing Japanese term under the influence of Portuguese Jesuits, since it sounded similar to obrigado?

Perfectly possible. I think I've seen evidence elsewhere of similar but unrelated words influencing each other. For example, round about where I live the Romany word "shan" is used meaning "mean" or "worthless", but it seems to have been influenced by the unrelated "sean" in Gaelic (also pronounced "shan") which means "old". So it's come to mean something worn out as well.

In general, I think this phenomenon is called "phono-semantic matching": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phono-semantic_matching.

Re: New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome

#99

Post by pfdietz »

lproven wrote: post #50
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, what? Is "eci" (eternal?) the origin of "Ecki Thump" - Yorkshire version of OMG?

And indeed the ancient and mysterious Lancashire martial art, of course. https://www.goodiesruleok.com/articles.php?id=17

Which has nothing on the secret Welsh art of self-defense, Llap Goch.

https://www.llapgoch.org.uk/

Re: New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome

#100

Post by detourdog »

detourdog wrote: post #58
roysting wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve long thought about how wonderful it would be to create a contemporary new hybrid language whose objective was to unify communication along the very common linguistic origins at least some language clusters have. The core challenge of course is that it would be contrived in a time when top down imposition does not work as effectively. It’s a dream I have nonetheless. It would be a gargantuan effort just alone to…

I’m sure you are aware of Esperanto. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

You are both more involved than I am. I only brought up Esperanto because it seemed as if there was no awareness of effort in this type of language development.
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