Letter of Recommendation: Old English
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Letter of Recommendation: Old English
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Re: Letter of Recommendation: Old English
#2> ð (interchangeable with þ)
I suspect this was still a dialectic distinction by the time of the Norman conquest; I suspect the distinction survived much longer in more linguistically conservative regions like what is now Yorkshire (which was also more heavily influenced by the danish.
I believe they can still have distinct pronunciations in Icelandic.
Re: Letter of Recommendation: Old English
#3> ð (interchangeable with þ) I suspect this was still a dialectic distinction by the time of the Norman conquest; I suspect the distinction survived much longer in more linguistically conservative regions like what is now Yorkshire (which was also more heavily influenced by the danish. I believe they can still have distinct pronunciations in Icelandic.
Yeah, I thought ð was voiced in old english, but it's been a very long time since I tried to learn it.
I do recall that ð was voiced in the old norse that I was taught in college. It probably doesn't matter too much since you don't have an old englishman to speak to.
Re: Letter of Recommendation: Old English
#4> ð (interchangeable with þ) I suspect this was still a dialectic distinction by the time of the Norman conquest; I suspect the distinction survived much longer in more linguistically conservative regions like what is now Yorkshire (which was also more heavily influenced by the danish. I believe they can still have distinct pronunciations in Icelandic.
Yeah, I thought ð was voiced in old english, but it's been a very long time since I tried to learn it. I do recall that ð was voiced in the old norse that I was taught in college. It probably doesn't matter too much since you don't have an old englishman to speak to.
Both used to refer to the same sound (the first sound of thing), which mutated into what we have today (as in the), in part due to surrounding sounds (note, for example, that words ending in th are soft/unvoiced).
The presence of two different characters has something to do with the integration of Latin and runic alphabets, but the choice of which was used isn't clear to me.
Re: Letter of Recommendation: Old English
#5Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I thought ð was voiced in old english, but it's been a very long time since I tried to learn it. I do recall that ð was voiced in the old norse that I was taught in college. It probably doesn't matter too much since you don't have an old englishman to speak to.
Both used to refer to the same sound (the first sound of thing), which mutated into what we have today (as in the), in part due to surrounding sounds (note, for example, that words ending in th are soft/unvoiced). The presence of two different characters has something to do with the integration of Latin and runic alphabets, but the choice of which was used isn't clear to me.
"th" can still have several different sounds depending on accent and word. The more obvious are t' ie the northern english eg t' mill (its quite hard to write down for those unacquainted with it). Then, of course we have t'ing for thing in some areas. Often the th in that becomes closer in sound to f when compared to the th in this. I personally have a slightly varied accent that generally homes in on RP and I can make "th" sound quite distinct in different words and contexts from a hard ending to "the" to something sounding similar to "fee" (also "the").
The above variations are in a tiny subset of en_ and across a probably tiny piece of time. Nowadays we have phones and TV etc which I think probably works towards homogenising our vocalisations.
I suspect that Old English was a bit more complex than is generally thought, if care is not taken.
Re: Letter of Recommendation: Old English
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both used to refer to the same sound (the first sound of thing), which mutated into what we have today (as in the), in part due to surrounding sounds (note, for example, that words ending in th are soft/unvoiced). The presence of two different characters has something to do with the integration of Latin and runic alphabets, but the choice of which was used isn't clear to me.
"th" can still have several different sounds depending on accent and word. The more obvious are t' ie the northern english eg t' mill (its quite hard to write down for those unacquainted with it). Then, of course we have t'ing for thing in some areas. Often the th in that becomes closer in sound to f when compared to the th in this. I personally have a slightly varied accent that generally homes in on RP and I can ma…
Well, it's a language that existed for quite a while (probably at least as long as Shakespeare->us) with a small amount of surviving written literature so we really only have glimpses of it.
I remember realizing at one point that I had read everything in Old French in the university library, and thinking that that probably meant I had probably read everything surviving in Old French.
Re: Letter of Recommendation: Old English
#7I taught myself OE grammar and some vocab a few years back; it was easy and one of the best things I ever did for myself. Did it as my parents both learned it in high school to the point they could read Beowulf (they also learned Latin). I figured it was a defect in my education not knowing it.
Noticed last year that Icelandic is kind of similar, so it may eventually prove useful beyond aesthetics.
Re: Letter of Recommendation: Old English
#8I'm an amateur student of language, particularly English. This article taught me about kennings, or compound words in Old English poetry.
At first I thought that the writer, Josephine Livingston, was saying that these were the main words --- like, the Old English word for sea is hronrad, "whale road." But no, if you look up "sea," that is Old English too. People normally said "sea," but sometimes if you were writing a poem you would make up these colorful alternatives. I think that's what she meant. It just took me a second reading.
At the end, she says this isn't possible in modern English. "We who speak contemporary English are so reliant on word order that we are no longer as able[...]. We just can’t do the same things with our vocabulary." She gives as an example that she wants to make a new kenning out of "poignant" and "solitude," but it won't work because today's readers would interpret "poignant solitude" as just an adjective modifying a noun, with no special poetical air. That's because she did it wrong.
At the beginning she defines a kenning as two nouns, but "poignant" isn't a noun, it's an adjective. She would need two nouns. And solitude, while a noun, is abstract. She would be better off with two concrete nouns, like the old kennings. The best I can come up with right now is "teardrop cloister." A more modern style, though, would be "cloister of tears."
I see no reason why you couldn't write a poem today with custom-made compound words like "whale-road" and "bone-house." The reader would have to rely on the context to figure out that you're using metaphors for the sea and the body, just like then. Maybe it would be a little more jarring these days. It sounds like back then that poets did it all the time. It was a meme. But modern poetry has this kind of wordplay here and there. And like I said, instead of doing it with compound words, they do it more by joining them with the word "of", like: "cloister of tears," "the road of the whales," "this house of bones." I could totally see any of those in modern poems.
Re: Letter of Recommendation: Old English
#9There are ways of expressing feeling in the Old English kennings that do not exist in the formal English of today.
An accusation that might be levied against any language vs another. Funnily enough I found Ms Livingstone's final para a rather good example of the sheer power of modern english to concisely link several concepts when wielded with precision.
That said, I rather like the sound of the freedom that is implied in her description of these kennings constructs. At the moment things like "banhaus" sound more like a slang term to me. Did OE (at some stage) have a separate word word for "body" or was bone-house it?
Re: Letter of Recommendation: Old English
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
"th" can still have several different sounds depending on accent and word. The more obvious are t' ie the northern english eg t' mill (its quite hard to write down for those unacquainted with it). Then, of course we have t'ing for thing in some areas. Often the th in that becomes closer in sound to f when compared to the th in this. I personally have a slightly varied accent that generally homes in on RP and I can ma…
Well, it's a language that existed for quite a while (probably at least as long as Shakespeare->us) with a small amount of surviving written literature so we really only have glimpses of it. I remember realizing at one point that I had read everything in Old French in the university library, and thinking that that probably meant I had probably read everything surviving in Old French.
The term "Old French" is probably as daft as "Old English" 8)
I recall my sister in law studied Occitan. Oh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_French - another rabbit hole to bookmark for spelunking.