Beowulf

[Sethomas]

I showed Italian an LJ thread in my old school's community trying to identify an Old English passage. It ended up being a preface attributed to King Alfred; most of my commentary was on the paleographical aspects, as I can't read very much Old English without context.

What I find cool about Beowulf is that comparative philology dates the bulk of the tale to the 7th century or so, but the earliest codex we have of it is less than 1000 years old. What that tells me is that the literary devices in it are so powerful that people continued to tell it the exact same way for centuries, each and every alliteration and kenning, even as their language evolved into something totally different. I have the Heaney bilingual edition, and the linguistic artistry is quite evident when you read the Old English from the verso while referencing the Modern English of the adjacent recto. It does take a little practice to pronounce the words correctly, but it's worth the effort.

The thing about the paradigms that Jeanette posted is that they're the most commonplace examples, with at least the latter two centered around London. I've been trying to read as much of Gawain and the Green Knight in its original Middle English. The thing is that although it was written about the same time as the Canterbury Tales, it's in a different dialect (Essex, I believe) and so is MUCH harder to sift through than the Londonian language of Chaucer from which our concept of English evolved.

The funny thing is that I find Old Saxon, one of the contributing/co-evolving languages to Old English, easier to understand than Old English because it's somewhat similar to German, while the only language still in existence remotely similar to Old English is Frisian. I was once speaking with a professor in an informal context, and when he said that his specialty was historical Germanic languages I said that I was interested in learning Old Saxon but was denied a place in the class they had on it because I wasn't a graduate student. He started reciting the Our Father from memory in it, and to demonstrate I knew what it was I repeated it to him in Latin. That's how hardcore I am.

Oh, shit, this is the Movies forum. You're all fags.

[Dr. Boogie]

Yeah, more like B.O.-wulf!

[sloth]

all this old english is a real thorn in my side!