You Too, Can Read Old English!

First, a reminder that Shakespeare is not Old English, though people will call it that.  The language of his period, the Elizabethan, looks old to us so people will call both his works and the Authorised (King James) Version of the Bible "Old.".  Yet that is more properly called Early Modern English. We can still read it, sort of, without any glosses or training beyond a few explanations.  I have written before that I think it is now too distant to still be regarded as quite the same language as Modern English, but people keep insisting they understand it just fine, even when there are meaning changes that throw them off.

The language was called "Anglo-Saxon" when I took it in college, but that is disfavored for two reasons now. The complaint that gets the most press is that there are "white supremacist*" groups and neo-Nazis who use the term Anglo-Saxon wrongly to refer to historical Englishmen and even white Americans by that term, so people think they can take a stand against racism by not calling the language that.  We wouldn't want to give them any encouragement that they are legit, y'see. Yet even prior to that the term was being pushed aside. The name "English," even though derived from "Angles," already included words and structures of other tribes right from the first invasions: Jutes, most famously, but also Frisians and even Franks. The Celts/Britons who were already there kept some of their language nailed in, there were some leftover Latin words, and pretty soon the Danes and other Vikings started bringing in their words and structures as well. The Angles may owe their prominence of the lists to all of them coming to to Britain - there is no later mention of them back on the continent.  The Saxons may have been over-emphasised for the opposite reason - they remained a big deal on the continent.  Saxony, Saxe-Coburg, etc. Either way, Anglo-Saxon doesn't capture the idea of the language fully. Old English really is better.  It has fuzzy borders at both ends, as it was only written in runic form from the 5th-7th C, and hung around for a century after the Norman Conquest before becoming Middle English.

All that by way of introduction. The Old English texts most often studied are poetry, especially Beowulf, because those are stories and hey, feature monsters.  Really good ones, too. But people didn't speak in poetry then any more than we do now, and poets make their livings by dressing things up and doing tricky things with the language that were absent in everyday discussions. Those are difficult and we have to have a glossary plus explanations of what is happening in order to read them. I had to read Apollonius of Tyre, a later work easier than Beowulf, and one could get the hang of it even in cold reading after a few weeks. Adventurous, too.

Yet even easier is the boring stuff, the business contracts, the year-by-year recording of historical events, which use the same words frequently, or the occasional charter.  I have a fun one for you, which because it was largely practical about everyday things may yield its meaning to your eyes and ear more easily.  The Monasteriales Indicia is a series of descriptions of the hand-signals Benedictine monks were supposed to use during periods of silence. What they would "talk" about in this manner was restricted to concrete, everyday things.  So candel-sticca, "candlestick" is easier for us to take in at a glance, and smael candel, "thin candle," might have been guessed.  The letters sc were pronounced "sh," which gives you fisc and disc without any help from me, and sceal also teaches you that the "ea" is a dipthong  in "shall" similar to an American Southern accented pronunciation. If I tell you that an initial ci- or cy- is pronounced "chee," you can likely read the traditional fruit list Aepple, peru, plyme, and cyrsen. Like in the song, A-Soalin'


The earlier k-sound was being softened into the "ch" under Old Norse influence as well, so in time cyse has a very similar pronunciation to "cheese" today. It doesn't look like modern English, but if you pronounce all vowels and throw in those consonant changes, you can sometimes stumble your way there. Sometimes it can throw you off.  Ael is not "ale," but "eel.  If you wanted the beverage, it was ealu.  Still pretty close, though.

Two additional tricks to reading.  The letter "p" is often used for the letter "thorn" in modern transcriptions, which is crazy, to my mind.  Thorn was a single letter that looked like a y that is closed at the top, but is pronounced "th." (Which is why Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe was never pronounced "ye.") For some reason it just offends people to write it as a th, so they have to put in a y or a p instead.  Ridiculous.  I will use the "th" here.  Second trick, g was on its way to being pronounced y, though unevenly over various dialects.  You can see this in "garden" and "yard" - used to be the same word.

Thus meolc, "mayolk" = milk.  Hunig, "hoony" = honey. Butere, "booterra" = butter,  and aegera "a-egerra" eggs, and beana "bayenna"= beans.

So let's fight our way through the sentence
Sete thu thin thry fingras swilce ou mete to moue do. I'm going to stretch the vowels.
Setteh thu thine three fingras sulche ou mayteh to mohueh do.
Set thou thy three fingers such (as) you meat to mouth do.
(Put your three fingers such as you would putting food to your mouth.) Now go back and read the first sentence again and it doesn't look so bad.  You can see how if you did a few minutes of this every day you could be rolling right along in no time, especially as things like swilch for such, swa for so, or mete for food became second nature. It's legitimately a foreign language, but you see how it might be managed.

Here is another: I'll mark the words you likely won't have a shot at.

And hwaet drincst thu? Ealu, gif ic haebbe, oppe* waeter gif ic naebbe ealu. Ne drincst thu win? Ic ne eom swa spedig* thaet ic maege bicgean me win; and win nes drenc cilda nes dysgra* ac ealda and wisra. 

"And what drinkest thu? Ale-u, yif ee habbe, oppeh* water yif ee n-abbeh ale-u. Ne drinkest ween? Ee nay am so speedy* that ee mayeh beeyan me ween; and ween nes drenk childa nes disgra*, ac ealda and weesra."


And what drinkest thou? Ale if I have, or water if I have not ale. Drinkest not wine? I am not so prosperous that I may buy me wine; and wine is no drink for children and foolish, but for old and wise.  

The unfamiliar words do have some connection to things you know.  Spedig/speedy/prosperous has a holdover in "good speed" or "God speed." This is an example of how we think we know meanings but they have changed.  We suspect that God speed will mean "God give you a speedy uninterrupted journey," or "may you fare well on your journey," but it doesn't.  It means "successful, rich."  Oppe = "or" has its roots in "opposition" or "opponent."  Dysgra can be stretched over to "badly outfitted," "has bad graces," and something like "dis-graced" for foolish.  The section in bold seems to have been a common saying of the age, as it occurs almost exactly in other places.  It rhymes.

As before, go back to the original sentence and you will see that it's not hard to read.  Much easier than if I had just walked you through a section in Russian or Greek.



*That is seldom a fully accurate description.  It's more like a mind-reading and a feeling about them. It is ironic that the people who are complaining about the inaccuracy of the A-S term are themselves being inaccurate.