What does Old English sound like? [Shorts]

[Canadia_Ball]

So it's just like if you speak Latin to an Italian person... They'll understand it, but they won't like understanding it.

[ungogdansk]

As a Dane, i can easily say that apparently, we speak old english the first year or two of learning English, where our own accent really strikes through.

[pendragon]

My English professor used to get very upset when people referred to Shakespeare as "Old English".

[gregorywhite]

I studied this stuff in Graduate school because I love language. The first line of Beowulf refers to the Gar-Danes, the Spear Danes. This word "gar" also appears in "garlic" or "spear leek". I find this utterly fascinating.

[friendstastegood]

As a Swedish person it's always amazing how comprehensible Old English is to me because it's so close to old Norse. I'm not saying I totally understand it but I do seem to get more of it than most contemporary english speakers?

[nunyabiznez]

When I was a teenager I wanted to learn about this. So I read one book in English every week or two for years. Each book was a little older than the previous one. I started out with The Great Gatsby. I went back from there. I went through Arthur Conon Doyle and Bram Stoker and Mark Twain and Poe and so one. As I approached Shakespeare I could see patterns in evolution except backwards. Every time I encountered a word or phrase that I didn't understand I looked it up in a dictionary or book on etymology. By the time I got to Shakespeare I found I understood most of his words without having to look much up. Geoffrey Chaucer was only a little challenging at that point. I finished with Textus Roffensis. What I found most interesting in this journey was how much Chaucer left us and how much Shakespeare molded the language.

[RepublicD]

As a Norwegian (there are 150 dialects in Norway), who understands German and speaks English, it's fairly easy to understand the Old English.

[micktaylor]

Apparently, many of Churchill's famous wartime speeches, deliberately included mainly Anglo Saxon Words.

[mayorjoshua]

That passage from Old English could have been translated into Modern English much more literally (using more cognates) and remained comprehensible:
"Here was Edward hallowed as king at Winchester on the first Easterday with much worship."

[smirbelbirbel]

As a German native, specifically coming from the North and growing up with Plattdütsch which is closer to Dutch, I can understand most of Old English, especiallyorally and after being exposed to it for a bit.

EDIT: Deary me, this is by far my most popular comment and the discussion it initiated is so full of knowledge and friendliness, it made my day!

[piers_bellman]

Churchill deliberately wrote his speeches to use the old English descended words so that they would be clear to understand

[artistsanomalous]

In Old English "dream" actually meant "joy, happiness".

[Milo]

I'm Dutch and when i hear Anglo saxon i can understand a lot of it without knowing the meaning of the individual words. Really cool to see how similar it sounds to Dutch/old Dutch

[jonathanw]

My professor for my Shakespeare class was a small, timid-seeming older woman with straight black and grey frizzy hair that fell down into her large bifocal'd spectacles and she was totally fluent in all Shakespearian English and old-English derivatives. She'd read poems and expressions out loud and the words just drew from her mouth like a bird's whistle.

It was really an amazing class. Probably read a dozen major plays or more in the semester, plus major selections of poems/sonnets. Then the papers.

The thing was she would grade your paper and take the time to correct Every. Single. Grammatical mistake, no matter how small or obscure, and then write in the margins full explanations for the correction and why/what was changed, to the point that she almost included as much text as you did.

In her office every morning at 5 am, out by 7 pm. She would walk everywhere at a brisk, powerwalker like pace. If I remember correctly she even got hit by a car once on the way home, got back up and kept walking.

An amazing professor.

[baberoot]

"Y'all come back now!" ---Old Tennessean.

[alexanderboulton]

Here was Edward given-got to king on Winchester on foremost Easter-day with much worship.

[MrCrazyeyes]

*“This is one small step for man, one ettin leap for mankind.”*

[JohnHoulgate]

My late brother studied Old English in college. Sometime after that, I told him how impressed I was reading Beowulf. He said it was even better reading it in Old English.

[lore.keeper]

English is a Germanic language, you can't help hearing very German-like sounds in there. It's amazing how you go from this to modern English over the course of a thousand years!

[YourCapyBruv_do_u_rmbr_Dpipes]

It's amazing how much the English language has and hasn't changed in the last 1, 000 years