Can Modern English Speakers Understand Old English? | Language Challenge | Feat. Eadwine

In this language challenge we continue exploring connections between Old English and Modern English. Speakers from Scotland, Ireland and the United States participate in a series of language experiments to see how much of Old English they can understand and if their specific accents and dialects have any effect on their comprehension. This time we focused on longer samples that Eadwine composed in Old English for this show specifically. You can join his Discord server if you are interested in further exploration of the Old English topic.

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🕰 Time Stamps:
0:00 - Introduction
1:47 - 1. Challenge
6:06 - 2. Challenge
9:24 - 3. Challenge
12:08 - 4. Challenge
18:51 - 5. Challenge
23:49 - Commentary

🤗 Big hug for everyone reading my video descriptions! You rock! 🤓💪🏻

#languagechallenge #oldenglish

[WiesoNurMistnamen]

It would be nice if you could see a complete translation of the descriptions

[hoathanatos]

As a Low German speaker this was actually pretty easy. I got so many words that neither a High German speaker nor especially an English speaker would have caught onto.

[JasonTaylor-poxc]

I don't think I've ever heard Old English spoken. It sounds like a completely different language. I wonder if our current modern English will sound just as foreign to those 1000 years from now.

[tammo]

As a Dutch speaker who also speaks Low German, this is actually quite easy. I had the first one without help from the text.

[Mulberrysmile]

My sis was taking a literature class for college. She was reading something in old English and was struggling, having to sound out the words. She got stuck and kept repeating two over and over. My son, two years old, looked at her, listening. He went up and pointed at his eye and said, “Me oy.”
He was right, lol.

[bloodystatic]

For a language that is 1573 years old, parts of it are surprisingly comprehensible!

[davidmarkwort]

Being German this sounds a lot like Plattdeutsch or even Dutch, both being Friesian languages/dialects. Some of what you spoke I heard as a child in the 50's in Barrow in Furness, they had a broad Lancashire dialect and used words that were unknown in London, even the pronounciations were different. Just love listening to the odl dialects, am now 72, but you never stop learning.

[mahlonrhoades]

i'd like to see how a Danish, Norwegian or Icelandic speaker would do - old english is far closer to these than modern english

[justinlee]

This was a pleasant surprise from the Youtube algorithm! I wish Eadwine would create a Duolingo course for Old English.

[martelkapo]

The word *blēo* strikes again! I remember seeing it in one of the previous OE videos on this channel. It has no cognates in any of the most widely spoken Germanic languages today.

Also, it's fascinating how the first challenge was the most difficult for me…really goes to show that once your ears become attuned to the sound correspondences, it becomes MUCH easier to follow along.

[Mercure]

Fun fact : "Kaiser" is in fact related to the word "Caesar" (same for "caser" in Old English). The name "Caesar" was used by pretty much all Roman emperors, in honor of the first emperor, Augustus Caesar (who got his name from Julius Caesar), and thus, in some languages, became the word for "emperor". In Classical Latin, the "C" was pronounced hard like a "K", so it was a lot closer to the modern German pronunciation.
Interestingly, "Caesar" also became the words for "emperor" in the Slavic languages (Russian "царь", which "tsar" comes from, or Polish "cesarz").

[yurigrilo]

I teach English for children here in Brazil, and once, we had to present some work about Middle Age churches in England. They found a text in old English, but I couldn't help them with its reading. Hehehe
We had fun, but it was a hard work for all of us.
Great channel! Congratulations!

[nirutivan]

As a (Swiss) german speaker who also knows English and some Swedish and Norwegian I did understand some things. I had almost no chance understanding it by just listening, but with reading I could work with my German and English knowledge to guess what it is. Swedish & Norwegian weren‘t that helpful, but German helped a lot.

[LupinoArts]

I got the last one. In my dialect of German, "Schwamme" (or Schwämme) means "mushroom", and with "cyninges dohter" and "gamen" it was clear that it was a game, something with a "kingdom of mushrooms" and a princess, so the only game that came to my mind was Super Mario.

[jcortese]

I got absolutely nothing without the text, and damned little from that. (Too many Romance languages.) The one thing that really struck me was how beautiful old English sounded. The language has become a lot harsher somehow, using a lot more stop consonants. The old language was much softer and more sibilant.

[_zaldivar]

If I could make two recommendations; English speakers trying to understand Scots, and a Celtic language experiment (Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish, Breton).

[neshrosuryoyo]

It's amazing how English developed to become a universal language used or understood by almost everyone!

[lucyleptonyx]

Obsessed with how common "þ" is as a sound! Old English sounds like one of those languages that physically "feels" good/fun to use 😂

[Antonio_DG]

It is estimated that modern English has had the following linguistic influences:
Old English (or Anglo-Saxon): 26%
Latin: 29%
French: 29%
Other (including words taken from languages such as Greek, Norwegian, Dutch, and Medieval Latin): 16%

[yurirykov]

You're getting Roman connotations because the word "Caserrice" is indeed reference to Caesar. You can also see it in Russian with Czar, which is the same. Literally "emperor", or "ruler as powerful as Caesar" as opposed to "common king of some run-of-the-mill kingdom". Using this word would be a pretty serious claim, because at the time, every backyard in Europe was called a kingdom. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of them on the territory that we now know as Germany. Burgundy, Normandy, Lorrain, and many other modern French territories were their own kingdoms, so there was an understandable demand for a word that represents more than a mere local king.