Old English Discussion

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TaylorS
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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby TaylorS » 2009-02-18, 3:24

ILuvEire wrote:I'm not sure if this is really OE discussion, but, what the hell. :)

Why does English have words like "dog" "black" or "bird"? German uses Hund, Schwarz and Vogel (sp?) and Italian uses cane, nero and uccello (which I assume are similar to Latin, in any case they are nothing like English's words). Even Welsh uses ci, du and aderyn.

So where did they come from?


"Dog" originally referred to a specific breed (which breed is a complete mystery, supposedly, it's one of the biggest mysteries in English etymology).

"Vogel" is cognate with "fowl". "Bird" meant a young bird in Old English.

"Schwarz" is cognate with "swarthy". The etymology of "black" is odd:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/black
From Middle English blak, from Old English blæc. Cognates include blaze', bleach, blond, bald, bale, pale, Latin flagare, to shine, Latin blancus, white, Gothic bala, paleness, German erbleichen, bleich, go -, turn pale, German bleichen, bleach and Russian белый, white.


Black is white? :lol:
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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby KingHarvest » 2009-02-18, 3:34

Nope, Wikipedia is wrong.

In OE., found also (as the metres show) with long vowel blāce, blācan, and thus confused with blác shining, white
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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby TaylorS » 2009-02-18, 5:52

KingHarvest wrote:Nope, Wikipedia is wrong.

In OE., found also (as the metres show) with long vowel blāce, blācan, and thus confused with blác shining, white


DOH!!! :oops:
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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby Karavinka » 2009-02-20, 15:43

Can "bird" be from the IE root *bʰerǵʰ-, meaning "high"? From Indo-European Languages (Routledge), its cognates include Irish name "Brigit", and if Brid to Bird metathesis took place in English but not in Celtic, then it may just be a loanword from Celtic.

From here:

"Barrow" : "mound," O.E. beorg (W.Saxon), berg (Anglian) "hill," from P.Gmc. *bergaz (cf. O.S., O.Fris., O.H.G. berg "mountain," O.N. bjarg "rock"), from PIE base *bheregh- "high, elevated" (cf. O.C.S. bregu "mountain, height," O.Ir. brigh "mountain," Skt. b'rhant "high," O.Pers. bard- "be high"). Obsolete except in place-names and southwest England dialect by 1400; revived by archaeology. Barrow-wight first recorded 1891.

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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby Sean of the Dead » 2009-03-18, 22:26

Well, I've been toying with the idea of learning Old English, and finally caved in and bought a used copy of the old TY book off Amazon yesterday. Are there any online English - OE dictionaries? Preferably large. :)
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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby KingHarvest » 2009-03-18, 22:39

There is one you can download the pdf of or something, but I can't remember its name.
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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby Sean of the Dead » 2009-03-18, 22:44

KingHarvest wrote:There is one you can download the pdf of or something, but I can't remember its name.

That's not too helpful. :P

If you remember it, or someone else knows of it, please tell me. :)

How many learners of Old English are there? It seems there are enough to warrant a forum, although no one seems to be active. :P
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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby Karavinka » 2009-03-19, 3:38

sjheiss wrote:
KingHarvest wrote:There is one you can download the pdf of or something, but I can't remember its name.

That's not too helpful. :P

If you remember it, or someone else knows of it, please tell me. :)

How many learners of Old English are there? It seems there are enough to warrant a forum, although no one seems to be active. :P


http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/texts/oe_bosw ... about.html

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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby Sean of the Dead » 2009-03-19, 3:51

Thanks a lot noir, but it seems the application doesn't go from English to Englisc. :/

And it doesn't even have the word for "dictionary". D:
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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby KingHarvest » 2009-03-19, 5:11

Probably because dictionaries didn't exist in the 10th century. Serious dictionaries for dead and Classical languages rarely ever have English - <insert language>.
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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby sa wulfs » 2009-03-19, 11:06

That application is superb. You can't browse it as an English>Englisc dictionary per se, but in the Search tab you can search any string. It does the trick. Anyway, you're not going to find anything more complete than the Bosworth-Toller, even if it's a bit dated (or very dated).
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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby Karavinka » 2009-03-19, 19:59

Sean of the Dead wrote:Thanks a lot noir, but it seems the application doesn't go from English to Englisc. :/

And it doesn't even have the word for "dictionary". D:


Go ahead and make a calque. Dictionaries didn't exist back then and English to Englisc dictionaries can only be bought on paper, AFAIK. "Wordbok" should be fine (as in "Wordhord" - vocabulary.)

Forum for OE? Perhaps not a good idea...

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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby Sean of the Dead » 2009-03-19, 21:46

How about "wordbōc"? Same construction as current Germanic languages. :P
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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby sa wulfs » 2009-03-19, 22:36

OE is a real language, not a conlang. Instead of making up new words and claiming they're real, we should just admit we don't know the word for it.
(Dictionaries as such didn't exist, but glossaries did, and yet we don't know what they were called back then)
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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby Sean of the Dead » 2009-03-19, 22:57

sa wulfs wrote:OE is a real language, not a conlang. Instead of making up new words and claiming they're real, we should just admit we don't know the word for it.
(Dictionaries as such didn't exist, but glossaries did, and yet we don't know what they were called back then)

I know that, I was just saying that the word "dictionary" in most (if not all) other Germanic languages is "wordsbook", e.g. Dutch "woordenboek", Norwegian "ordbok", German "Wörterbuch", etc.
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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby Aleco » 2009-05-04, 13:07

What about word list? List of words would be possible, right? Then word list should too?.
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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby shizi_sprinkles09 » 2009-06-29, 3:48

Why hasn't Old English gotten its own forum yet?

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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby elvisrules » 2009-07-01, 16:47

The Old English Wikipedia uses wordbōc.
English (British): Native
Français (Belge): Fluent
Nederlands (Vlaams): Advanced
Scots (Central): Average
日本語: Beginner

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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby sa wulfs » 2009-07-02, 16:01

I wouldn't trust the OE Wikipedia at all. I'd go as far as to say it's pretty terrible, actually. Wordboc is a decent option, but still, this is not a conlang we're talking about.
shizi_sprinkles09 wrote:Why hasn't Old English gotten its own forum yet?

Not nearly enough people interested, as should be obvious from this thread. :\
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Re: Old English Discussion

Postby Anonshot » 2009-08-22, 10:38

http://faculty.virginia.edu/OldEnglish/ ... dings.html

The above is actually a pretty good site as a whole, but this section is particularly interesting in that it contains about 10 minutes worth of sound recordings of someone reading Old English lines from Beowulf.

Does anyone know why there aren't more resources like this? I always learn a language better when I can hear it, but it seems the majority of Old English learning material is geared toward the torture of grad students and rarely frees itself of the deadly wall-of-charts syndrome, which is quite horrifying for a self-studier to gaze upon. There's also almost no recorded Old English accompanying these texts. Are OE scholars just too bashful to record themselves?

In regards to learning resources that move away from wall-of-charts syndrome, I have found the "Teach Yourself Old English" book (the edition from the 60s, NOT the current edition) to be about the best out there in regards to presenting the language in logical, digestible chunks of vocabulary, grammar, and graded translations. The current edition, however, has sound recordings, which makes it the only textbook I know of to do so, though the recordings themselves kind of suck.
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