/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17189552]

Woldon ge gewesan ymbe Eald Englic?

Ic hæbbe gecneordlæht Englic feower monaþ ac ne geseo ic nu giet ænig þræd her þe betealde hit.

If I made a mistake please correct me!

[Anonymous No.17189563]

>mfw can't understand my own language

[Anonymous No.17189579]

>>17189563
Desu Old English isn’t anymore a modern English speaker’s language than Latin is a Spanish or Italian speaker’s language. Just because there’s an undeniable ancestral link doesn’t make them the same thing.

[Anonymous No.17189714]

>>17189552
>þræd
nice

[Anonymous No.17189750]

>>17189552
Sounds more german than english

[Anonymous No.17189799]

>>17189750
That's because Old English was a Germanic language closely related to what later become German and Dutch (and Frisian). Only after the Norman invasion and the addition of French words to English did it become more like modern English.

[Anonymous No.17189802]

>>17189552
What book are you using to learn?

[Anonymous No.17190003]

>>17189799
Modern English is also a Germanic language

[Anonymous No.17190010]

>>17190003
Technically yes, practically it's a grammatically Germanic language with Romance vocabulary. That's why OE is so different from Middle and modern English.

[Anonymous No.17190019]

>>17189552
>tfw you can actually read that more due to knowing german than english

[Anonymous No.17190035]

>>17190010
The basic English vocabulary is also Germanic.

[Anonymous No.17190047]

>>17190035
Yes, but that doesn't change what I said. Old English is far closer to German than to modern English is because of the major Romance influences in the latter.

[Anonymous No.17190056]

>>17189579
Yeah. Same with saying "The Anglo-Saxons were English." not really true and it's the equivalent of saying Swedes and Danes are both the same people.

[Anonymous No.17190095]

>>17190047
>Old English is far closer to German than to modern English is because of the major Romance influences in the latter.
IIRC OE is only moderately more understandable to your average German speaker than to your average English speaker. A lot of the similarity is superficial.

[Anonymous No.17190109]

>>17190095
No you're wrong there, I speak German and Dutch and those were much more helpful in learning Old English than English was. A lot of constructions (such as ge- for the perfect tense) are still found in modern German/Dutch.

[Anonymous No.17190169]

Why don't we have a proper /lang/ board?

[Anonymous No.17190179]

>>17190109
Post a sample of your OE.

[Anonymous No.17190208]

>>17190056
Aren’t English people just a mix of Anglo Saxons and Normans?

[Anonymous No.17190211]

>>17190179
No, it's been a few years so that would take too much time. I can still read it reasonably enough though.

[Anonymous No.17190222]

>>17190169
That’s basically just /int/, and /lit/ is for more literary/historical languages.

[Anonymous No.17190235]

>>17190208
Depends. Cornishmen, Welshmen, and Scotsmen can have substantial amounts of Celtic depending on the individual, but Englishmen are mostly Anglo-Saxon and Celtic. Having said that, the upper class of England is substantially more Norman in them. Of course, the royal family is almost entirely German, but that's a different matter.

[Anonymous No.17190243]

>>17190235
This, but in the (north-)east there is also some Norse admixture.

[Anonymous No.17190258]

>>17190243
I completely forgot about that, but yes, that is also true.

The whole "Anglo-Saxon is a colonial construct to justify imperialism, the original Britons were Black" thing is, ironically, a colonial construct to justify imperialism. It's also just flat out wrong.

[Anonymous No.17190274]

>>17190235
Cornish Welsh and Scots don’t consider themselves English though.
>Celtic
Why would there be a significant amount of Celtic admixture if they’ve kept themselves separate from their Celtic neighbours?
>Upper classes
Really? What explains this? Surely the non-noble Normans would have mixed in with the general population.
>Royal family
Yeah but that’s normal for monarchies.

[Anonymous No.17190301]

ENGLISH LANGUAGE WEBSITE

[Anonymous No.17190340]

>>17190274
>Celtic
Because they didn't keep themselves separate, they interbred with the already-present Roman-Britons. The whole "King Arthur vainly resisting Saxon invaders" thing is a meme. Culturally, the Anglo-Saxons did indeed distance themselves from the prior Roman-Briton rule, but biologically they did not. At this time, Roman-British society was in complete freefall, so in many ways the Anglo-Saxons coming in was a rejuvenation. To put it another way, the Roman-Britons would have been glad to mingle with the Anglo-Saxons.

>Upper classes
1066. The Norman Invasion is a complete covering over of England. The English nobility essentially get demoted, and are broadly replaced with Normans. Now, of course, that's a VERY general statement, you can easily find areas of England that had Anglo-Saxon nobility in places of power just as you can find villages composed entirely of Normans. However, broadly, the Norman invasion is a military and political conquest, not an actual colonization. To put it another way, the Normans came in, won at Hastings, and then gave titles to as many of their men as they could. There were very, VERY few "Norman farmers working the soil". DNA studies confirm this, there's very little Norman blood anywhere except the nobility and upper classes (from nobility eschewing nobility and becoming mercantile elites).

This has substantial cultural effects, such as why French becomes the official language of England for several centuries, and why there is no "English Cuisine": The entire concept of "cuisine" is the codified dietary habits of the upper class, who in this case identify as Frenchmen (specifically Normans), and as such their cuisine is French cuisine, meaning for several centuries England's best chefs are siphoned off to make French cuisine instead of English.

[Anonymous No.17190462]

>>17190340
I don't get how that works. To win at Hastings the Normans had to have an army, and armies are composed for the most part of regular people. Where did this army disappear following the invasion? Surely they could not give a title of nobility to all or most of the soldiers. And if the soldiers simply went away, leaving only the nobility to rule in England, why didn't the Saxons rise against them? If they didn't leave, they must have mixed in with the regular Saxons.

[Anonymous No.17190570]

>>17190462
The army is pretty small, 10,000 men in a country of 3,000,000 and wasn't followed by colonisation. Of course, I think he's overstating how much Norman ancestry the upper classes retained, what with intermarriage - it's probably in the low single figure percentages. The Norman names are a lot stickier and tend have only reached more or less parity with good old Anglo names recently, they still retain some prestige.
>https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/60593/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRARY_Secondary_libfile_shared_repository_Content_Cummins%2C%20N_Surnames_Cummins_Surnames_2015.pdf

[Anonymous No.17190609]

>>17190208
We're Germano-Celtic mutts

[Blarty Hongo !WegkZP4tiw No.17191159]

>>17189552
Hwaet the hell are you talking about?

[Anonymous No.17191233]

>>17190570
>Of course, I think he's overstating how much Norman ancestry the upper classes retained, what with intermarriage
Normans were the ones to bring primogeniture to England- which also meant trying to marry your other children into other Norman families, so they could acquire titles which otherwise would be lost to the eldest male sibling. However, the Normans would also use intermarriage to gain titles, marrying their daughters to English earls, making the offspring half Norman half English, but still enforcing the primogeniture rule and encouraging the half Norman sons to marry full Norman women. You see more intermarriage in the upper classes, with upper class Normans marrying their non-inheriting daughter to earls, and then at a lower level, non-inheriting or non-titled Norman men marrying titled English women.
The Irish were wise to this, so offered titled daughters to the Normans, but failing to tell the Normans that the daughter's title was a temporary title which could evaporate at the next tribal vote.

[Anonymous No.17191962]

>>17191233
Thanks, can you recommend some books?

[Anonymous No.17192167]

>>17190258
>ironically, a colonial construct to justify imperialism.

wat?

[Anonymous No.17192179]

>>17190340
>This has substantial cultural effects, such as why French becomes the official language of England for several centuries,
Of the nobility
>and why there is no "English Cuisine"
Fuck off

[Anonymous No.17192324]

>>17189563
>>17189750
>>17190019
True Anglosaxons speak Platdutch