You wait 1000 years for a Beowulf movie...

[Stone Angel]

One word: SWEET!


The Seraph of Earth and Stone

 

[Tonguez]

Middle English is much easier if you say it out loud rather than reading silently

 

[MonsterMash]

Middle English is much easier if you say it out loud rather than reading silently

Definitiely, and I remember doing it with the Canterbury Tales in school English lessons.

Apparently Frisian is the closest language still spoken to Middle English.

 

[Jack Daniel]

I, for one, am an Anglo-Saxon/Old English groupie. I like Chaucer and all, but hearing Beowulf read aloud is a beautiful thing, probably a helluvalot more moving than either of these movies will be...

 

[Desdichado]

Apparently Frisian is the closest language still spoken to Middle English.

It's also the closest language to Modern English. That doesn't mean it's intelligible. Have you ever heard any speaking Frisian? It's freaky; it sounds like they're speaking English but you're just not quite catching what the words are.

That's not true for some other language families, however. I also speak Spanish, and I can speak, interpret and read Italian and Portuguese relatively easily based on the similarity. My brother, who can speak Polish, said the same of Czech when we were in Prague a few years back.

But, for whatever reason, in the Germanic language family, that's just not the case. Part of that may be the rather brusque restructuring of the English language in the transition from Old to Middle english wherein all kinds of case endings, conjugations and whatnot were dropped out of use. Part of that may be the Great Vowel Shift that transformed pronunciations of a lot of Middle english from its hereditary Germanic pronunciation to something that much more closely resembles Modern English.

Whatever the reason, mutual intelligibility amongst West Germanic languages is quite low. I've heard (although I can't verify via personal experience; maybe someone else can) that the Northern Germanic languages, however, retain a fairly high degree of mutual intelligibiligy. That is, if you speak Swedish, you can get the gist of a conversation held in Norwegian or Danish or what-have-you fairly well.

 

[Shieldhaven]

My prediction for these movies - and I don't know if this is a good thing or bad - is a half-line from Beowulf:

Wand to wolcnum wælfyra mæst,
hlynode for hlawe; hafelan multon,
bengeato burston, ðonne blod ætspranc,
laðbite lices.

Which means:

Flew to the heavens the greatest of the funeral fires,
roared before the mound; the heads melted,
wound-openings burst, that blood sprang out,
horrible wounds of the body.

So either our heads will melt with steaming liquid joy, or they will melt with volcanic rage, but pretty much either way we'll need to have a fire extinguisher on hand.

Scyldheofon

 

[Jack Daniel]

It's also the closest language to Modern English. That doesn't mean it's intelligible. Have you ever heard any speaking Frisian? It's freaky; it sounds like they're speaking English but you're just not quite catching what the words are.

That's not true for some other language families, however. I also speak Spanish, and I can speak, interpret and read Italian and Portuguese relatively easily based on the similarity. My brother, who can speak Polish, said the same of Czech when we were in Prague a few years back.

But, for whatever reason, in the Germanic language family, that's just not the case. Part of that may be the rather brusque restructuring of the English language in the transition from Old to Middle english wherein all kinds of case endings, conjugations and whatnot were dropped out of use. Part of that may be the Great Vowel Shift that transformed pronunciations of a lot of Middle english from its hereditary Germanic pronunciation to something that much more closely resembles Modern English.

Whatever the reason, mutual intelligibility amongst West Germanic languages is quite low. I've heard (although I can't verify via personal experience; maybe someone else can) that the Northern Germanic languages, however, retain a fairly high degree of mutual intelligibiligy. That is, if you speak Swedish, you can get the gist of a conversation held in Norwegian or Danish or what-have-you fairly well.

English really sits between the Germanic and Italic language families, having been French-fried as it were by the Normans. Before 1066, Old English was actually as conversationally intelligible to a speaker of Old Norse as modern Norwegian, Sweedish, & Danish are today. North Germanic languages didn't undergo nearly as much linguistic drift as the West langauges -- and much of that has to do with the fact that Middle English had that Great Vowel Shift that no language on the Continent had, while German had a major consonant shift that none of the other Germanic languages went through.

 

[Desdichado]

English really sits between the Germanic and Italic language families, having been French-fried as it were by the Normans.

All that did was add significantly to the vocabulary, though. It hardly makes it sit midway between the two language families; English is still very firmly a Germanic language. It has very little basic vocabulary that's not firmly Germanic, and has practically no structural or grammatical borrowings from French. Second generation Norman English were already learning Norman-French as a second language rather than a native one. And a lot of the changes that happened between Old and Middle English are actually attributed to Norse influence rather than French influence anyway.

For that matter, there's not a language of Europe that didn't borrow fairly heavily from Latin in one way or another as well. That doesn't make them all partly Italic, though.

 

[Shieldhaven]

All that did was add significantly to the vocabulary, though. It hardly makes it sit midway between the two language families; English is still very firmly a Germanic language. It has very little basic vocabulary that's not firmly Germanic, and has practically no structural or grammatical borrowings from French. Second generation Norman English were already learning Norman-French as a second language rather than a native one. And a lot of the changes that happened between Old and Middle English are actually attributed to Norse influence rather than French influence anyway.

For that matter, there's not a language of Europe that didn't borrow fairly heavily from Latin in one way or another as well. That doesn't make them all partly Italic, though.

The irony here is that no one really remembered to tell teachers of English grammar this. It is because of Latin's method of forming the infinitive that we have rules against splitting the infinitive - that is, since it is literally impossible to put an adverb in the midst of "amare," in Latin you cannot possibly use the word order of "to truly love." So teachers of English grammar decided it was against Teh Rulez. This is just one example.

Scyldheofon

 

[Terath Ninir]

Joshua, I think you are vastly understating the influence of Latin and French on English. It is MUCH larger than on other Germanic languages, and it has leached down into some of the basic vocabulary.

No, I can't provide examples. It's been almost a decade since I studied all this.