Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/03/what-old-english-perhaps-sound.html
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Well, I like him.
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He sounds like a Brummy.
Nice chaps, the Brummies…
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I’m curious to know how / if he is confident about the accent and the intonation. It’s pretty easy to hear the affinities between modern speakers from around the North Sea – I sometimes overhear a Newcastle accent only to realise, actually, they’re speaking Danish – and it seems reasonable to suppose that you can triangulate those spatial variations to estimate how people sounded in the distant past.
But on the other hand, Dutch and Scandinavian languages have been evolving over time, too, and despite what Brexit types might like to think, there’s been continuous intermixing for thousands of years. So it doesn’t necessarily follow that English dialects which are closer to modern Scandinavian therefore reflect what English a thousand years ago. Not to mention, there was surely an even wider variety of accents back then.
But on the disturbing third hand, there are presumably ways to infer clues from written language, too, especially where people used to make up their own spelling a lot more. Though I would guess written sources from 800AD are thin on the ground, as that was the golden age to which Brexit will return us, before socialist tyrannies like “education” and “sub-50% infant mortality”.
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i wonder if that sounds remotely familiar to a british english speaker vs an american english speaker?
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If you turn on CC you can see what he is actualy saying.
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I am and American who speaks Dutch and German, and have also dabbled in Scandinavian languages.
To me, it sounded like a combination of Danish and Frisian with some sort of English accent. Which is unsurprising, because old English/Frisian and Old Norse are not too distant from each other.
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There are people who do theoretically correct Shakespeare dialect and a lot of the clues for that have to do not only with spelling, but also with words that don’t rhyme in modern English but do in the corrected dialect. If you’ve got poetry like that, rhymes offer a huge clue. I’m fascinated by that stuff. I wish I could understand the guy in this video. It’s a fun exercise/concept!
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Where I grew up in Iowa we always said “de-pantsing”, but on the east coast, everyone refers to the surprise removal of someone’s trousers as “pantsing”. Similar to the comic there, I think the Iowa way sounds better. Ha.
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Watch it with CC on
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Oh! I didn’t see that was possible. Thanks!
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Like a Brummie speaking German, which sounds like an historically accurate mix for the UK at least.
As awesome as my old boss from Yorkshire who never lost the accent when he learned Italian…
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1,200 years from now future humans will be [watching?] our 2019 videos and having the same experience.
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“My name is Bealdric”
How do you say, “I have a cunning plan” in old English?
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His name is Baldrick, and I bet he has a cunning plan.
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Jinx!
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“Ful wys is he that kan himselve knowe.”
With a vague meh nod of apology to Chaucer.
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“The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne.”
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I was entertained how similar this is to some of the Appalachian and Amish people I have heard, people who preserved their tribal languages as best they can from the past - in the case of those I mention, much more German than anything else.
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