Word 1 This is a thing we see when we look up into the sky. But not just one. There are thousands of them in the sky, and they appear to our eyes as little lights that twinkle - at one moment you see them, at the next not, and then you see them again. Most of them are very far from our world. But one is nearer to us. This one appears in the day, the others at night. Word 2 This is a color. It is a very common color we often see in our lives. It is warm, not cold. Now I will say some things of this color: apples, and cherries, are. Also fire is this color. In the time when Old English was a living language they called gold it. But what I mostly think of with this color, is blood; it is the color of blood Word 3 This is what you feel about someone who is dear to you. There is more than one kind. You can feel it about your brother, monther, best friend, but also your wife or husband. But it is a good thing - you don't feel this to your enemy. We like to say often that it comes from your heart. I don't know if that is true, but that is what everyone says. Challenge 4: Now I am not talking about an Old English word. I am going to tell you briefly the story of some film, and you should tell me which one it is: A long time ago in a far away galayxy there ruled an evil empire. They had power over all worlds on this galaxy and now they are building a new weapon that can destroy a whole world in one blow. But a young farmer rises up, learns that he wields a magical power known as "The Force" - He uses it to destroy the weapon, before the empire destroys the rebellion. The last I will tell you about is a game. That is a video game from the year 1985. In this game you play as a plumber with a red hat, who runs through the mushroom kingdom, to save the princess (king's doughter). On his journey through the kingdom he will contend with evil mushrooms and turtles and jump on them. There are also good mushrooms, which make you the player larger. There are eight worlds and in seven of them you will hear said: Sorry, but the princess is in another castle
@@EngliscMidEadwine I understood most of that, but some words are weird, like Hlæfdige, which literally means loaf kneader. And for the origins of the word Lady, it's most hilarious. So if you had talked about let's say Resident Evil's antagonist Lady Dimitrescu, would you have translated it into Hlæfdige Eorþemodorisce...
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.
@@Meatloaf_TV German dialects/languages are often broken up into three categories based on intelligibility and sound shifts that have occurred. You have Upper German variants in the mountainous South, you have Middle German across Central Germany, and then you have Low German in the Northern Lowlands. German nationalism in the mid-to-late 1800s led many state institutions to abandon the native Low German dialects in the North for Standard High German as a unifying national language while Southern Germans remained much more conservative and worked to preserve their dialects in the face of state efforts at assimilation. That's probably why you aren't aware of it.
@@Meatloaf_TV low German is a language that evolved from Old saxon. Where as modern German evolved from Old High German. Low German is closely related to Old English and Old Frisian because they also evolved from Old Saxon
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.
It is a completely different language, and that's mostly thanks to the injection of Norman French vocabulary a la "Billy" the Conqueror starting in 1066. It's also due to the fact that the Gutenberg press had not yet been invented, so I doubt English will change AS drastically in the next thousand years (if it's even still naturally spoken then). We have to consider that English is now a worldwide, lingua franca, and tons of English (as well as other languages) is being archived and thoroughly documented daily on the internet and in books.
@@HelloOutsiders The story of the tower of babel sortove might have been inspired by a real structure(there is not sufficient archeological evidence to support even that assertion at the moment) , but we do have a significant body of evidence that opposes the idea of their ever having ever been a global unified language at any point in history. The current linguistic trend does appear to have a reduction in the diversity of languages, but there does not appear to be a high probability of a single universal language becoming a thing at any point in the future.
@@garethbaus5471 Biblical events such as the confusion of language at the time of the tower of Babel likely were regional, not world wide. It could be argued that even now we have confusion of language between political factions within our own nations
You are very lucky indeed, then. I’m British English, and I had absolutely no idea what was being said in the first example. Honestly I understand German better than I know this, and I only instead of few words in German.😆😓😓😭 this language feels completely alien to me now. I guess it makes sense then that this is considered old English as honestly, it feels more like I am listening to something closer to Welsh. That’s the language we really just don’t need coming back. Lmao
@@maryk446 I can hear it. I’m English and it doesn’t feel at all like the language we have today. It feels closer to Welsh with a tiny bit of Germanic then it does to modern British English today.
@@danielwhyatt3278 Weirdly, Old English has no connections to Welsh at all. Not even the occasional loan word. So it's interesting that it sounded a bit Welsh to your ears.
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.
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.
There is a reason for that... In the 11th century when the Normans invaded England, only French and Latin were spoken by those rulers and the clergy, but we English people refused to relent, and we hung on to our sturdy language. For one hundred years or more, books were not written in English, but only in Latin, French, and Greek, but we English people only spoke English. We insisted on speaking English, we absorbed French, Latin, and Greek words, and added them to English words - that came from Old German and Old Norse. We made the language, “English”, richer, more subtle, and much more precise. The Normans, meanwhile, intermarried with us English people, and they also learned to speak English - playful, pungent, philosophical, practical, and poetic English. This is just one of many of our greatest achievements, and the English language belongs to all of us. First, for saving our language from conquest, and then secondly, by letting it grow freely, with all the people of England deciding which words we liked, and wanted to keep, and which words we'd scuttle. In the intervening years, we English people, have invented and added over a million new words, including half a million technical and scientific terms, while German has about 185,000 words and French has fewer than 100,000.
@@hotstepper887 We also add a few Hindi words as well over the years think of the word Bungalow, eg one story house. Juggernaut from the Hindi word 'Jagannath' we've add Abratic words also into the English Language.
Dutch and Plattdeutsch are not actually Frisian Dialects/Languages. Dutch is derived from Frankish, and Plattdeutsch is derived from Saxon. West Frisian and it’s dialects are the actual closest language, other than the Creole and Scots languages, that retains an English grammar structure.
Absolutely hilarious that the New Yorker heard "thousands of them in the night sky" and thought airplanes instead of stars. Hard to think of a city that has worse light pollution than the one with giant lightup billboards going 24/7
When a major New York blackout happened in 2003, people started calling emergency hotlines and reported that thousands of strange objects were suddenly appearing in the night sky. Lo and behold, these "strange objects" were actually just stars 😂
@@RafaelBenedictoI was there for the 03 blackout and I never heard any such thing… I mean guess in a city of roughly 8 million at the time, anything is possible.
@@RafaelBenedictoI'm a New Yorker and I was there during the 2003 and no one did that 😂 we're not idiots. We know what stars are. This is such an internet lie for clout and not a good one at that
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.
Also, 11:17 shows just how similar PIE roots can remain long into the history of its descendants: OE **wer** and Latin **vir** are only separated in pronunciation by the vowel!
@@gljames24 no, despite the similarity in both words starting with they ultimately come from different (but related) PIE roots. Funny enough, "blue" was borrowed into English from Anglo-Norman, which itself borrowed it from a Germanic language, so the borrowed Norman form actually supplanted the native English term, despite it ultimately coming from the same Germanic source. If this hadn't happened, we'd be saying "blow" instead of "blue".
Yeah I'm Swedish and could see some words in relation to any of the Scandinavian languages. But I'd say Icelandic might understand it better but that judgement I make mainly because they have similar letters. Þ for example.
I'm Norwegian, I picked up the occasional word and phrase, but it took until I saw the text to start understanding it. The first two, I had a great deal of trouble with, but the last three, I figured out before the people on the show. However, it took as much knowledge of English as of Norwegian. The closest languages would be other West Germanic languages, and I'd expect Frisian and Low German speakers to have the easiest time of this.
I am fluent in Norwegian. I could pick out some of the words but was not able to understand what was written. The lilt reminded me of some of the Norwegian dialects.
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!
Sou brasileira. Esse vídeo apareceu pra mim como sugestão, abri pois sou muito curiosa em relação a linguagens do passado. Entendo inglês moderno (apenas ouvindo, não sei conversar) e consegui entender o q os convidados falaram, mas do inglês antigo não entendi nada 😅
@@anne4240I am English and I didn’t understand any of it. Old english and modern english are basically two different languages. You need a background in other Germanic languages to make any sense of it
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").
@@iparipaitegianiparipaitegi4643 Correct, but Octavian took his name, and became the first emperor, Augustus. And it's because of him that all the emperors took the name Caesar.
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.
I was surprised at how much of it I understood, but, then again, I majored in English at an elite university and had prior exposure to Old English, so I understood a lot of words that your average English speaker wouldn't get because I've studied their word etymologies.
This was actually quite amazing to watch! Being fluent in Swedish and English (and having studied German), I understood a lot more than I would have thought! The Star Wars one was clear to me even as it was read! Well done, indeed! More of these, please.
The word "swam" for mushroom makes sense in german, if you think how the word for it is in bavarian or austrian dialects. They say "Schwammerl", which translates to "little/small sponge". And that's because if you look under some mushrooms hood it looks like the texture of a sponge.
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%
Also, in America there are the loan words from Native American languages (such as "moccasin"), Spanish (via Mexico), French (via New Orleans), and African languages (such as "tote").
Why, Why, Why did we ever quit speaking Old English? It's such a beautiful language to hear spoken and has a beautiful sing-song-y quality to it. I didn't understand much of what was sad while the text was being read, but it was still such a joy to listen to it being spoken.
I don't know the specifics but likely war's and conquests played a part in why the Language evolved. Conquerors inserting parts of there own language into the conquered
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.
We all started using tools over the Internet that were developed in English as well (and this is 21st century, not that old), so why fighting the current when flowing with it seems to be easier...
@@tulenik71Every society in history had slavery. It was the dominant economic model. So, this is an unfair characterisation; you make it as if the British were unique in this regard. But the British empire was unique in the sense that it was the first empire in history to abolish slavery, and British people lost their lives trying to stop the trade on the high seas as the practice continued, and indeed, still continues to this day in other places and by other people. As for genocide and colonialism, this again, is not unique to the British. In fact, as empires go, the British empire is a benign example. Why do you think most of the near east and North Africa speak Arabic?
@@gonsalomon English became the global lingua franca before the internet was a major factor. The decisive cause was just that the USA has been the richest and most powerful country in the world for more than a hundred years now. The flow certainly needs to be fought to some extent - what's easy isn't always good for you.
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.
@@Valerio_the_wandering_sprite They are spongy to be fair lol. Another term that pops up in pa Dutch is Marichel, which is related to Morchel, but can mean both a morel specifically and just a mushroom in general.
@@Valerio_the_wandering_sprite That's no coincidence: Just look under the cap of some sorts of mushrooms and the rule of thumb that mushrooms with lamella tend to be poisonous while tose with "sponges" are more likely to be edible, at least in central Europe.
I feel like English is one of the harder ones because half our language is stapled onto the skeleton of german so we have to ignore any base romance language words and try to think back to something like King James' English to even have a shot at getting certain words to sound similar to their old english counterparts. Not to mention the cases that we stripped out of the language.
@@mr_h831 youre not serious. English is a germanic language. England is literally angeland. The land of the Angles. A german tribe. English imports words from anywhere it finds them if theyre useful.
@@sugarnads Oh wait sorry, I'm thinking American English. It has a lot more Latin influence in it. Whoops. I mean obviously it's still got that Germanic framework, but you'd be surprised how many American English words can trace their roots back to Latin, because it's actually alot.
@@mr_h831it has nothing to do with American. Modern English uses a lot of Latin words from influence of the Roman Empire and Catholicism. However old English has none of that influence and therefore is more akin to German than modern English.
I would really love to make this an actual game, I'd love to do some coding and turn these paragraphs into a group guessing game kind of like the online version of cards against humanity. But with guessing Old English's paragraph topics! I absolutely LOVE THIS! Please make more of these videos with guests! This was so WELL produced in my opinion! My hats off to you!
Would say that a lot of Dutch quite helped to understand some bits of the phrases, such as "he gebrycp hiere paet waepn" - "hij gebruik hier dat wappen"(he use here that weapon), or "langre tide" - "lang tijd"
As a note about how gold related to, and still relates, to the color red, it is interesting they cross-identified that because in physics, the vibrations of gold are the same as red. They are healing vibration measurements that are, in fact, also used in far-infrared medical treatment. Also interesting, I have a friend who is a glassblower, and she told me that in order for glassblowers to make red-colored glass, they must add the element, gold. It is tradition in ancient arts and construction that wherever gold-leafing was to be applied, it was first underpainted with red pigmented paint. As it comes near the time to restore the gold-leafing about every 20 years, such as a building’s roof dome, the red paint typically shows through.
Waow! I know a lot of things and are not easily impressed but here you are impressing me with beautiful knowledge! I study Architectural Alchemy or the usage of sacred architecture with the purpose of transforming and purifying the human consciousness, and one very Amazing author and teacher, Ibrahim Karim, spoke heavily from the vibration of Gold and I didn't get that beyond any metaphysical attributes Gold also had this type of vibration within more conventional physics! You just made my day 😊
Wow, this is incredibly interesting. In Persian, the word for the colour blonde “bur (بور)” also means red in some texts (both ancient and relatively newer literature). In the Shahnameh, the word “bur” is used to refer to mostly red horses but also other red things, but today “bur” is mostly used to denote the colour of a blond persons hair.
Austrian German, German German, Dutch really helpled a lot here! For example, I guessed Mario right away because in Austrian German, mushroom is Schwammerl and in Old English it is swamm. :D This was such a fun exercise!
8:48 Reminds me how in Old Norse things referred to as "Raven colored" was referring to the iridescent blue of the feathers and for a long time it was getting mistranslated as black instead of blue
@@dumupad3-da241In Old Norse literature, the two lexemes that were often translates as black, were svartr and blár. The descendants of these in North Germanic languages nowadays exclusively mean black and blue. Since the term 'blár' was often used to describe terms that we associate with the color black, translators often translated it as such. The current discussion is about whether these two color terms referred to the same hue (svartr being dull, and blár being shiny), or two different hues (black & blue, blue often used poetically to blueish looking black things), and when these terms acquired their modern meanings. Dr Jackson Crawford has a few videos dedicated to this problem and wrote a dissertation about it that can be probably found somewhere (I haven't read it myself)
It's interesting to me that wer means man in Old English, and in Classical Latin, vir (pronounced "wir" also means man. I assume these words both have their root in Proto Indo-European.
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).
I would love to hear anyone speaking Bretagne. My grandfather was born in Brittany and brought up speaking it until the French government literally beat it out of his generation. He immigrated to Canada speaking French, but with a "brogue" if that makes any sense. His accent carried into his English and Spanish as well.
There are many words in Welsh similar or identical to their English counterparts (e.g. car, siop, lico, siaced, plismon, peintio), but I doubt any English speaker would understand any sentence without such words. Fasai siaradwyr Saesneg ddim yn deall unrhyw frawddeg, tasen nhw ddim yn sylwi unrhyw eiriau cyfarwydd yn y brawddegau hynny. (English speakers would not understand any sentence, if they did not notice any familiar words in those sentences.) - I hope there aren't many mistakes in this Welsh sentence, I'm still a learner.
@імхо Irish gaelic, Scottish gaelic and Manx are certainly mutually inteligible. It pretty much depends whether the languages belong to the same branch or not. Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic are almost dialects of the same language, Manx is very close to them also (at least in spoken, not written form). There're already many videos of people talking in them and understanding each other quite well. All three languages belonging to the Goigodelic branch. The problem comes with speakers of the Goigodelic branch vs. the Brythonic branch (Breton, Cornish and Welsh). They wouldn't understand each other. However, the languages are still related and many words look alike, more like German and English.
@імхо You have no idea what you're talking about. The Goidelic languages in particular are fairly mutually intelligible. Not without their difficulties (particularly depending on the specific dialects in question), but "English to Nahuatl" is an utterly absurd comparison.
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.
Old English sounds beautiful. It's very interesting how, due to the Norman invasion, we lost the word byrg and developed the word castle which itself is derived from the Norman-French word castel. But a German speaker would recognise byrg.
I'm so fascinated by Old English and recently started my journey of learning this beautiful language. Any recommendations for resources would be greatly appreciated, since it's hard to find decent ones!
On UA-cam, Simon Roper (who has featured on this channel a few times) deals with it quite a bit, as well as other interesting linguistics stuff. I love his personality and videography as much as the topics he discusses. I've heard good things about 'leornende eald englisc', though I've never made a concerted effort to pursue OE after studying a bit in uni. Sheer laziness; I'd love to get good at it :/
Also, there are some pretty good OE dictionaries online, generally put up by universities, that--while crude and a bit dated--are fairly complete. A great resource if you want to translate a text word-by-word, which is a good way to learn if applied correctly.
There is a free PDF of Fulk's "Introductory Grammar of Old English" on the internet somewhere, though I don't think I can link it in YT comments. RE Leornende Old Englisc, his very channel name is grammatically incorrect, a fact which is reflective of the quality of the OE in the rest of his videos unfortunately. He's not 100% wrong about everything, but I can't recommend him as a good source.
@@minerat27 good shout with Fulk et al., Indiana U.P. should be the first link. Minerat, how would you improve 'leornende eald englisc'? (apart from the ash) I reiterate that I know very little OE. The closest I could find to "leornende" is present continuous of 'leornian': "leorniende". 'I am learning', maybe a flub as was common in manuscripts, but it doesn't even seem to be the most common word for learning either, at least in that sense. Maybe something like ''cneordlæcan' would be better.
@@darraghchapman Actually the lack of æ is a point in LEE's favour, I don't have the exact stats to hand but "Englisc" is far more common in the corpus than "Ænglisc", but many people use the latter because it looks more "medieval". As regards "leornende", yeah, firstly as a Class II weak verb there should be an "i" in there, and secondly Old English didn't really use the present participle to form tenses like MnE does, it was mostly just used as an adjective. I believe the correct form would be "Eald Englisc Leornian", with the infinitive, though I'm not 100% on the word order. It's also possible that this kind of construction was just not really used at all, and they'd reword it somehow. And as for word frequency, that's not something I remember off the top of my head. I don't recall leornian being one of the etymological translations to avoid, but I'll check in the morning when I'm not on my phone.
During my five years of study at a Ukrainian institute for foreign languages, we had a compulsory History of the English language course. Of course, 25 years on, I don't remember a thing in Old English, but we did look into it quite extensively back then. Just wondering if other non-native English students have had that experience in their countries.
We learn nothing of Old English in America. The oldest we study in school is Shakespeare. It's possible a history class in college might go over that time period, but as a CS major, I wouldn't know.
In my native South Africa, where English is the language of education, it's not even mentioned. We barely studied the English language at all. 90% of it was literature analysis. Even in England it's rare to study Old English or Middle English at high schools. Maybe the literature is studied, but always in translation. Otherwise, you can study both languages at University if you pursue modules in Medieval English. Along with Old Norse if desired.
@@happysloth3208 I mean, I'm sure it's taught in some cases, but most people don't take AP courses. I haven't been exposed to Beowulf in college, but I'm also a CS major.
We need a video of Old English vs Dutch. Dutch helped me to understand 4 and 5 much more than English. :D Also interesting that the word for "cold" in the second one - "ceald" - is pronounced almost with "kh" - like in Swiss German. (And there were no Swiss German videos here too, btw.) It was a very curious one, and even more curious that it's not with Simon.
Yeah, I speak the Scandinavian languages, Dutch and German, so this was pretty easy. It would be nice to have a panel with a German, a Dutch and a Swede/a Dane/a Norwegian :)
Frisian gets my vote, but any Frisian speaker is more than likely able to speak Dutch anyway. On top of that the Dutch people study English at school. It would be three Germanic languages in their mental database to learn Old English. Not a one on one comparison.
That's because ceald was a word of the Southwestern dialects in modern-day West Country. The word cold we use in English today is derived from cald, which was more commonly seen in areas in Eastern England including London.
@alanguages there is another video on this channel, you may or may not have seen. Can German speakers understand old english, one of the guys on that also speaks Frisian
im frisian and speak dutch and english and a bit of german and i can sometimes understand random scandinavian words its so interesting how language evolved over time
@@nfnworldpeace1992 Funnily enough, I looked at some common words in different Germanic languages and Frisian seemed to be closest to Swedish. (if you don't count Norwegian and Danish which also are part of the North Germanic languages).
@@Magnus_Loov I think that depends upon which dialect of Frisian you are comparing to Standard Swedish. North Frisian has a tremendous influence from The Jutes in Jylland (Jutland) who some historians believe migrated south from southwest Modern Sweden (Skone) to the very southwest of Jutland (which is now southwest Denmark; whilst West Fries has gotten much more influence from Dutch and some from low Frankish. The North Frisian's other main element came from Old Aengelsc (The West Germanic Angels, who migrated there later than The Frisians, together with The West (Lower) Saxons. As a Dutch speaker, who also understands West Fries and English, I can understand West Fries better, But, I also understand Dansk as well (though not absolutely fluently, so that also helps me with Nord Fries. So, I was able to read the printed Old English with little trouble, but I didn't get all of it when Norbert spoke very quickly, or slurred his words in a few spots. Someone who speaks Dutch or Frisian, plus a Scandinavian language shouldn't have much trouble with Old English. I was shocked ay=t how well I moved through reading "Beowulf", getting the gist most of the time.
@robbk1 thanks. You answered I had. My late parents were fluent in Dutch and English, although they spoke different Dutch dialects. My father also had some knowledge of West Frisian. I wish I could know if they would have been able to understand Old English.
@@robbk1Well. The way I've remember it, all germanic people originate at the southern part of Scandinavia, where they have spoken Old Norse, or quite propably, whatever proto Norse was before that, until they migrated to north part of Europe, so it's no wonder why most European languages have so much similarities. Celtic languages are a bit "weirdo" among them. That's why it interests me most of all European languages.
I took two years of German in high school, back in the mid-1970s, and tried to guess at individual words. I surprised myself by getting a few right, but only a few. This was still lots of fun.
Yes the German word for man is Mann, but the German word “man” still exists as the word for “you”/“one”/“somebody” that involves talking about a nonspecific and indefinite person placeholder.(and not the normal 2nd person pronoun) It wouldn’t surprise me if a few other Germanic languages still had a similar word leftover.
Someone tell Andrew that the word he asked about 'Drycraeft' retains a Celtic root that appears both in Irish 'Draíocht', and strangely, in English 'Druidry', both meaning Witchcraft.
Latin and German are both Indo-European languages. When you put a lot of words through the mind bending rules of linguistics, the connections become more apparent. Like Latin, old English was a more highly inflected language than modern German or modern English.
In modern Icelandic, maður (accusative 'mann') still means primarily person, human being, rather than 'man'. If you want to specify it's a male, you have to say 'karlmaður' (which, if you use the related English word, you can 'translate' as 'churlish human' :)).
This is very cool. I love languages and to hear Old English spoken today is amazing. Good job on the part of the contestants and host. Really interesting. It's good to know that there are others out there that are as interested in language as I am. Good job!!!
Being Russian I was surprised when I could guess the second word Red, cause my native language is from absolutly another language group, and I can speak only English and a bit of Italian and know only a couple of words and phrasis in German. It was much fun for me! And also I wanna know what 'swa swa' means? So funny expression for my ear:)
Russian is still an IE language and there are many commonalities. Take words like Leute / Lyudi. Or that the Russian word for face, Lits, also appears in the German word Antlitz (which also means face).
As a Frisian, I could only pick a word or two from the speaking. For me it sounded like a complete different phonology was used. The spelling is also not common to me, however when trying to pronounce the words myself, it was much easier to understand to get the rough story. To be fair not getting all the right answers. When hearing old English with a more Scottish accent is much easier for me, probably because the phonology is closer to Frisian. Regarding man. Dutch has the (slightly ancient) pronoun men, which is not directly coupled to neuter, but refers to a non-specific group of people. "Men zegt dat ...", translates to "People say that ...". German has about the same with "man sagt ...", where man is also neutral.
I was going to say that for me it sounded like someone from the north of Scotland was speaking a dialect I am mostly unfamiliar with in terms of the phonology. I'm from Edinburgh like the man on the left. Also with the 'man sagt' German has a similar thing, but it less means person than 'one says...', as a polite way of not directly referring to someone.
as same way when foreigner read your language ❤ Old english is dialect of Frisian and Scottish are middle english speakers who survived from bring romanization by French
Old English seems so different, looks like other language a mix of german perhaps more into the roots than modern english. I couldn't recognize most of the words but when reading some maybe it would be possible, that's is something so incredible!
old Norse dialects had a significant effect on Old English because of the period of Viking rule over the Danelaw (Northern England, approximately) and King Canute’s rule over all of England (or, more technically, over the English). These results coincided with English adopting various vocabulary elements from Old Norse, and they also coincided with a simplification of Old English grammar, which is notable because Old English and Old Norse were more mutually intelligible in terms of their vocabulary than in terms of their grammar. To illustrate the vocabulary change, the Modern English verb “hog” is borrowed from Old Norse and is cognate with the Modern English verb “hew,” which is from Old English. They have similar meanings of cutting out a space in a piece of wood, but “hog” refers to what a woodworker does when using a chisel to hand carve a mortice into a workpiece in the context of mortice-and-tenon joinery, while “hew” is the more general term which would be applied to most other types of hewing, including flattening the sides of a log with an axe. Similarly, the use of “gate” to mean a street - as in “Highgate” - is a borrowing from Old Norse. “Sky” is an Old Norse term which means “cloud” in modern Scandinavian languages.
This was a great episode! I thought the clues were fun and well-written. I do wish that he had translated the clues word for word after revealing the answer, so we could learn more Old English! 😃 Thanks for your videos, Norbert!
17:48 the "Roman connotations" are no coincidence here - the German word "Kaiser" (as well as presumably the "Caser" part of "Caserrice") does derive from the name of Julius Cesar. In fact, "Kaiser" is much closer to the contemporary pronunciation of "Caesar" than the way the name is pronounced in most langauges today (or the way most Latin speakers pronounce the name today).
@@cerdic6305 "Kaiser" as pronounced by Germans totally is closer to the classical pronunciation of the name than the ecclesiastical pronunciation of Latin (which gets both the "C" and the "ae" totally wrong), or indeed the way the name "Cesar" is rendered in most languages, including German. But OK, I guess it's a matter of argument. You could of course argue that Germans get the "r" and the vowel of the 2nd syllable wrong. I am pretty sure, however, that the German pronunciation of "Kaiser" would at least be recognizable as "Caesar" to a native speaker of classical Latin. Whereas the same speaker would have been completely thrown off by the incorrect rendering of the C as well as of "ae" being a simple vowel rather than a diphtong.
@@arthur_p_dent That's debatable. The 'k', 's' and 'r' sounds are pronounced quite differently in Kaiser and (classical Latin) Caesar, I would say just as differently as in ecclesiastical Latin or modern Italian. My point is that none of them are 'closer' to the classical pronunciation, they are all different but in a variety of ways.
As someone with virtually no experience in other languages, especially germanic languages, I was proud to get the Star Wars one before they could. I had remembered that "tide" means "time" in Old English and guessed "langre tide" meant "long time", so I knew that this takes place a long time ago. Then I saw "yfel Caserrice" and based on the sound I figured "yfel" was "evil", and knowing that "kaiserreich" basically means "empire" I should've guessed it here. Instead, I saw the words "niewe wæpn", my brain autocorrected that to "new weapon" and it immediately clicked that it was Star Wars since the Death Star, a "new weapon" was such a specific and integral part in what otherwise could've been a million different fantasy stories. But I was absolutely hopeless on the rest. XD
Pretty happy with my performance! A few pauses after the spoken bits, and a few more with text on screen either to confirm or to make a guess in the first place, but I got almost all of them. Like yer man, I never would've gotten Star Wars probably because I've had so little contact with the franchise (let alone seeing it in German!)
Btw, with my knowledge of english, icelandic and swedish, i can understand a lot or guess what. Mainly thanks to Icelandic, which still sounds pretty similar
I can't believe I got "Star Wars" before any of you! I'm not a linguist. I'm just a 42 year old mother of 2 and a paramedic. How did you guys take so long to get to get that one, I've never even seen the movie!
I've always told people German and English are closer languages then you think. Being that I'm not collegically educated on the subject, I assumed it was due to European languages being a combination of Latin, Celtic and Roman languages. Listening to this, English and German are almost similar. It's wild to see which language has separated from those basic linguistic similarities
English comes to the British Isles by means of the invasion of the North-German tribes of the Angles and Saxons (Anglo-Saxons) following the decline of the Roman Empire, which had to withdraw military support from Roman Briton. So it was quite literally brought to the British Isles BY Germans as a Germanic language. Hope this helps :)
Same thing happened to Romance languages: the word for person, which I believe was homine (hard to know what is the nominative singular form of a word when you haven't studied the grammar...) drifted into meaning adult male human, whereas the old word for it, vir (pronounced [wir]) was lost or only kept in expressions related to law, or as the adjective virile. The word for woman was derived from a different word for each descendant language. Funnily enough, while the Latin cognate of wer was extremely transparent, I don't think there was a cognate of wif. Edit: Caserrice is Caesar Rex, isn't it? Ah, no, it's cognate to Reich. If drycraft means magic, does it literally mean druid-craft?
*Homo, with a long "o" was actually the nominative in Latin. "Homine" is the ablative, the case of means. "Vir" also relates to Roman ideas of masculinity specifically. Eg: "virtus" which isn't just virtue like in modern English, it's specifically "masculine virture". But otherwise, yes, you can also see this similar phenomenon in other modern languages that have retained case systems. Especially in the plural forms for groups of people, whereby "virility" and "non-virility" start to affect noun-adjective agreement. Edit: To help you out, "reich" is also cognate with "rex", they have the same reconstructed IE ancestor. And "Kaiser" directly comes from Latin's "Caesar".
That shift for "man" is actually quite common. It's caused by the fact that people are more likely to call out the gender for females, i.e. saying "a woman" instead of "a person", or " a little girl" instead of "a child". Just compare these 3 sentences: "A man was working the field", "a woman was working the field", and "someone was working the field". If you know that the person you saw was a (wo)man, would you use the third one?
This is very interesting! I have a latin, french, italian, low german, scotch, and scandinavian background (bits of language not ethnicity lol) so there are words that jumped out at me. The sentence structure reminds me most of old norse though :) very cool and fun to listen, pause & try to guess! I got 3 of 5
8:35 red gold actually makes a lot of sense if you think of a naturally generated golden nugget which typically contains copper (a mix of copper and pure gold) and, as a result, looks more red than yellow in the light.
The Star Wars was the easiest thing for me and the only time I got the answer from the spoken Old English and he just needed to speak few sentences. The color red I got quite easily when I saw the text. I did get the other words but only after I saw the text and after stopping the video to read it slowly. I didn't understand whole sentences but recognized enough of the words to know what it was about. I'm Icelandic and that helped. I recognized some words because of Icelandic, but also my knowledge of German helped a lot, and Danish and of course English.
23:34 I did figure out that it was something about 1985, and I considering that a mushroom is a "Schwammerl" in Austrian German, _should_ have figured out that "Swamm" could be a mushroom. Well, I never played Super Mario, so likely wouldn't have figured this one out anyway. In fact, the year number was the first thing I figured out and the first thing I thought of from 1985 was Back To The Future. But this one obviously didn't fit at all.
An amazing video. I really wondered if modern speakers would understand old English. And here I have my answer. ... Lots of German in it! Looks like french doesn't help much here, and neither does Spanish. Fascinating video. Thanks!
I think from a modern German perspective the written Old English is relatively fast understandable if one get used to know how every letter/written text is pronounced and how some patterns have to be re-arranged (a bit practicing to get the 'feeling', also in general for the older way to say something). I noticed for instance that in old English often words with 'c' changed in modern German to 'ch' like 'ic' (old English) is 'ich' (German), 'rice' (old English became 'Reich' (German) ... sometimes the additional knowledge of English helps like with 'worolda' (German 'Welt', but modern English 'world' is closer) etc.
@@dylanmurphy9389 this might also be the case due to a shared scientific (and some old Clerical) stream of words from Latin/Greek. I mean, German sentences like 'Anna und Peter studieren Geologie und Mathematik an der Humboldt Universitaet in Berlin.' are really not difficult to understand for English speakers due to that ...
On the last one, I could understand it was the year 1985. Only because I know French and they write out their years in long-form Eg: 1985 would be "mille neuf-cent quatre-vingt cinq" which is literally "thousand, nine hundred, four-twenty, five"
As a child I would go to the pictures to see a film. Thanks Rob for jogging my memory. It was very interesting to hear Old English spoken so fluently, I wonder what an Icelander would make of it?
As a Polish native speaker that speaks also English and Norwegian I must say that knowing Norwegian helps me more with this than knowing actuall English. 😂
This one was fun! For the final one I picked up the spoken "Game from 1985 or 1958, or maybe 1850?", "red hat" and "the kings daughter", but didn't connect it with the word princess. If I did, I'm pretty sure I would have solved it immediately. Instead my mind got stuck at the Little Red Riding Hood, but that didn't make any sense with games and kings daughter. :D It surprised me that none of the participants picked up the red hat. Maybe they just didn't mention it. (Swedish/Norwegian/Danish/Dutch/German/English)
Yeah, i thought the year was 1958 too. None of the clues would have helped me, since I never got into playing video games. I did play some Legend of Zelda and a couple of other games i cant remember, way back in 1989/1990, on my freshman college roommate’s old Commodore 64 computer. Also some Space Invaders on an arcade type machine they had in a restaurant in my Swedish hometown, and Ms.Pac Man, on another arcade style console another ex-roommate had in our living room.
English 'man' is 'Mann' in German, but we also have a 'man' in German (same pronunciation) which we kind of use like a neutral third person (singular) pronoun when we talk about generalized behaviour of/instructions for people. So we probably get the origin of the word better than English speakers.
I think the answer is “no” but not because it is old Italian, its just because it is very hard to understand that way of singing (1800 italian is not so different from current one)
@@mattonthemoon225 Old and modern Italian are similar. Even texts from 980 AD are still readable. This is because Italians have been speaking it since the end of World War II. Thus, Italian does evolve over time, in fact, it has changed more in the last 20 years than in all of its history. By the way, the most challenging part of an opera is not the grammar or vocabulary but how the words are sung/stretched.
The first two where the easiest for me. I think this is a lot easier if you speak both German and English. I'm also from northern German and have basic understand of Plattdeutsch (law German) which also helped. 🙂 Great video! I love languages, old and modern. 😁
I got the last one although English is my 2nd language. I read "gamen" which i assume is game, then "man plegeth" as person play(player). Also king's daughter, aka a princess. I immediately guessed Super Mario or the Legend of Zelda. I feel proud of myself.
Swedish here. Not too hard. I got 2 and 4 just from listening. 4 in particular was dead easy - got it during the second sentence and started laughing! 3 was the hardest. Didn't get that one.
I am not a native English speaker, nor do I speak any of the European languages. I actually speak Urdu, and yet I guessed the second one correctly. Therefore, I don't believe the gentlemen's knowledge of languages other than English actually helped them guess the Old English, rather it was the little nuances and bits and pieces of the text here and there that helped. In a way, if all other words except those specific bits were replaced by gibberish, they'd have guessed the actual word anyhow. Just my take on this whole exercise.
Glad to say I got the film in the fourth one without the text. When I saw "tha Meahte" I was sure (macht, Macht, makt in Dutch, German, Swedish), but a little harder for English speakers.
More English people should learn there ancient tounge just like the Welsh learn Welsh Old English is a beautiful language and the language of our Ancestors great to see a Scot and Irish man taking a interest in our old language 👍🏻🏴⚔️
It would be nice if you could see a complete translation of the descriptions
Hi there! I can give you the translations - I gave them to Norbert because I wasn't sure if he needed them.
Word 1
This is a thing we see when we look up into the sky. But not just one. There are thousands of them in the sky, and they appear to our eyes as little lights that twinkle - at one moment you see them, at the next not, and then you see them again. Most of them are very far from our world. But one is nearer to us. This one appears in the day, the others at night.
Word 2
This is a color. It is a very common color we often see in our lives. It is warm, not cold. Now I will say some things of this color: apples, and cherries, are. Also fire is this color. In the time when Old English was a living language they called gold it. But what I mostly think of with this color, is blood; it is the color of blood
Word 3
This is what you feel about someone who is dear to you. There is more than one kind. You can feel it about your brother, monther, best friend, but also your wife or husband. But it is a good thing - you don't feel this to your enemy. We like to say often that it comes from your heart. I don't know if that is true, but that is what everyone says.
Challenge 4: Now I am not talking about an Old English word. I am going to tell you briefly the story of some film, and you should tell me which one it is: A long time ago in a far away galayxy there ruled an evil empire. They had power over all worlds on this galaxy and now they are building a new weapon that can destroy a whole world in one blow. But a young farmer rises up, learns that he wields a magical power known as "The Force" - He uses it to destroy the weapon, before the empire destroys the rebellion.
The last I will tell you about is a game. That is a video game from the year 1985. In this game you play as a plumber with a red hat, who runs through the mushroom kingdom, to save the princess (king's doughter). On his journey through the kingdom he will contend with evil mushrooms and turtles and jump on them. There are also good mushrooms, which make you the player larger. There are eight worlds and in seven of them you will hear said: Sorry, but the princess is in another castle
@@EngliscMidEadwine Thank you!
@@EngliscMidEadwine I understood most of that, but some words are weird, like Hlæfdige, which literally means loaf kneader. And for the origins of the word Lady, it's most hilarious.
So if you had talked about let's say Resident Evil's antagonist Lady Dimitrescu, would you have translated it into Hlæfdige Eorþemodorisce...
@@livedandletdie I'd keep her name as Dimitrescu and call her "Dimitrescu Hlæfdige" (as was common in OE for the title to come second)
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.
what is a low german speaker?
Us holstein?
@@Meatloaf_TV Northern German or Netherlander. High German is down in the south around the Alps.
@@Meatloaf_TV German dialects/languages are often broken up into three categories based on intelligibility and sound shifts that have occurred. You have Upper German variants in the mountainous South, you have Middle German across Central Germany, and then you have Low German in the Northern Lowlands. German nationalism in the mid-to-late 1800s led many state institutions to abandon the native Low German dialects in the North for Standard High German as a unifying national language while Southern Germans remained much more conservative and worked to preserve their dialects in the face of state efforts at assimilation. That's probably why you aren't aware of it.
@@Meatloaf_TV low German is a language that evolved from Old saxon. Where as modern German evolved from Old High German. Low German is closely related to Old English and Old Frisian because they also evolved from Old Saxon
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.
It is a completely different language, and that's mostly thanks to the injection of Norman French vocabulary a la "Billy" the Conqueror starting in 1066. It's also due to the fact that the Gutenberg press had not yet been invented, so I doubt English will change AS drastically in the next thousand years (if it's even still naturally spoken then). We have to consider that English is now a worldwide, lingua franca, and tons of English (as well as other languages) is being archived and thoroughly documented daily on the internet and in books.
@@redpillsatori3020 Billy the Bastard
@@redpillsatori3020 Languages will probably form back into 1 like in the tower of babel days.
@@HelloOutsiders The story of the tower of babel sortove might have been inspired by a real structure(there is not sufficient archeological evidence to support even that assertion at the moment) , but we do have a significant body of evidence that opposes the idea of their ever having ever been a global unified language at any point in history. The current linguistic trend does appear to have a reduction in the diversity of languages, but there does not appear to be a high probability of a single universal language becoming a thing at any point in the future.
@@garethbaus5471 Biblical events such as the confusion of language at the time of the tower of Babel likely were regional, not world wide.
It could be argued that even now we have confusion of language between political factions within our own nations
As a Dutch speaker who also speaks Low German, this is actually quite easy. I had the first one without help from the text.
As another Dutch speaker, with a light dusting of Norsk to boot, I had no clue. Only 3 and 4 were easy.
I heard once that Old English is closer to today's German than it is to Modern English.
You are very lucky indeed, then. I’m British English, and I had absolutely no idea what was being said in the first example. Honestly I understand German better than I know this, and I only instead of few words in German.😆😓😓😭 this language feels completely alien to me now. I guess it makes sense then that this is considered old English as honestly, it feels more like I am listening to something closer to Welsh. That’s the language we really just don’t need coming back. Lmao
@@maryk446 I can hear it. I’m English and it doesn’t feel at all like the language we have today. It feels closer to Welsh with a tiny bit of Germanic then it does to modern British English today.
@@danielwhyatt3278 Weirdly, Old English has no connections to Welsh at all. Not even the occasional loan word. So it's interesting that it sounded a bit Welsh to your ears.
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.
And that's the immense power of neuro plasticity
So cute
Yeah, and "window" literally means "wind eye"
That sounds like you’re just Irish lol
@@human7491 Das Windauge.
Obsessed with how common "þ" is as a sound! Old English sounds like one of those languages that physically "feels" good/fun to use 😂
Eadwine here! Thank you Norbert for having me on your channel, I had a lot of fun!
Great job! Tricky but gettable prompts, and I enjoyed your cadence and pronunciation, even if it was slowed down a bit to give them a chance.
@@darraghchapman yes I did have to read a bit slower. First thing said when we started recording was I was talking too fast.
Thank you for your contribution, Eadwine! 🤗
ti liubish gruzia i ukraina?
@@teopilemalakia1444 what language are you speaking? something Slavic definitely... but other than that I can't tell
Now the real question is can Old English speakers understand Modern English?
😂
I Guess more or less yes if you speak english with no much latin words
we wuz kangz n shet mang stawp da cap
It simmilar on writing informal english so incomphrehensible
No way, I can barely understand deep Southern accents.
For a language that is 1573 years old, parts of it are surprisingly comprehensible!
This was a pleasant surprise from the UA-cam algorithm! I wish Eadwine would create a Duolingo course for Old English.
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.
There is a reason for that... In the 11th century when the Normans invaded England, only French and Latin were spoken by those rulers and the clergy, but we English people refused to relent, and we hung on to our sturdy language. For one hundred years or more, books were not written in English, but only in Latin, French, and Greek, but we English people only spoke English. We insisted on speaking English, we absorbed French, Latin, and Greek words, and added them to English words - that came from Old German and Old Norse. We made the language, “English”, richer, more subtle, and much more precise.
The Normans, meanwhile, intermarried with us English people, and they also learned to speak English - playful, pungent, philosophical, practical, and poetic English. This is just one of many of our greatest achievements, and the English language belongs to all of us. First, for saving our language from conquest, and then secondly, by letting it grow freely, with all the people of England deciding which words we liked, and wanted to keep, and which words we'd scuttle. In the intervening years, we English people, have invented and added over a million new words, including half a million technical and scientific terms, while German has about 185,000 words and French has fewer than 100,000.
@@hotstepper887 We also add a few Hindi words as well over the years think of the word Bungalow, eg one story house. Juggernaut from the Hindi word 'Jagannath' we've add Abratic words also into the English Language.
@@eileencritchley4630 Indeed many rather than as few - Bandana - Chutney - Shampoo - Typhoon are a few others,
@@hotstepper887 Correct.
Dutch and Plattdeutsch are not actually Frisian Dialects/Languages.
Dutch is derived from Frankish, and Plattdeutsch is derived from Saxon.
West Frisian and it’s dialects are the actual closest language, other than the Creole and Scots languages, that retains an English grammar structure.
Absolutely hilarious that the New Yorker heard "thousands of them in the night sky" and thought airplanes instead of stars. Hard to think of a city that has worse light pollution than the one with giant lightup billboards going 24/7
When a major New York blackout happened in 2003, people started calling emergency hotlines and reported that thousands of strange objects were suddenly appearing in the night sky. Lo and behold, these "strange objects" were actually just stars 😂
@@RafaelBenedictoI was there for the 03 blackout and I never heard any such thing… I mean guess in a city of roughly 8 million at the time, anything is possible.
@@RafaelBenedictoI'm a New Yorker and I was there during the 2003 and no one did that 😂 we're not idiots. We know what stars are. This is such an internet lie for clout and not a good one at that
🤣🤣🤣
@@takishaedwards273 so how did that guy not get the answer? It was infuriating to watch
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.
Also, 11:17 shows just how similar PIE roots can remain long into the history of its descendants: OE **wer** and Latin **vir** are only separated in pronunciation by the vowel!
Is it where we get the color blue?
@@gljames24 no, despite the similarity in both words starting with they ultimately come from different (but related) PIE roots. Funny enough, "blue" was borrowed into English from Anglo-Norman, which itself borrowed it from a Germanic language, so the borrowed Norman form actually supplanted the native English term, despite it ultimately coming from the same Germanic source. If this hadn't happened, we'd be saying "blow" instead of "blue".
Surely the word 'blee' is related to it? Meaning colour or hue. I use that word to mean colour or complexion even today personally.
blēo might not have a cognate, but it does have a false friend.
i'd like to see how a Danish, Norwegian or Icelandic speaker would do - old english is far closer to these than modern english
Im danish and I didnt understand anything😊
Yeah I'm Swedish and could see some words in relation to any of the Scandinavian languages. But I'd say Icelandic might understand it better but that judgement I make mainly because they have similar letters. Þ for example.
I'm Norwegian, I picked up the occasional word and phrase, but it took until I saw the text to start understanding it. The first two, I had a great deal of trouble with, but the last three, I figured out before the people on the show. However, it took as much knowledge of English as of Norwegian.
The closest languages would be other West Germanic languages, and I'd expect Frisian and Low German speakers to have the easiest time of this.
I was wondering if someone who speaks Frisian can understand.
I am fluent in Norwegian. I could pick out some of the words but was not able to understand what was written. The lilt reminded me of some of the Norwegian dialects.
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!
Germans and Dutch people understand Old English quite well.
English people can’t understand a single word
Sou brasileira. Esse vídeo apareceu pra mim como sugestão, abri pois sou muito curiosa em relação a linguagens do passado. Entendo inglês moderno (apenas ouvindo, não sei conversar) e consegui entender o q os convidados falaram, mas do inglês antigo não entendi nada 😅
@@anne4240I am English and I didn’t understand any of it. Old english and modern english are basically two different languages. You need a background in other Germanic languages to make any sense of it
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").
Caesar doesn’t come from Augustus, but from Caius Julius Caesar, his great uncle.
most titles are widely spread. earl/jarl etc.
@@iparipaitegianiparipaitegi4643 Correct, but Octavian took his name, and became the first emperor, Augustus. And it's because of him that all the emperors took the name Caesar.
@@Mercure250. True. But the name Caesar comes from Caius Julius
@@iparipaitegianiparipaitegi4643 Yes, I'm not denying it. I suppose I could edit my original comment to specify it.
I was impressed how much I could 'guess' with my smattering of Swedish. This is fun!
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.
Yes, and almost all sounds coincide with the letter, and the sound - R stands out especially.
Old English sounds very Germanic, almost nothing romance language.
I was surprised at how much of it I understood, but, then again, I majored in English at an elite university and had prior exposure to Old English, so I understood a lot of words that your average English speaker wouldn't get because I've studied their word etymologies.
@@RobbieStacks90 Same I studied etymologies as a child as my father was very keen for us to understand the root meanings of words.
This is not even close of any romance language
This was actually quite amazing to watch! Being fluent in Swedish and English (and having studied German), I understood a lot more than I would have thought! The Star Wars one was clear to me even as it was read! Well done, indeed! More of these, please.
The word "swam" for mushroom makes sense in german, if you think how the word for it is in bavarian or austrian dialects. They say "Schwammerl", which translates to "little/small sponge".
And that's because if you look under some mushrooms hood it looks like the texture of a sponge.
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%
Pure BS
@@dylanmurphy9389 no hes telling the truth its a 5 second google search 💀
I know at least "window" came from Scandinavian (danish/norwegian) vindu
Also, in America there are the loan words from Native American languages (such as "moccasin"), Spanish (via Mexico), French (via New Orleans), and African languages (such as "tote").
But most words used commonly are Germanic.
Why, Why, Why did we ever quit speaking Old English? It's such a beautiful language to hear spoken and has a beautiful sing-song-y quality to it. I didn't understand much of what was sad while the text was being read, but it was still such a joy to listen to it being spoken.
It sounds terrible
I don't know the specifics but likely war's and conquests played a part in why the Language evolved. Conquerors inserting parts of there own language into the conquered
@TechFan101 agree to disagree. I think English sounds terrible and Old English sounds beautiful.
Be honest and admit you didn't understand a single word... LOL
@@doowoppyify this and that mother and brother were words I understood, after that pretty much just pretty sounds.
Tungol is pretty close to tungl which means moon in Icelandic.
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.
Because it is anglo saxon.
It's amazing how English developed to become a universal language used or understood by almost everyone!
what is amazing about collonialism, series of aggressions, genocides and slavery?
very valid point@@tulenik71
We all started using tools over the Internet that were developed in English as well (and this is 21st century, not that old), so why fighting the current when flowing with it seems to be easier...
@@tulenik71Every society in history had slavery. It was the dominant economic model. So, this is an unfair characterisation; you make it as if the British were unique in this regard. But the British empire was unique in the sense that it was the first empire in history to abolish slavery, and British people lost their lives trying to stop the trade on the high seas as the practice continued, and indeed, still continues to this day in other places and by other people. As for genocide and colonialism, this again, is not unique to the British. In fact, as empires go, the British empire is a benign example. Why do you think most of the near east and North Africa speak Arabic?
@@gonsalomon English became the global lingua franca before the internet was a major factor. The decisive cause was just that the USA has been the richest and most powerful country in the world for more than a hundred years now. The flow certainly needs to be fought to some extent - what's easy isn't always good for you.
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.
Pa Dutch (German dialect) is much similar with der Schwamm meaning mushroom
It's amusing how the same word means "sponge" in Standard German.
@@Valerio_the_wandering_sprite They are spongy to be fair lol. Another term that pops up in pa Dutch is Marichel, which is related to Morchel, but can mean both a morel specifically and just a mushroom in general.
@@Valerio_the_wandering_sprite That's no coincidence: Just look under the cap of some sorts of mushrooms and the rule of thumb that mushrooms with lamella tend to be poisonous while tose with "sponges" are more likely to be edible, at least in central Europe.
@@Valerio_the_wandering_sprite natural sponges that live in oceans are actually a type of fungus, so it's all connected.
I feel like English is one of the harder ones because half our language is stapled onto the skeleton of german so we have to ignore any base romance language words and try to think back to something like King James' English to even have a shot at getting certain words to sound similar to their old english counterparts. Not to mention the cases that we stripped out of the language.
Ki g ja es english has all the french in it, which came over 600 years BEFORE king james.
I thought English had a heavier basis in Latin or Greek languages.
@@mr_h831 youre not serious.
English is a germanic language. England is literally angeland. The land of the Angles. A german tribe.
English imports words from anywhere it finds them if theyre useful.
@@sugarnads Oh wait sorry, I'm thinking American English.
It has a lot more Latin influence in it.
Whoops.
I mean obviously it's still got that Germanic framework, but you'd be surprised how many American English words can trace their roots back to Latin, because it's actually alot.
@@mr_h831it has nothing to do with American. Modern English uses a lot of Latin words from influence of the Roman Empire and Catholicism. However old English has none of that influence and therefore is more akin to German than modern English.
I would really love to make this an actual game, I'd love to do some coding and turn these paragraphs into a group guessing game kind of like the online version of cards against humanity. But with guessing Old English's paragraph topics! I absolutely LOVE THIS! Please make more of these videos with guests! This was so WELL produced in my opinion! My hats off to you!
Would say that a lot of Dutch quite helped to understand some bits of the phrases, such as "he gebrycp hiere paet waepn" - "hij gebruik hier dat wappen"(he use here that weapon), or "langre tide" - "lang tijd"
Old English sounds so good! I love the rolling of the "r".
As a note about how gold related to, and still relates, to the color red, it is interesting they cross-identified that because in physics, the vibrations of gold are the same as red. They are healing vibration measurements that are, in fact, also used in far-infrared medical treatment. Also interesting, I have a friend who is a glassblower, and she told me that in order for glassblowers to make red-colored glass, they must add the element, gold. It is tradition in ancient arts and construction that wherever gold-leafing was to be applied, it was first underpainted with red pigmented paint. As it comes near the time to restore the gold-leafing about every 20 years, such as a building’s roof dome, the red paint typically shows through.
Waow! I know a lot of things and are not easily impressed but here you are impressing me with beautiful knowledge!
I study Architectural Alchemy or the usage of sacred architecture with the purpose of transforming and purifying the human consciousness, and one very Amazing author and teacher, Ibrahim Karim, spoke heavily from the vibration of Gold and I didn't get that beyond any metaphysical attributes Gold also had this type of vibration within more conventional physics!
You just made my day 😊
Wow, this is incredibly interesting. In Persian, the word for the colour blonde “bur (بور)” also means red in some texts (both ancient and relatively newer literature). In the Shahnameh, the word “bur” is used to refer to mostly red horses but also other red things, but today “bur” is mostly used to denote the colour of a blond persons hair.
Austrian German, German German, Dutch really helpled a lot here! For example, I guessed Mario right away because in Austrian German, mushroom is Schwammerl and in Old English it is swamm. :D This was such a fun exercise!
8:48 Reminds me how in Old Norse things referred to as "Raven colored" was referring to the iridescent blue of the feathers and for a long time it was getting mistranslated as black instead of blue
Citation needed. From what I've read, it's the other way around and the word for 'blue' could also mean 'black' (perhaps with some bluish nuance).
@@dumupad3-da241In Old Norse literature, the two lexemes that were often translates as black, were svartr and blár. The descendants of these in North Germanic languages nowadays exclusively mean black and blue. Since the term 'blár' was often used to describe terms that we associate with the color black, translators often translated it as such. The current discussion is about whether these two color terms referred to the same hue (svartr being dull, and blár being shiny), or two different hues (black & blue, blue often used poetically to blueish looking black things), and when these terms acquired their modern meanings.
Dr Jackson Crawford has a few videos dedicated to this problem and wrote a dissertation about it that can be probably found somewhere (I haven't read it myself)
It is great to see how Old English has survived. Your reading, speaking, and writing are directly connected to those times so long ago.
It's interesting to me that wer means man in Old English, and in Classical Latin, vir (pronounced "wir" also means man. I assume these words both have their root in Proto Indo-European.
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).
I would love to hear anyone speaking Bretagne. My grandfather was born in Brittany and brought up speaking it until the French government literally beat it out of his generation. He immigrated to Canada speaking French, but with a "brogue" if that makes any sense. His accent carried into his English and Spanish as well.
There are many words in Welsh similar or identical to their English counterparts (e.g. car, siop, lico, siaced, plismon, peintio), but I doubt any English speaker would understand any sentence without such words.
Fasai siaradwyr Saesneg ddim yn deall unrhyw frawddeg, tasen nhw ddim yn sylwi unrhyw eiriau cyfarwydd yn y brawddegau hynny. (English speakers would not understand any sentence, if they did not notice any familiar words in those sentences.) - I hope there aren't many mistakes in this Welsh sentence, I'm still a learner.
@імхо Irish gaelic, Scottish gaelic and Manx are certainly mutually inteligible. It pretty much depends whether the languages belong to the same branch or not. Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic are almost dialects of the same language, Manx is very close to them also (at least in spoken, not written form). There're already many videos of people talking in them and understanding each other quite well. All three languages belonging to the Goigodelic branch. The problem comes with speakers of the Goigodelic branch vs. the Brythonic branch (Breton, Cornish and Welsh). They wouldn't understand each other. However, the languages are still related and many words look alike, more like German and English.
@імхо You have no idea what you're talking about. The Goidelic languages in particular are fairly mutually intelligible. Not without their difficulties (particularly depending on the specific dialects in question), but "English to Nahuatl" is an utterly absurd comparison.
And ultimate challenge! ANY other Europeans try to understand ANY Finnish! :D (Estonians are banned to participate!)
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.
This is awesome! Many of these words have similarities to Dutch aswell. Like Swamm would be Zwam.
Old English sounds beautiful. It's very interesting how, due to the Norman invasion, we lost the word byrg and developed the word castle which itself is derived from the Norman-French word castel. But a German speaker would recognise byrg.
Byrg is ''Burgh or Bury'' like Pittsburgh of Canterbury, It's not lost.
What fun! Fifty years ago I took an Old English class. It was exciting to delve into what I remember.
I'm so fascinated by Old English and recently started my journey of learning this beautiful language. Any recommendations for resources would be greatly appreciated, since it's hard to find decent ones!
On UA-cam, Simon Roper (who has featured on this channel a few times) deals with it quite a bit, as well as other interesting linguistics stuff. I love his personality and videography as much as the topics he discusses.
I've heard good things about 'leornende eald englisc', though I've never made a concerted effort to pursue OE after studying a bit in uni. Sheer laziness; I'd love to get good at it :/
Also, there are some pretty good OE dictionaries online, generally put up by universities, that--while crude and a bit dated--are fairly complete. A great resource if you want to translate a text word-by-word, which is a good way to learn if applied correctly.
There is a free PDF of Fulk's "Introductory Grammar of Old English" on the internet somewhere, though I don't think I can link it in YT comments. RE Leornende Old Englisc, his very channel name is grammatically incorrect, a fact which is reflective of the quality of the OE in the rest of his videos unfortunately. He's not 100% wrong about everything, but I can't recommend him as a good source.
@@minerat27 good shout with Fulk et al., Indiana U.P. should be the first link.
Minerat, how would you improve 'leornende eald englisc'? (apart from the ash) I reiterate that I know very little OE. The closest I could find to "leornende" is present continuous of 'leornian': "leorniende". 'I am learning', maybe a flub as was common in manuscripts, but it doesn't even seem to be the most common word for learning either, at least in that sense. Maybe something like ''cneordlæcan' would be better.
@@darraghchapman Actually the lack of æ is a point in LEE's favour, I don't have the exact stats to hand but "Englisc" is far more common in the corpus than "Ænglisc", but many people use the latter because it looks more "medieval".
As regards "leornende", yeah, firstly as a Class II weak verb there should be an "i" in there, and secondly Old English didn't really use the present participle to form tenses like MnE does, it was mostly just used as an adjective. I believe the correct form would be "Eald Englisc Leornian", with the infinitive, though I'm not 100% on the word order. It's also possible that this kind of construction was just not really used at all, and they'd reword it somehow. And as for word frequency, that's not something I remember off the top of my head. I don't recall leornian being one of the etymological translations to avoid, but I'll check in the morning when I'm not on my phone.
During my five years of study at a Ukrainian institute for foreign languages, we had a compulsory History of the English language course. Of course, 25 years on, I don't remember a thing in Old English, but we did look into it quite extensively back then. Just wondering if other non-native English students have had that experience in their countries.
We learn nothing of Old English in America. The oldest we study in school is Shakespeare. It's possible a history class in college might go over that time period, but as a CS major, I wouldn't know.
@@YukiSnowmew well, I had Beowulf in OE in highschool, and Chaucer in ME, but I'm old, so...
In my native South Africa, where English is the language of education, it's not even mentioned. We barely studied the English language at all. 90% of it was literature analysis.
Even in England it's rare to study Old English or Middle English at high schools. Maybe the literature is studied, but always in translation. Otherwise, you can study both languages at University if you pursue modules in Medieval English. Along with Old Norse if desired.
@@YukiSnowmew I’m from the US as well, and I read Beowulf in my AP English literature class which was equivalent to a college level literature class.
@@happysloth3208 I mean, I'm sure it's taught in some cases, but most people don't take AP courses. I haven't been exposed to Beowulf in college, but I'm also a CS major.
We need a video of Old English vs Dutch. Dutch helped me to understand 4 and 5 much more than English. :D
Also interesting that the word for "cold" in the second one - "ceald" - is pronounced almost with "kh" - like in Swiss German. (And there were no Swiss German videos here too, btw.)
It was a very curious one, and even more curious that it's not with Simon.
Agreed. Ik ben Nederlands aan het leren. It's helpful.
Yeah, I speak the Scandinavian languages, Dutch and German, so this was pretty easy. It would be nice to have a panel with a German, a Dutch and a Swede/a Dane/a Norwegian :)
Frisian gets my vote, but any Frisian speaker is more than likely able to speak Dutch anyway. On top of that the Dutch people study English at school. It would be three Germanic languages in their mental database to learn Old English. Not a one on one comparison.
That's because ceald was a word of the Southwestern dialects in modern-day West Country. The word cold we use in English today is derived from cald, which was more commonly seen in areas in Eastern England including London.
@alanguages there is another video on this channel, you may or may not have seen. Can German speakers understand old english, one of the guys on that also speaks Frisian
Would be interesting to get a west Frisian speaker on the challenge considering it's considered to be English's closest relative
im frisian and speak dutch and english and a bit of german and i can sometimes understand random scandinavian words its so interesting how language evolved over time
@@nfnworldpeace1992 Funnily enough, I looked at some common words in different Germanic languages and Frisian seemed to be closest to Swedish. (if you don't count Norwegian and Danish which also are part of the North Germanic languages).
@@Magnus_Loov I think that depends upon which dialect of Frisian you are comparing to Standard Swedish. North Frisian has a tremendous influence from The Jutes in Jylland (Jutland) who some historians believe migrated south from southwest Modern Sweden (Skone) to the very southwest of Jutland (which is now southwest Denmark; whilst West Fries has gotten much more influence from Dutch and some from low Frankish. The North Frisian's other main element came from Old Aengelsc (The West Germanic Angels, who migrated there later than The Frisians, together with The West (Lower) Saxons. As a Dutch speaker, who also understands West Fries and English, I can understand West Fries better, But, I also understand Dansk as well (though not absolutely fluently, so that also helps me with Nord Fries. So, I was able to read the printed Old English with little trouble, but I didn't get all of it when Norbert spoke very quickly, or slurred his words in a few spots. Someone who speaks Dutch or Frisian, plus a Scandinavian language shouldn't have much trouble with Old English. I was shocked ay=t how well I moved through reading "Beowulf", getting the gist most of the time.
@robbk1 thanks. You answered I had. My late parents were fluent in Dutch and English, although they spoke different Dutch dialects. My father also had some knowledge of West Frisian. I wish I could know if they would have been able to understand Old English.
@@robbk1Well. The way I've remember it, all germanic people originate at the southern part of Scandinavia, where they have spoken Old Norse, or quite propably, whatever proto Norse was before that, until they migrated to north part of Europe, so it's no wonder why most European languages have so much similarities. Celtic languages are a bit "weirdo" among them. That's why it interests me most of all European languages.
This is fascinating. IDK how I got here, but I'm glad I stayed!
I took two years of German in high school, back in the mid-1970s, and tried to guess at individual words. I surprised myself by getting a few right, but only a few. This was still lots of fun.
Dzięki ci za twoją robotę videa twoje są zawsze ciekawe do oglądania ;)
Yes the German word for man is Mann, but the German word “man” still exists as the word for “you”/“one”/“somebody” that involves talking about a nonspecific and indefinite person placeholder.(and not the normal 2nd person pronoun) It wouldn’t surprise me if a few other Germanic languages still had a similar word leftover.
They do and OE also uses man in that way.
*Man* muss das Leben eben nehmen wie das Leben eben ist.
Yes, Swedish still has it, although a lot of younger people are avoiding it these days because it sounds gendered.
@@aprillen really? i thought these days most young swedes are speaking arabic.
gender hu? @@aprillen
Someone tell Andrew that the word he asked about 'Drycraeft' retains a Celtic root that appears both in Irish 'Draíocht', and strangely, in English 'Druidry', both meaning Witchcraft.
Yeah, I caught that too. Drycraeft, Druidcraft...
As a brazilian this amazes me to see how much difference there's between old latin languages and Germanic ones, like two completely different worlds
Latin and German are both Indo-European languages. When you put a lot of words through the mind bending rules of linguistics, the connections become more apparent. Like Latin, old English was a more highly inflected language than modern German or modern English.
I'd say the latin languages have stayed a lot more similar to there vulgar latine
@@javierhillier4252 True. Caballo comes from Vulgar Latin Caballus not classical Equus and Testa - head, comes right from Vulgar Latin for jar
@@thomaszaccone3960 I only know french and its cool to see that testa is 《tête》 in french ê means there used to be an s after the e
@@javierhillier4252 Classical "head" was caput, capitis
best thumbnail I've ever seen.
thanks. lol
I have to agree!!
In the jewellery business we still say that gold is red, if it is "normal" gold. At least in Sweden
A lot of words are still used in Dutch.
In modern Icelandic, maður (accusative 'mann') still means primarily person, human being, rather than 'man'. If you want to specify it's a male, you have to say 'karlmaður' (which, if you use the related English word, you can 'translate' as 'churlish human' :)).
This is very cool. I love languages and to hear Old English spoken today is amazing. Good job on the part of the contestants and host. Really interesting. It's good to know that there are others out there that are as interested in language as I am. Good job!!!
Being Russian I was surprised when I could guess the second word Red, cause my native language is from absolutly another language group, and I can speak only English and a bit of Italian and know only a couple of words and phrasis in German. It was much fun for me! And also I wanna know what 'swa swa' means? So funny expression for my ear:)
@@ASS_ault thanks!
@@dimonarcher4598Jesus is the only way to heaven put all your faith in him and what he did on the cross
Russian is still an IE language and there are many commonalities.
Take words like Leute / Lyudi. Or that the Russian word for face, Lits, also appears in the German word Antlitz (which also means face).
@@BrodyStag Don't go wasting your emotions, lay all your love on me!
As a Frisian, I could only pick a word or two from the speaking. For me it sounded like a complete different phonology was used. The spelling is also not common to me, however when trying to pronounce the words myself, it was much easier to understand to get the rough story. To be fair not getting all the right answers. When hearing old English with a more Scottish accent is much easier for me, probably because the phonology is closer to Frisian.
Regarding man. Dutch has the (slightly ancient) pronoun men, which is not directly coupled to neuter, but refers to a non-specific group of people. "Men zegt dat ...", translates to "People say that ...". German has about the same with "man sagt ...", where man is also neutral.
I was going to say that for me it sounded like someone from the north of Scotland was speaking a dialect I am mostly unfamiliar with in terms of the phonology. I'm from Edinburgh like the man on the left. Also with the 'man sagt' German has a similar thing, but it less means person than 'one says...', as a polite way of not directly referring to someone.
as same way when foreigner read your language ❤ Old english is dialect of Frisian and Scottish are middle english speakers who survived from bring romanization by French
Old English seems so different, looks like other language a mix of german perhaps more into the roots than modern english. I couldn't recognize most of the words but when reading some maybe it would be possible, that's is something so incredible!
old Norse dialects had a significant effect on Old English because of the period of Viking rule over the Danelaw (Northern England, approximately) and King Canute’s rule over all of England (or, more technically, over the English). These results coincided with English adopting various vocabulary elements from Old Norse, and they also coincided with a simplification of Old English grammar, which is notable because Old English and Old Norse were more mutually intelligible in terms of their vocabulary than in terms of their grammar. To illustrate the vocabulary change, the Modern English verb “hog” is borrowed from Old Norse and is cognate with the Modern English verb “hew,” which is from Old English. They have similar meanings of cutting out a space in a piece of wood, but “hog” refers to what a woodworker does when using a chisel to hand carve a mortice into a workpiece in the context of mortice-and-tenon joinery, while “hew” is the more general term which would be applied to most other types of hewing, including flattening the sides of a log with an axe. Similarly, the use of “gate” to mean a street - as in “Highgate” - is a borrowing from Old Norse. “Sky” is an Old Norse term which means “cloud” in modern Scandinavian languages.
I really enjoyed this. Facinating to here my ancient ancestors language spoken. Beautiful. 🎉❤
This was a great episode! I thought the clues were fun and well-written. I do wish that he had translated the clues word for word after revealing the answer, so we could learn more Old English! 😃
Thanks for your videos, Norbert!
17:48 the "Roman connotations" are no coincidence here - the German word "Kaiser" (as well as presumably the "Caser" part of "Caserrice") does derive from the name of Julius Cesar.
In fact, "Kaiser" is much closer to the contemporary pronunciation of "Caesar" than the way the name is pronounced in most langauges today (or the way most Latin speakers pronounce the name today).
Neither way is closer to the classical Latin pronunciation than the other
@@cerdic6305 "Kaiser" as pronounced by Germans totally is closer to the classical pronunciation of the name than the ecclesiastical pronunciation of Latin (which gets both the "C" and the "ae" totally wrong), or indeed the way the name "Cesar" is rendered in most languages, including German.
But OK, I guess it's a matter of argument. You could of course argue that Germans get the "r" and the vowel of the 2nd syllable wrong. I am pretty sure, however, that the German pronunciation of "Kaiser" would at least be recognizable as "Caesar" to a native speaker of classical Latin. Whereas the same speaker would have been completely thrown off by the incorrect rendering of the C as well as of "ae" being a simple vowel rather than a diphtong.
@@arthur_p_dent That's debatable. The 'k', 's' and 'r' sounds are pronounced quite differently in Kaiser and (classical Latin) Caesar, I would say just as differently as in ecclesiastical Latin or modern Italian. My point is that none of them are 'closer' to the classical pronunciation, they are all different but in a variety of ways.
These are so fun! I would love to see the modern English at the end of each round. I get them wrong almost every time, but they're great fun! :)
I only got "Love". All the relationships listed, plus the reference to the heart gave it away.
As someone with virtually no experience in other languages, especially germanic languages, I was proud to get the Star Wars one before they could.
I had remembered that "tide" means "time" in Old English and guessed "langre tide" meant "long time", so I knew that this takes place a long time ago. Then I saw "yfel Caserrice" and based on the sound I figured "yfel" was "evil", and knowing that "kaiserreich" basically means "empire" I should've guessed it here.
Instead, I saw the words "niewe wæpn", my brain autocorrected that to "new weapon" and it immediately clicked that it was Star Wars since the Death Star, a "new weapon" was such a specific and integral part in what otherwise could've been a million different fantasy stories.
But I was absolutely hopeless on the rest. XD
English is a Germanic language. Modern English shares at least 100 words with modern German.
Pretty happy with my performance! A few pauses after the spoken bits, and a few more with text on screen either to confirm or to make a guess in the first place, but I got almost all of them. Like yer man, I never would've gotten Star Wars probably because I've had so little contact with the franchise (let alone seeing it in German!)
Intelligent conversations are the best here!
Btw, with my knowledge of english, icelandic and swedish, i can understand a lot or guess what. Mainly thanks to Icelandic, which still sounds pretty similar
i was blown away by how different it sounded than what i expected
I can't believe I got "Star Wars" before any of you!
I'm not a linguist. I'm just a 42 year old mother of 2 and a paramedic. How did you guys take so long to get to get that one, I've never even seen the movie!
I've always told people German and English are closer languages then you think. Being that I'm not collegically educated on the subject, I assumed it was due to European languages being a combination of Latin, Celtic and Roman languages. Listening to this, English and German are almost similar. It's wild to see which language has separated from those basic linguistic similarities
English comes to the British Isles by means of the invasion of the North-German tribes of the Angles and Saxons (Anglo-Saxons) following the decline of the Roman Empire, which had to withdraw military support from Roman Briton. So it was quite literally brought to the British Isles BY Germans as a Germanic language. Hope this helps :)
Why are you surprised, they're both germanic... >>
Same thing happened to Romance languages: the word for person, which I believe was homine (hard to know what is the nominative singular form of a word when you haven't studied the grammar...) drifted into meaning adult male human, whereas the old word for it, vir (pronounced [wir]) was lost or only kept in expressions related to law, or as the adjective virile. The word for woman was derived from a different word for each descendant language. Funnily enough, while the Latin cognate of wer was extremely transparent, I don't think there was a cognate of wif.
Edit: Caserrice is Caesar Rex, isn't it? Ah, no, it's cognate to Reich. If drycraft means magic, does it literally mean druid-craft?
*Homo, with a long "o" was actually the nominative in Latin. "Homine" is the ablative, the case of means.
"Vir" also relates to Roman ideas of masculinity specifically. Eg: "virtus" which isn't just virtue like in modern English, it's specifically "masculine virture". But otherwise, yes, you can also see this similar phenomenon in other modern languages that have retained case systems. Especially in the plural forms for groups of people, whereby "virility" and "non-virility" start to affect noun-adjective agreement.
Edit:
To help you out, "reich" is also cognate with "rex", they have the same reconstructed IE ancestor. And "Kaiser" directly comes from Latin's "Caesar".
@@Nikelaos_Khristianos yep I tried to write "hard to know" but somehow autocorrect decided I meant "add to know"
@@Nikelaos_Khristianos Correct !
Now paying attention again , Caserrice souns equal to the German " Kaiserreich"
That shift for "man" is actually quite common. It's caused by the fact that people are more likely to call out the gender for females, i.e. saying "a woman" instead of "a person", or " a little girl" instead of "a child". Just compare these 3 sentences: "A man was working the field", "a woman was working the field", and "someone was working the field". If you know that the person you saw was a (wo)man, would you use the third one?
This is very interesting! I have a latin, french, italian, low german, scotch, and scandinavian background (bits of language not ethnicity lol) so there are words that jumped out at me. The sentence structure reminds me most of old norse though :) very cool and fun to listen, pause & try to guess! I got 3 of 5
Scotch? 😂
red coloured gold-copper alloy is a fairly common natural occurrence.
I feel proud I got the last two. "Our Princess is in another castle" I could for some reason understand.
8:35 red gold actually makes a lot of sense if you think of a naturally generated golden nugget which typically contains copper (a mix of copper and pure gold) and, as a result, looks more red than yellow in the light.
maybe related to this but unsure but i know when gilding with gold paints there usually is a red layer underneath to make it look better
The Star Wars was the easiest thing for me and the only time I got the answer from the spoken Old English and he just needed to speak few sentences. The color red I got quite easily when I saw the text. I did get the other words but only after I saw the text and after stopping the video to read it slowly. I didn't understand whole sentences but recognized enough of the words to know what it was about. I'm Icelandic and that helped. I recognized some words because of Icelandic, but also my knowledge of German helped a lot, and Danish and of course English.
23:34 I did figure out that it was something about 1985, and I considering that a mushroom is a "Schwammerl" in Austrian German, _should_ have figured out that "Swamm" could be a mushroom.
Well, I never played Super Mario, so likely wouldn't have figured this one out anyway. In fact, the year number was the first thing I figured out and the first thing I thought of from 1985 was Back To The Future. But this one obviously didn't fit at all.
An amazing video. I really wondered if modern speakers would understand old English. And here I have my answer. ... Lots of German in it! Looks like french doesn't help much here, and neither does Spanish. Fascinating video. Thanks!
Oh I love this! It's like Old English University Challenge! 😍
I think from a modern German perspective the written Old English is relatively fast understandable if one get used to know how every letter/written text is pronounced and how some patterns have to be re-arranged (a bit practicing to get the 'feeling', also in general for the older way to say something). I noticed for instance that in old English often words with 'c' changed in modern German to 'ch' like 'ic' (old English) is 'ich' (German), 'rice' (old English became 'Reich' (German) ... sometimes the additional knowledge of English helps like with 'worolda' (German 'Welt', but modern English 'world' is closer) etc.
As an Englishman, German is easier for me to understand than old English
@@dylanmurphy9389 this might also be the case due to a shared scientific (and some old Clerical) stream of words from Latin/Greek. I mean, German sentences like 'Anna und Peter studieren Geologie und Mathematik an der Humboldt Universitaet in Berlin.' are really not difficult to understand for English speakers due to that ...
And with Dutch even closer! 'ic' -> ik, rice -> rijk (reads as ryke), worolda -> wereld
On the last one, I could understand it was the year 1985. Only because I know French and they write out their years in long-form
Eg: 1985 would be "mille neuf-cent quatre-vingt cinq" which is literally "thousand, nine hundred, four-twenty, five"
11:29 OE "wer" = cognate with Latin "vir" and Irish "fear"
I totally cracked up over the thumbnail, where the creepy-angry old-english scholar frustrates latter native speakers via laptop
I somehow clocked Star Wars immediately because I perceived "aer lange tide" to be "a long time ago" and "steorrwege" to be "star-way"->"galaxy".
As a child I would go to the pictures to see a film. Thanks Rob for jogging my memory. It was very interesting to hear Old English spoken so fluently, I wonder what an Icelander would make of it?
Yeah, our English History professor said modern Icelandic is pretty much the same as Old English. I've been in doubt for ages:)
@@redhippiegirl интересно, почему так получилось - ведь жители Исландии прекрасно понимают ещё и старые скандинавские тексты на письме
As a Polish native speaker that speaks also English and Norwegian I must say that knowing Norwegian helps me more with this than knowing actuall English. 😂
This one was fun!
For the final one I picked up the spoken "Game from 1985 or 1958, or maybe 1850?", "red hat" and "the kings daughter", but didn't connect it with the word princess. If I did, I'm pretty sure I would have solved it immediately. Instead my mind got stuck at the Little Red Riding Hood, but that didn't make any sense with games and kings daughter. :D
It surprised me that none of the participants picked up the red hat. Maybe they just didn't mention it.
(Swedish/Norwegian/Danish/Dutch/German/English)
Yeah, i thought the year was 1958 too. None of the clues would have helped me, since I never got into playing video games. I did play some Legend of Zelda and a couple of other games i cant remember, way back in 1989/1990, on my freshman college roommate’s old Commodore 64 computer. Also some Space Invaders on an arcade type machine they had in a restaurant in my Swedish hometown, and Ms.Pac Man, on another arcade style console another ex-roommate had in our living room.
as a language speaker this was most satisfactory
English 'man' is 'Mann' in German, but we also have a 'man' in German (same pronunciation) which we kind of use like a neutral third person (singular) pronoun when we talk about generalized behaviour of/instructions for people. So we probably get the origin of the word better than English speakers.
Can you do "Can modern Italian speakers understand Italian from opera?"
Sounds like a great idea! lol
I think the answer is “no” but not because it is old Italian, its just because it is very hard to understand that way of singing (1800 italian is not so different from current one)
@@mattonthemoon225 Old and modern Italian are similar. Even texts from 980 AD are still readable. This is because Italians have been speaking it since the end of World War II. Thus, Italian does evolve over time, in fact, it has changed more in the last 20 years than in all of its history. By the way, the most challenging part of an opera is not the grammar or vocabulary but how the words are sung/stretched.
@@DBGabriele penso di aver detto esattamente la stessa cosa... o no? :)
@@mattonthemoon225 hai ragione, cretino io XD
I hope they talk about the 20th century a lot if I ever get transported back in time, because these are the only ones I got 😂
I understood barely anything for the first one. But after Dan explained his thought, I was like, isn't the answer stars?
The first two where the easiest for me. I think this is a lot easier if you speak both German and English. I'm also from northern German and have basic understand of Plattdeutsch (law German) which also helped. 🙂 Great video! I love languages, old and modern. 😁
I got the last one although English is my 2nd language. I read "gamen" which i assume is game, then "man plegeth" as person play(player). Also king's daughter, aka a princess. I immediately guessed Super Mario or the Legend of Zelda. I feel proud of myself.
Swedish here. Not too hard. I got 2 and 4 just from listening. 4 in particular was dead easy - got it during the second sentence and started laughing! 3 was the hardest. Didn't get that one.
I am not a native English speaker, nor do I speak any of the European languages. I actually speak Urdu, and yet I guessed the second one correctly. Therefore, I don't believe the gentlemen's knowledge of languages other than English actually helped them guess the Old English, rather it was the little nuances and bits and pieces of the text here and there that helped. In a way, if all other words except those specific bits were replaced by gibberish, they'd have guessed the actual word anyhow. Just my take on this whole exercise.
I'm from England but I am incredibly surprised that I actually got the first one.
Glad to say I got the film in the fourth one without the text. When I saw "tha Meahte" I was sure (macht, Macht, makt in Dutch, German, Swedish), but a little harder for English speakers.
More English people should learn there ancient tounge just like the Welsh learn Welsh Old English is a beautiful language and the language of our Ancestors great to see a Scot and Irish man taking a interest in our old language 👍🏻🏴⚔️
It was also spoken in Scotland to