this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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"You are before in my king."
Þæt sceal wesan: "þū stenst beforan þām cyninge".
Interesting, knowing German and modern English makes this about as decipherable as Dutch.
Old English was more mutually understandable with Old Norse than German and Dutch are today as I recall. Northern English dialects still show the influence of Old Norse on the English they spoke not just in location names but in vocabulary and some grammar. It’s been years since I studied this in grad school, so please take it with a grain of salt.
There’s a guy on YouTube who, among other things, makes language intelligibility videos. Here’s the one he did on how well German speakers can understand Old English
This video is also a good one!
Or this one.
As a Dutch speaker, I can understand some of the Old English, but not all of it.
As a Dutch person, I disagree ;)
But yeah, knowing Dutch, English and German makes this pretty understandable, right up until someone starts to speak it.
The same applies to Danish. Sorta kinda readable, impossible to understand when spoken.
Well, as a German I understand about as much old English as I would Dutch.
@[email protected] and to you,
in archaic Dutch it'd be "Du/doe staatst voor den koning(e)". Some dialects still use "du". But standard would be "Je staat voor de koning".
So archaic Dutch is much closer to German still.
I am conversational in Norwegian (basically Danish in written form) and fluent in English (my native language) Dutch, when you figure out the pronunciation and do a bit of mental figuring, is about 40% for me. I know the gist of what is being written (less of what is being said).
Gebruikersnaam klopt!
I can actually mostly interperet that. It's rough, and I couldn't speak it, but I might be able to get a vague sense of what's being said.
In Icelandic "Þú stendur fyrir framan þínum konungi"
So how much old English from Beowulf do you “get” when it is pronounced. Basically the English had forgotten how to read Old English and it was a Danish/Icelandic linguist who helped figure out the language again.
That could also work, "þū stenst beforan þīnum cyninge".
As a Dutch person I never realized I might be able to make sense of Icelandic! This sentence is quite decipherable
I speak both, there is plenty of vocabulary differences but the sentence structure is almost identical and most germanic vocab is shared. Dutch has a lot of Latin vocab which is non-existent in Icelandic (introductie for example).
Icelandic also comes with a grammar DLC with declined nouns and 3 genders that also apply to definite articles that are suffixes instead of standalone words.
"Ég hef ekki gert neitt" Is translated as "Ik heb niets gedaan"
"Hann kann að tala eins og faðir minn" Is "Hij weet hoe to spreken zoals m'n vader."
But then you get "Stjórnmálamenn eru krabbamein samfélagsins" which is harder. Stjórn-mála-menn is rooted in "Steering", mál has the same root as "meal" but here means a case such as legal case "mealtime" in Icelandic has it's counterpart "máltíð". Menn is English "men". Eru is same as "are". Krabba-mein is "crab" and "mean" which means cancer. Sam-félag is Dutch "samen" and English "fellowship" which means society.
It's weird how pretty much every word can be separated into pieces and looked up to see where the shared between other germanic languages. The usage has obviously changed a lot in the last 1500 years but the connection is still there. :)
I'm autistic btw, this is one of my special interests, sorry if it's too long.
Sorry for bad Dutch spelling, I never learned to spell Dutch.
Cool, thanks for explaining!
Which means ... ?
"You stand before the king."
"Could you send for the hall porter? There appears to be a frog in my bidet."