language

[thedarkproject]

English is strange.

In the simple past tense, we say "I solved" but to negate it, we say "I didn't solve"? Not only do you add in the negation as you might expect, but you have to add the auxiliary verb "did" because you can't negate normal verbs (unlike French where you surround it with 'ne' and then something like 'pas' or 'jamais' to signify the type of negation), which then means the original verb gets changed to match the auxiliary, so it becomes almost a different tense entirely.

But in the future tense, you can interchange "I will solve" and "I won't solve" easily enough with no confusion. Unless you start thinking about what the hell "won't" actually stands for.

At the moment I'm trying to teach myself Old English from a book, which is actually going better than I had expected, although even back then there seem to be a lot of irregularities much like the above one in Modern English. A year or two back, I posted on here about the attempt to translate Wikipedia into Old English. Back then it was all gobbledegook to me; now I can actually get the general gist of some of the articles. Maybe it'll inspire me back into learning German eventually.

Comments

[velvetchamber.livejournal.com]

It's the Gaelic looking words that confuse me in my attempts at comprehending Old English. Apart from those it looks like a weird mix of German, Icelandic and English with "C"s thrown in everywhere.

[thedarkproject]

Apparently most people think that Gaelic had very little influence on English, so I assume it's just that they look similar, with all the 'æ' stuff everywhere. The rest does look quite like German and Icelandic, and the 'C's in Old English mainly correspond to the 'sh' sound apparently.

I'd love to learn Gaelic too eventually, though whether the Irish or Scottish variety I haven't decided.

[velvetchamber.livejournal.com]

It's not the "æ"s, I am quite used to those, although I am not used to the stroke above it. It's words like "nīwlicum" that look queer to me

[thedarkproject]

Aha, right. Those are just pronunciation guides to signify longer vowels. I don't know if many or even any original texts featured those.

Do you know what nīwlicum means? Is it 'knowledge'?

[velvetchamber.livejournal.com]

I do not think so, judging from the context I found it in. I found it in this sentence here on the page on the second world war:

Sēo Ōðru Woruldgūþ wæs blōdigosta, deorwierþosta, and hīehst gūþ on nīwlicum stǣre.

I also notice that some of the modern stuff in there seems to borrow from Icelandic, and adapt it to Old English. Like the word for radio (which I can't find again) looks like an adaptation of the Icelandic word for radio: "Útvarp". Which is neat, since it is a composite of the words "út" (out) and the verp "varpa" (to throw), essentially meaning to broadcast, and these words can both be found in Old English and hence the composite is easy and looks fairly natural to me.

[thedarkproject]

That line looks to me something resembling, "The Second World War was the bloodiest, deadliest, and biggest war in known history", or something like that. No doubt I've got some of those words wrong though. The last word looks like it could also mean "star", after all.

I often wonder how modern writers of Old English decide on how to write modern words that didn't exist a thousand years ago, and I suppose that looking at the etymology of similar words in Icelandic or German and constructing them similarly is probably the most faithful way.

[velvetchamber.livejournal.com]

It does mean history, or at any rate that's the name of the category that also includes the battle of Hastings. That still leaves the mystery of where the original word comes from. In Icelandic knowledge can be any one of these words: Þekking, kunnátta, vitneskja, vitund or viska. In German I know these words for knowledge: Wissen, Ehrfahrung and Erkenntnis, none of which really match with "nīwlicum" or knowledge. Do you have any bright ideas?