The Latin word huswiva

This article on the completion of a Medieval Latin dictionary (after only 100 years of effort) has an interesting note on the word housewife, which apparently made an appearance as Latin huswiva before ever being seen in English:

Some of the words of Old and Middle English that were ‘borrowed’ in the Latin language were found in earlier Latin texts than the first appearance of these words in English.

Many we still use today in a modern form, for example, the Medieval Latin huswiva corresponds to modern English housewife, found as early as 12th century Latin texts.

The word of course is Germanic, but looking at the written word alone Latin may have beat English to the chase.

Wiktionary's etymology of the word is not nearly as interesting.

Etymology

house +‎ wife

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English is actually Scandinavian (northern Germanic)

According to this link provided in a comment by a poster today which has made it very easy to write today's post. It reminds me a bit of a book I mentioned three years ago called Le français ne vient pas du latin which also makes a somewhat unorthodox yet interesting claim.

Back to the link: the claim is that Old English did exist as we know it, but then later died out and the language that took its place was Northern Germanic, naturally with a very heavy Old English influence. There was a lot of bitter confrontation for a while and by the time the Normans invaded England the two had more or less merged. One more reason: many of the words said to be adopted from Norse were very basic words like big and egg and skin, and to have adopted so many basic words when Old English already had its own words for them is difficult to believe. The final claim is word order, with some examples in the article as well as an article I wrote a few years back on why Norwegian is the easiest language for English speakers to learn.

I think I'll submit that link to /r/linguistics as well...wait, somebody already did today.

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Ormin does not approve of spelling bee

Saw an article on a spelling bee today and suddenly Ormin came to mind. According to the article:

Newcombe, 12, a Toronto eighth-grader, faltered on the word "sorites," misspelling it psorites...She lost to Sukanya Roy of Pennsylvania, who won on the word "cymotrichous."

Speakers of other languages, and ancient speakers of English itself, would find such an orthography ridiculous. Ormin was one of the first advocates of an orthography that represented English as spoken:

He states that since he dislikes the way that people are mispronouncing English, he will spell words exactly as they are pronounced, and describes a system whereby vowel length and value are indicated unambiguously.

Orm's chief innovation was to employ doubled consonants to show that the preceding vowel is short and single consonants when the vowel is long...His devotion to precise spelling was meticulous; for example, having originally used and inconsistently for words such as "beon" and "kneow," which had been spelled with in Old English, at line 13,000 he changed his mind and went back to change all "eo" spellings, replacing them solely with "e" alone ("ben" and "knew"), to reflect the pronunciation.

Ormin resurrected today witnessing 21st century English would probably either utterly despair of what has become of the language he wrote and spoke, or go to Iceland.

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BBC's Old and Middle English language samples

I just noticed today that BBC has a nice page here about the evolution of the English language, with two samples for each era (out of ten) that can be read as well as heard - one sample can be heard by clicking on the jester, the other through the microphone icon in the centre. By about stage 5 the language already mostly resembles the modern tongue so it becomes much less interesting, but the samples in the beginning are fun. English really comes across as a language with a short history here, and when it turns from a heavily inflected language into a more synthetic language it suddenly becomes really easy to understand.

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Can students be tricked into learning Germanic languages?

Every time a Eurobarometer or some other poll comes out the UK is shown to be one of the worst nations in Europe at foreign languages, and the US and Canada plus most other English-speaking nations are also quite bad. At the same time, knowing an extra language at graduation on average brings at least a few extra thousand dollars a year (in IT in Scotland for example those that know extra languages make up to £3,000 extra a year at entry level and continue to earn more than their peers afterwards too), so an extra language is definitely something a student would like to have, if it wasn't too hard to acquire.

It's now 2010 and China is the world's second-largest economy, but let's not forget which countries remain at the top of the Human Development Index. Languages with Germanic languages other than English are in bold.

1. Norway
2. Australia
3. Iceland
4. Canada
5. Ireland
6. Netherlands
7. Sweden
8. France
9. Switzerland
10. Japan
11. Luxembourg
12. Finland
13. United States
14. Austria
15. Spain
16. Denmark
17. Belgium
18. Italy
19. Liechtenstein
20. New Zealand
21. United Kingdom
22. Germany
23. Singapore
24. Hong Kong
25. Greece

That's almost half of the top 25, and a total GDP of $6.8 trillion (more than China, and three times that of the UK).

Now let's take a quick look at the attitude of a student learning a foreign language vs. another subject, English literature.

Foreign language: begin with nearly context-free simple sentences, work on conjugation, learn about grammatical gender, the language doesn't relate to anything else the student studies for at least a year or two. Ich bin Portier, Du bist Portier, Bist du Portier? Nein, ich bin nicht Portier. Ist das Wasser? Ja, das ist das Wasser. Ist das Tee? Nein, das ist nicht Tee.

English literature: students dive into anything they can understand and are assigned to read. Rime of the Ancient Mariner, why not. Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare naturally.

Now what's interesting about the second example is that due to their age many of these works are already nearly foreign languages. And once you get to Beowulf it really is a foreign language, as you're working with something no more comprehensible to an English speaker than German or Dutch at first glance. And yet students tend to dive right in. Let's take a look at one example from the Canterbury Tales, with the words and grammatical functions common to modern Germanic languages in bold:

Whilom, as olde stories tellen us,

Ther was a duc that highte Theseus;

Of Atthenes he was lord and governour,

And in his tyme swich a conquerour,

5 That gretter was ther noon under the sonne.

Ful many a riche contree hadde he wonne,

What with his wysdom and his chivalrie;

He conquered al the regne of Femenye,

That whilom was ycleped Scithia,

10 And weddede the queene Ypolita,

And broghte hir hoom with hym in his contree,

With muchel glorie and greet solempnytee,

And eek hir yonge suster Emelye.

And thus with victorie and with melodye

15 Lete I this noble duc to Atthenes ryde,

And al his hoost, in armes hym bisyde.

A quick glance over the rest of the Knight's Tale shows a number of other words: myn (my, German mein), spak (past tense of speak, German sprach and Dutch sprak), biseken (German besuchen), thurgh (through, German durch), starf (died, German starb, Dutch stierf), neither to been yburyed nor ybrent (y here is the same as the Germanic ge- prefix), sheene (beautiful, German schön), brennynge (burning, German Verbrennung), bleynte (turned pale, German bleichte), and many, many more.

So let's skip straight to the conclusion in order to avoid the post becoming overly long. Since students have no problem with taking on Middle and Old English literature, a curriculum should be devised that balances appreciation of literature with learning about the language itself in its previous iterations, in particular in respects where it used to resemble other Germanic languages used today. There would not need to be any outright mention that this or that word is similar to this or that word in German/Dutch/Norwegian or what have you, it would simply focus on the words and grammar that would prove most useful to a student later on.

Thus, instead of just writing about what Chaucer means here or why Shakespeare said this or that, there would be a bit more of a focus on what is actually written. There would be vocabulary tests, translating sentences from Middle English to modern English, that sort of thing. How far back in English literature the students could get before going on to university is hard to say, but the older the text the more it begins to resemble Icelandic as well as Western Germanic languages, as apparently English and Icelandic used to be mutually intelligible back around the time Beowulf was written.

The end goal would not be to have students fluent in other Germanic languages without ever having seen them (that's still impossible), it would simply be to give them a familiarity with them that gives them the courage to dive right in when truly studying them for the first time, perhaps in university. German and Dutch in particular should look and even sound a bit familiar, and almost feel like a different version of the Middle and Old English that they have become used to over the years. And even if they don't go on to a Germanic language they still end up with a superb knowledge of their own tongue, which can only be useful.

One extra bonus: a slightly improved knowledge of French and Latin too.


If I feel up to it I may devise a sample page or two or three of this curriculum I would be interested in seeing in order to show exactly what I mean. Any thoughts?

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LibriVox's language learning collection, part 1

LibriVox has an interesting page here containing a fairly haphazard but interesting collection of language learning-related materials. While some of them are fairly standard (Arabic, Greek, etc.) there is quite a bit of IAL or extinct/reconstructed language material there too, with Esperanto, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon. Some of the texts there are about languages themselves (all in English) and I wondered at first what a book from the 19th century about Baha'i was doing there but taking a quick look it contains references to the Baha'i view on international languages, which is that humanity should have one in order to aid progress.

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Book review: Beowulf as translated by Seamus Heaney

Well, I finally got around to finishing the famed translation of Beowulf by Seamus Heaney. The only other translation I've read has been the Gummere translation, since it's available for free online, so I won't be able to give any insight into any other translations besides these. The Heaney translation though seems to be the best version for a reader that either has no plans to learn Old English or is just starting, and still sees the original text as more or less gibberish. The Gummere translation adheres much more closely to the original text, which also means that it includes some pretty archaic terms that those unfamiliar with them will have to look up the meaning of. Welkin is a good example right from the beginning, a word that means clouds/heavens, but unknown to anyone that hasn't read a lot of Shakespeare.

So this line:

...syððan ǣrest wearð
fēa‐sceaft funden:   hē þæs frōfre gebād,
wēox under wolcnum,   weorð‐myndum ðāh,

becomes this in the Gummere translation:

awing the earls. Since erst he lay
friendless, a foundling, fate repaid him:
for he waxed under welkin, in wealth he throve...

whereas Heaney writes it thus.

A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on as his powers waxed and his worth was proved.

So no mention here of welkin, nor erst, and this can be seen throughout the book. At the same time, this makes it much more readable to the modern reader, especially in a few notable places. I made note of one passage that I particularly liked in order to mention it here later, and interestingly enough it's also included on the Amazon.com review page introducing the book. It's the description of the swamp where Grendel's mother and all the other monsters live, and Heaney's description is phenomenal. First the original text:

And now Heaney's translation.

Chilling. Now the Gummere translation:

Having read Heaney's translation it's now not too hard to understand, but if this had been the first translation I had read I would have just read over this without feeling a single chill. Some parts don't even seem to make sense: "So wise lived none of the sons of men", "this holt should seek", "on the brink he yields ere he brave the plunge to hide his head". Closer to the original, but bereft of all feeling to the average reader who has never encountered Beowulf for the first time.

That being said, after reading Heaney's translation one is able to appreciate the one by Gummere, as it adheres more closely to the original and does a far better job of acting as a bridge to it. So the recommendation I would give isn't one or the other, but simply order: begin by reading the Heaney translation, glance at the Old English text and see what you can make out, and then after reading it move on to another more literal translation (Gummere or another) and see how much more of the original text you can understand while still keeping in mind the overall atmosphere that Heaney's translation has given thanks to its clarity it gives modern readers.

Even better though for a second (or perhaps third) reading would be a fully marked-up version, like this (image here).

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Comparing Old English with modern Icelandic

For anyone wishing to compare Old English with modern Icelandic, there's no better way than referring to this translation of Beowulf in Icelandic from 1983. Or for a quick and easy example, here are the three languages (modern English included) stacked up next to each other as Beowulf reaffirms his first boast to defeat Grendel.

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Newly Discovered Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem Much, Much Gayer than Previously Thought

I suddenly had the urge to try my hand at an Onion-like article of my own.

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Random links for 25 February 2010

Firefox has too many tabs open at the moment with articles and links that are worth a mention but perhaps not their own post, so here they are in no particular order.

A review of a new dictionary of Old English, which so far has been completed up to the letter G (out of a total of 22 letters) and expects to have between 33,000 and 35,000 headwords. There are a few interesting etymological notes there as well, such as the origin of the word baleful.

New Scientist on symbols on cave paintings that appear to be a real code or language, not just random scribblings. Apparently studies of cave paintings have been so distracted by the imagery itself for so long that nobody really thought to check the tiny scribblings next to the drawings. See here and here to take a look at the actual symbols and their frequency for yourself.

Also remember that simply tracing languages back to their source doesn't necessarily help us discover the origin of language, because for all we know there was, or were other languages that preceded the ancestor of all the ones we speak and simply died out. This talk mentions that a bit:



Washington Post has an article today on Kazakhstan and uranium. I mentioned back in 2008 that Kazakhstan was set to become the world's largest producer of uranium in a year, and now it is.

Times Online has a fascinating piece today on a British PoW who snuck into Auschwitz during WWII.

Miles O'Brien on why he supports the White House's new plans for NASA.

Phobos flyby season is beginning again, and the ESA's Mars Express will have a particularly close encounter (just 50 km above the surface) on the 5th of March.

An article here is on the partnership between the EU and Russia on space technology. The Russian Soyuz rocket will launch from Guiana for the first time this year.

Finally, here's an optical illusion along with instructions on how to make your own.

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The Onion on a sudden reversion to Anglo-Saxon sentence structure

The Onion just released a short piece of fake radio news on a sudden reversion to a more Anglo-Saxon sentence structure for English.



And to make it easier for people to parse, here's the script. Someone more familiar with Anglo-Saxon will be able to tell how accurate this is. This syntax resembles modern Persian quite a bit.

Rules grammar change, English traditional replaced to be new syntax. The Onion Radio News it's Redland Doyle I'm. The U.S. Grammar Secretary that no more will rules English follow announced today, the changes verbs, verb clauses and adjectives placing involved frequent with random shuffling or elimination conjunctions and prepositions of. Grammar Secretary to according:

Is mood structure loosely on obscure 800-year-old pre-Medieval Anglo-Saxon syntax based.

This week beginning America across, all dictionaries, highway signs and other books or objects writing upon revised to fit new syntax will be.

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Marked up Beowulf > fully translated Beowulf

Beowulf is not my specialty so as far as I know a version like this may already exist in book form, but the Wikipedia page on Old English has an example of the first few lines of Beowulf in a kind of half translated and marked-up form that looks like this:


Thanks to this version all of a sudden the formerly unintelligible vocabulary in the original text makes sense in a way that a full translation doesn't help at all. Compare it to this version, where either terms are used that don't help with terms in the original text (foes in place of þreatum) or terms that agree with the original text to the extent that they are impossible to understand -- how does the reader know that welkin is supposed to mean cloud? Well, an astute German reader might, but that's no help to most.

So I suppose what I'm saying is that if there's a book out there written in exactly this style then I'd like to buy it, and if one doesn't exist then it should. The overall feel of a marked-up version like this is kind of like having a friend from the 10th century sitting next to you who is explaining the whole tale as it is being read. "Threat here means enemy!" "An atheling is kind of like a prince." "Whale-road is a clever way of saying sea!" and so on.


Edit: this link may be of interest as well - it turns out that the bones of Princess Eadgyth (910 - 946) may have been found.

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