(no subject)

Jun 17, 2007 11:29

I am having one of my periodic attempts to learn some German.  I don't know what it is, the language just seems to slide off me like oil.  So I've been going through some of Rilke's sonnets with a dictionary.  As always, I spend most of the time obsessing over how similar all the words I don't understand are to Old English equivalents.  The first of the Sonnette an Orpheus begins:

Da stieg ein Baum.

Which, I need scarcely remind you, means “there grew a tree”.  But in Old English you would say

Þær stag an beam.

Which is virtually identical.  A little later the half-line

Und alles schwieg.

can be expressed analogously in OE (though we lose the verb rhymes)

Ond eall swigode.

...whereas in English we have to say “and all was silent”.  Which makes me wonder why this verb died out, since we actually have no word that means “be silent”.  And then I realised that both these verbs, stigan and swigan (= German steigen and schweigen) survived into Middle English as sty and swie, and in fact sty lasted well into the 17th century.  I now plan to use both of them as often as possible, in an attempt to force them back into circulation.  Join me!

So anyway, I wasted about 2 hours translating the whole sonnet into Old English, which did more for my Anglo-Saxon than my German, and because it's Rilke I still don't really have a clue what he's going on about anyway.  Eventually I just decided to cut out the middleman, and went back to reading some Beowulf.  With those two interesting words from Rilke still in my head, I came across another one!  Sigan, which means “go down, fall, descend”.  (Here the German is not much help, because in Germany the equivalent verb seigen now means “strain”.)  In English it became sigh.  I have never seen it before, but it didn't become obsolete till about 150 years ago!

They all rhyme!  Instead of rising and falling we could be talking about stying and sighing.  How is it that words like this go out of fashion?  ALL OF YOU STOP NOT USING THESE AWESOME WORDS!

words, german, old english, languages

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