Old English and Its Closest Relatives

[ewx]

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog calls for a celebration of ancient languages. I’m not sufficiently confident in the pronunciation of languages that are in any case no longer spoken to follow suggestions involving putting up videos, but I can certainly write about some of what I learned from Orrin Robinson’s book Old English and Its Closest Relatives.

Comments

[hairyears]

Any thoughts on Late West Saxon?

[3c66b]

gg for 'ng' is a Classical Greek orthographic convention; that's presumably where Gothic got it from.

[ewx]

Yes, definitely, it's basically the Greek alphabet adapted to the Gothic language. IIRC some detect influence from contemporary Greek syntax in the writing style too (Gothic having relatively free word order).