Comments | martyfan: ENGLISH DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY

martyfan

ENGLISH DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY

Sep 16, 2009 17:45

So I've had a few people talk to me lately who are convinced that Shakespeare wrote in Old English. Being an English major and a passionate yet asexual lover of books, this bugs the ever-loving shit out of me. Therefore I have decided to write up a quick history lesson... ish... thing. Including examples!

( This gets really long. )

there ael goes again

Comments 5

foxywriter September 17 2009, 00:45:53 UTC

As I said earlier, I SHARE YOUR PAIN! I get to hear it every year when I teach Shakespeare to the high schoolers, and I'm so over it. When I was writing and researching PIT2, I learned in intimate detail about old English, middle English, and modern English. The teacher in me cringes to hear the kiddies today be so uninformed!

martyfan September 17 2009, 01:00:23 UTC

I learned a lot of this in British Literature last year - we started not with the actual writing, but the history of how the language evolved, which was kind of awesome. Learned all sorts of nifty tidbits I never knew before, like the swear words vs. "polite" words thing, as well as why it changed to be the wacky hybrid that it is now. (Although it took me until taking German this year that I understand our silent "gh"s, for example, night - it comes from the German word nicht, where the "ch" is pronounced kind of like cat hissing ( ... )

cleothemuse September 17 2009, 01:47:59 UTC

Allow me to introduce to you a friend of mine: aelfgyfu_mead. Aelf is a professor of Anglo-Saxon Studies (or some such), and gets giddy over Old English stuff.

Philology is fascinating, and early this evening, I was discussing with my parents how the rapid advance of communications technology is probably the only reason English-speakers across the world can still somewhat understand one another!

martyfan September 17 2009, 03:03:07 UTC

Hee, I've read some of Aelf's fanfics (as well as the Beowulf rants). Good stuff! A guest speaker in my Brit Lit class last year (husband of our professor) told us all about how he got to actually handle the actual manuscript that Beowulf is in. I'll have to share that story sometime. :)

I found out an interesting thing the other day - the reason why languages like Dutch are so phonetically spelled is because every ten years or so, they revise all their spellings to keep up with any pronunciation shifts. Imagine what that would be like if Anglophone countries did that. England, Australia, and the US would no longer be able to talk to each other without a lot of huhwhatnow?

cleothemuse September 17 2009, 03:09:36 UTC

The Soviets did that to the Russian language, too. Double letters were removed, spellings were standardized, and all but a few of the more common verbs were given a consistent conjugation.

Eep, yes. There'd be enough problems just in the U.S. itself! (Now is that the Southern spelling, "eys", the Upper-Midwest "ays", or the traditional "ice"?)