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godriqk

GODRIQK

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godriqk · 7 years

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parallel ⟡

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godriqk · 7 years

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godriqk · 7 years

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“Just divorced the son of a bitch” oh my god

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godriqk · 7 years

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Thus the story of English, from when it hit British shores 1,600 years ago to today, is that of a language becoming delightfully odd. Much more has happened to it in that time than to any of its relatives, or to most languages on Earth. Here is Old Norse from the 900s CE, the first lines of a tale in the Poetic Edda called The Lay of Thrym. The lines mean ‘Angry was Ving-Thor/he woke up,’ as in: he was mad when he woke up. In Old Norse it was:

Vreiðr vas Ving-Þórr / es vaknaði.

The same two lines in Old Norse as spoken in modern Icelandic today are:

Reiður var þá Vingþórr / er hann vaknaði.

You don’t need to know Icelandic to see that the language hasn’t changed much. ‘Angry’ was once vreiðr; today’s reiður is the same word with the initial v worn off and a slightly different way of spelling the end. In Old Norse you said vas for was; today you say var – small potatoes.

In Old English, however, ‘Ving-Thor was mad when he woke up’ would have been Wraþmod wæs Ving-Þórr/he áwæcnede. We can just about wrap our heads around this as ‘English’, but we’re clearly a lot further from Beowulf than today’s Reykjavikers are from Ving-Thor.

(cont.)

Most of us know that English is a stew comprised of bits and pieces of various languages over the course of a thousand years or so, but it’s more like a leftover trash casseroles you throw together out of whatever was randomly left in the fridge. This is the most engaging mini-essay on the whys and hows I’ve ever read.

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godriqk · 7 years

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