Old English and Middle English
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- čas přidán 21. 08. 2024
- This video lecture is a part of the course 'An Introduction to English Linguistics' at the University of Neuchâtel. This is session 16, the first one in a series of two that address the history of English. In this one, I talk about Old English and Middle English, highlighting selected aspects of their morphological, syntactic, and lexical characteristics.
One cornerstone is missing: The invasion of the Danes and Norwegians in the nineth century AD. This had a great influence on the English language.
At 14:15, the video turns to that issue.
I admire the manner in which the lecturer, with facts in-hand and intelligent balance, just gets on with learning us this.
There's no display of cleverness &c
Wow, I never realized quite how Germanic English really is, especially with the Old English pronouns. Makes a lot of sense in the historical context you put it in with the arrival of those various groups into Britain in 460. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. I'm just a regular person interested in the subject and felt this was very well presented.
Hello, Martin. I am a Spanish student of English Studies and this year I'm struggling with Old English, which is even harder for a non native speaker.Thanks for your video, you already saved my head last term in Sociolinguistics.
Thanks for watching, Jorge! And good luck with your studies!
thanx martin....your video helps me much in my studies of english history which I'going to do examination on july this year...god bless you
Kiosso Mwambashi Good luck with your exams!!
Super interesting! We especially liked your reading of OE and ME with the Modern English right next to it. My daughter and I never thought about flexible word order because of inflections (
Thank you so much, you actually helped me. I have an exam this week and you explained the information in an easy way. Keep going.
When you played the audio for Middle English, it was much too quiet and seemed slightly muffled; it was almost impossible to hear, unforunately.
16:07 Minor quibble: "ill" is actually the Old Norse word and "sick" is the Anglo-Saxon word
Your video is truly magnificent since you succinctly showed the features of both Old and Middle English. This was an astonishingly well-prepared presentation and I utterly reveled in listening to your input. Thank you for this flawless and enlightening attempt which has indeed been very successful.
Many thanks for your kind words!
Man- you had me laughing at the Scotsman problem joke. Nice dry delivery.
That was the joke? "Don't invite the German's." I've heard a much better one. In Scotland if you want the hotel staff to waken you, you ask them to "knock you up". Going back to a time where someone would knock on your door at the appropriate time. I don't know, if they changed the policy to avoid the shocked look on the faces (outraged, if they're women) of the guests.
I really like english with more germanic words to it but sadly most of the words we used today are swayed by french. Thanks for the video Sir!
Because when a country becomes rich... the languages of others has to change. Thats invasion in a different form sadly
Agree. They are words from an invasion from 1066!
I like this video ... Thank you very much..
Sometimes I wish if the Old-English still exist
I wholly on your own will-if you truly love English ,you should speak and write it like me ,only with the help of truly english ot at least with the help of other germanic words,throwing away all these latin-rooted and greek-rooted words which mar his loveliest west-germanic ringing and feel after the Norman's takeover.By saying this ,I do not mean that you should not speak Latin ,Italian or Greek tongue ,what I mean is that you ought not to inset their latin and greek words in your english speech.Now I believe that I made myself thoroughly well understood.So not-english and not-germanic words like "very","exist " and so on ought to be kept always at bay.
@@classy_dweller you are right. The word "bay" is a loanword though.
If only Harold won the battle of Hastings!
Just a note by the by...there will have been plenty of variation in old English accents in much the same way as there are today in modern English=Northumbrian anglo saxon will have been different in sound to say wessex anglo saxon. Just in case people are confused by the way the lords prayer was read (for example). Nice video. Thanks!
Northumberland in the Danelaw was from the North Sea across to North bank of R Mersey
Just a quick note of thanks for taking the time to share this here. It's fascinating stuff. Now I'm off to check out your other offerings.
Thank you. I really appreciate the video and your comments on the development of English. Great job.
Great! Thank's a lot!!! Your video lectures are a huge help in teaching English history for me.
Congratulations,you teach very well.
Very interesting video! I gotta write a response paper on "Why is it important to know about Old and Middle English", so I'm procrastinating by watching videos on this topic in order to get inspired... :D
It came to my mind that H.P Lovecraft wrote in Late Modern English (the latest of the Late) when he said post-WWII definitely starts Present English. In the 1920's and 1930's it's definitely not hard to find examples of Late Modern still holding out. And even for context, Weird Fiction magazines like the ones Lovecraft published in were considered low-brow literature for dumb people; today it's high level reading!
20:01 - Swedish has preserved final vowels ("inversing roles" of -a/-e as compared to OE, but really a different development from same Germanic vowels, as they suppose - Icelandic still even has -u), Danish has -e, like Middle English - probably from around time when this also happened in Middle High German and Middle English.
Dialects of Norrland as to Swedish and of Bavaria/Austria as to High German have gone to the vowel dropping stage, like Modern English.
I am brazilian so I am a portuguese native speaker, but I have been learning how to speak english has been a long time and now I've got to be used to it. According to what I saw this old english has a plenty of similarities to the currently language spoken in germany, manly due to the accents on the top of the words.
These languages are from the same root.
in slavic languages easy to tell gender because of sound the noun ends in, i dont know much about german but from my understanding it works different and simply have to memorize the gender of noun regardless of the sound it ends. is there any trick to determining an old english noun's gender? or simply just has to be memorized?
Justin Bieber... How much do you hate modern English really??
Yeah I'd say like Mervyn Peake or George Orwell or even Stephen King would have been better examples..
Of course, there is the emergence now of @nglish (I just made that up, i think..) but it's too young and not yet developed enough to be able to identify the voices of that language
+Isosceles Kramer Mervyn who? I know the others. Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, or Jules Verne instead of what's-his-name!
Loss of -n.
Min > mi paralleled in one Swedish dialect (Småland).
Infinitive -n - lost in Danish and Swedish (rida), preserved in High German (reiten, Swiss and Middle High: rîten).
You just reminded me of this old Swedish folk song called
I wonder if it is old or newly written in old style by Gjallarhorn?
I've definitely heard several other versions of this song before (possibly under different titles which I no longer can remember) so it must have been based on an old folk song. But I agree the mentioning of Freja and Valhalla is definitely from modern rework and cannot have come from medieval sources
Great stuff, you are a top geezer. I would like to learn Anglo Saxon (OE) but I don't know where I can study. I live in London.
Thanks for the very informative lesson.
+Steven Williams Thanks for watching! The UCL English dept is very good.
Love your videos they r so fascinating. I'm learning ME and OE and it is so much fun.
is that a German accent I'm picking up? I love German accents 🙂
Who else but a Deutscher Mann to learn Germanic linguistics from?
He's Canadian or yank lol
Two conclusions about comparing history and prehistory as to language studies:
a) in history we see parallel changes - all Westic languages lost vowel distinctions in final syllables, so by comparing them we would be reconstructing infinitives in -en rather than in -an.
If all PIE languages really descend from a common one, its reconstruction is given is a minimal distance from present stages - not necessarily the real one.
The one reconstructed right now is pretty ugly. "pH2teH1r" or "pxtehr" for pater/father is a bit Klingon.
b) but when we come to prehistory, we find disputable theories, when we come to history, we come to pretty firm facts.
thank you so much for this. very well taught and very useful! thank you!
Wow, English had the same German cases!
We still use the word "hund" in English but with an added "o". To make sure we can use the words "hound dog" as was the name of a famous song. Also used in the novel "Hound of the Baskervilles". Or "blood hound".
The German cognate is "Hund" and its Dutch counterpart is "hond".
Excellent speaker.
Thanks, Yuri Ivanov, you're right of course! I inserted a note with a correction.
Are we really sure about this? It just occurs to me that the Norwegian word for sick is syke, and the word for hospital is basically 'sickhouse' sykehus in Norwegian (and Faroese too iirc). I don't think there's a Norwegian word that corresponds to the English word ill
Heimrikr hinn Svarti The words you mention were precisely the ones that I had initially thought of. It only occurred to me after Yuri's comment that German as 'Seuche' and Dutch has 'ziek', so English 'sick' has wider Germanic roots. For 'ill' there is at least a Swedish cognate with the meaning 'bad'. If you have access to the Oxford English Dictionary online (www.oed.com/), there are useful etymologies under 'ill' and 'sick'.
Middle English sounds like a mixture of Modern English and Dutch
Yes, Danish and Norwegian has "ilde" [ eel*-le ] / "ille" [ eel-le ], and Swedish has "illa" [ eel-lA ] meaning "bad" - but it can also mean "sick" as in "feeling bad". And "ild" btw. means "fire", so there may be some link there - ?
Danish has "syg" [suegh] ( an orig. -k typically turned into -g in Danish, now typically pronounced as [-gh ] as in 'sigh" ), Norwegian "syk", and Swedish "sjuk" [(s)hjuek] for "sick" / "ill" .
Today we have "vrede" [vraith-e] = "wrath" / "anger", and the meaning of "anger" [Ang-er] has now shifted to "remorse" / "regret" ;-)
I don't understand how the Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight differ so much in language, even though they're written in basically the same period. Could you explain this?
The standardisation of English didn't occur till the Early Modern English period.
thank you sir Martin i understand now what is old and middle English, it helps a lot.
Excellent knowledge.
ic hǣfde þes video sōþe geneaht
+Micheal Kantymir I doff my proverbial cap.
*þisne video
Axel Batalha video is a neuter noun, so þes video
@@victoriaeduok5231 If it's masculine, þisne video; if it's neuter, þis video.
I enjoy your videos and learn so much. Thank you!
9:57 "and very reasonably got rid of it" ... ha, I dispute that!
I wish Old English/AngloSaxon is still in use today. It would have made it a lot easier for Northern Europeans to learn each other's languages had this been the case.
Old English and Old Icelandic are closer than langs are now ... curse of Babel?
Yeah i, too, as a gender-language speaker as well, find that kind of lazy. It makes me think of Chinese which has no verb tenses and relies entirely on tone and context to denote past, present or future. I mean, really Chinese? Do you know how much time you waste having to add all that extra stuff so people know if it's worth responding to something or if it already happened?
1) Gendered nouns are the most stupid aspect of language ever created. Why? Because it is 100% pointless. And the concept of spoons and hair having gender means absolutely nothing. It has no significant benefit at all, but it adds objectively negative qualities to the language including more required memorization which sometimes even native speakers mix up, and just adds unnecessary case matching to the grammar.
Noun gender isn't a super "hard" aspect of language since it's just 1-to-1 memorization, but it is annoying since it's needed for every word on an individual basis, and the concept of it is completely retarded. I'm amazed that there are actually people who would want something so asinine brought back to pollute the greater simplicity of English. English is a more rational and simple language as a result of its evolution (with the exception of its spelling and pronunciation of course, which has become nonsensical).
2) Chinese expresses tense, but they just do it in a vastly simpler and more efficient way: through the use of particles. Or when they have already referenced the time in which the action occurred (whereas in European languages we would need to match tense AND context). By using either method, they can convey the same information as any other language but by using a single verb form forever. It's brilliant.
Speakers of European languages are just so used to how over-engineered our own languages are that we think anything else must be "too simple" and lack the ability to communicate effectively. Yeah, I'm sure Mandarin speakers are all just futilely screaming at each other having no clue what each other mean.
Great video, thanks Martin!
In your opinion, what is the main reason why English lost most of its morphological complexity while German largely preserved its own declensions and conjugations? Is it the fact that English was subject to intensive language contact, whereas German was not?
"Should you ever have trouble with a Scotsman, don't bring the Germans in" 😆 Very funny but a decent summary of what happened to the Celts. The English are Northern Germans/Southern Danes and Frisians.
Justin Beiber, that's sacrilege.
In the same chart as William Shakespeare?!?
Sacrilegious indeed!
Him or Brittle-Knee Spars?
I agree and same for Brittney Spears. IT should have had some famous writer or scientist to show modern language. I could say that I guess its because its to show what the common language is like instead of showing how cultured the language is.
Great lecture Sir, thank you.
Thanks a lot, your videos are of great help with my studies! May I ask what your mother tongue is? Your English seems as spotless as e.g. your German (from what I could make out).
akayakay Thanks for watching! My native language is indeed German.
du Deutsch? O.o
Respekt XD ich hätte sowas nicht so gut hinbekommen, auch nicht mit meinem guten Englisch ^^
One example of how good his accent is: many German speakers would pronounce the s in “allows” as an s. Martin correctly pronounces it as a z.
Thank you for your great lesson. However, the words "ill" and "sick" were used backwards in your presentation: "ill" is the ON word and "sick" is the OE.
Very good explained!! Thank you! 📖👩🏻💻👍🏼
An odd thing I found is in Wycliffe and Canterbury there is the j letter, but in the bibles of the 1500s, there is no j. So were Wycliffe and Canterbury made in a different place then where the 1500 bibles were made (as in different place=different type of English used)? Wiki doesn't seem to know of this if I ask about the letter j. It would rather me think that the letter j came later.
I'm still struggling to bridge the gap between OE and ME. I have no problem imagining the change from ME to modern English, but OE is so different that I can't visualise a process of change (despite your excellent vid). Are there any examples where for example an OE text goes through a few changes on a timeline so we can understand how the morphing came about?
Mr. Hilpert, how do we say this in Anglo-Saxon and Middle English: "The howmaniest month is July in a year?
Great video, totally love this topic, English does really have a very interesting and complex history. I was wondering though.. if the word 'slave' comes actually from the French, because I heard that slave comes from 'slav', since the germanic tribes in the East of Europe used to buy and sell slavs as, precisely, slaves. Wouldn't that word then come directly from germanic roots? Maybe it passed from the East to the West through French, that may also be a good explanation. Hope somebody answers, thanks!
That's common mistake connecting 'slave' and slavic people. Actually it derives from latin and involves the tribe of Sclavini in northeast Italy and to the East from there. First a slave was called in latin 'servus' and and only after 'sclavus' no matter from where he was captive.
gedaeghwamlican - sele - costnunge - ac might have been impossible without context or translation.
I have background in Sweden and Austria so some words (hlaf=Laib, swa swa=såsom, (a)lys=lös=erlöse, gehalgod=helgadt=geheiligt) are more obvious to me than to monoglot English speakers.
I've been learning the whole course in more complexed manner, that's why I only remember only depicted elements in it))
thanks a lot, sir. it really helps me a lot.
Just take late old french, middle french and compare it to old english and middle english. You can clearly see what happened.
It's not a latin language, it's hybrid between germanic and french language. Its influence mostly comes from french.
France has greek-latin culture.
The large majority of the latin words you can find in the english language today come from the french influence, not many latin words survived from the roman empire. It's actually 41% of words that come from french, not 29% as this might suggest.
The French influence also imported many greek words outside of latin and old french words.
Why has present Englush described under Britney and Justin biebers? If you could please give example as to how different that is to Late modern English.
Thanks
6:00 The Lord's Prayer/Our Father in OE
Thank you so much!!
Didn't hear the Middle English, wasn't loud enough, but I've heard it before elsewhere.
5:53 The Basileus when fighting about Sicily in 1033 _might_ also have taken a second thought about hiring Normans, if he had attended to Wyrtgeorn's/Vortigern's bad strategy ...
Or count Julián. Or are these apocryphal?
brilliant explanation!!
thank you very much for this video.
so did they just read their thoughts in medieval England?
Wait a moment the g in Old English was rarely pronounced like a Kh but as a Ye sound that's where Frisian and English get Dei and Day from and also the æ should be pronounced like ä in modern German or just A in the first letter of the English alphabet.
Hahah cutie teacher
So we started with Shakespeare and ended up with Biber?? Don't get me so upset....!
Imagine we still spoke like that today
I am an English major student, and I found out that teachers actually don't really teach students these.....
Is it difficult for people like me (English as second language) to learn ancient English?
Jűrgen sounds german, you should ten steps ahead in learning old english. As I would be with my Frisian background 🤗
*That's is great sir*
we have 3 = nom,acc, gen but rarely
You forgot to mention the frisians at 450 ad
excellent and really helped my studies ………...thankyou
Alright.
Very interesting. Is there one word or small phrase that shows the evolving of the English language from 1. Old English to 2. Middle English to 3. Early Modern English to 4. Modern English. It must be the same word or phrase for each time period. Thanks
Thank you to the Vikings for she, them and their. Clearly superior to the Old English equivalents, which all sound like he and him.
Voice of Father Ure - Alexander Arguelles?
Thank youuuu 🙏🏻
The Middle english sample is too quiet to hear.
The Chaucer link was removed but here, use this. czcams.com/video/GihrWuysnrc/video.html
Middle english is easy but old english... It's like German for me
Why is the old English word "and" used but a few lines later also "ond"?
+Adam 9812 Spelling variation!
Ahh I guess old English did not yet have standardized spelling, but I find it funny that the spelling changed in a few lines.
Oh Brittany and Justin hehehe
Brittany? Any Brit will do? He's not there, but just in. The real fun is with the guy from the Case family whose parents are such big fans of him that they gave their son his name. Now he has to put up with endless jokes about being called Bieber Case. (What were you expecting? His parents aren't that dumb.)
very good
I can't read the writing not clear😣😣😵
Juten, Anglen, Saxsen and Frisians!
Old English and old Frisian are closest to eachother.
I'm absolutly do not understand why you only mention Jute, Angels and saxon as the basic for the Ild English.
How odd that the people, most close to England, did not go to England.
People living in a drowning country, already present in England working there for the Romans for ages.
There are mentioned two large armies by the Romans.
The Northsee was called after their tribe.
And how strange even modern friesian is still, also in the past already, most similar.
I think you should do some more study in the Old frysian language.
Would be nice to hear your conclusio ns.
It would be better if you write the definition of all of the confusing words
I was under the impression that g was pronounced like our modern English y.
Middle English recording is not recognizable, very quiet, like buzzing
Oh great as a speaker of modern English I am represented by Brittney Spears and Justin Bieber…Fan-bloody-tastic.
Martin..english still has the genitive case.....ex: the paw of the dog= the dog's paw
I liked old english o__o
We've had Roger Waters and Bob Dylan... and you chose Justin Bieber :')
Britney spears and Justin Beiber: ouch
Did cavemen invent: case, number, gender? Or ?
Loss of N/A distinction : Swedish, Danish yes. German/Icelandic no.
Not Bob Dylan and The Beatles?!
I bet Britney is still salty that they gave the Nobel Prize to Bob and not to her.
gylt- = guilty
Not too important - but as a linguist I had to let you know that my/your/our etc. are not pronouns but are instead determiners. Mine is a possessive pronoun since it is replacing a noun phrase. My, however, does not replace anything. It is always found in front of a noun. Many grammarians call this a possessive adjective. Yet, again it does not function as an adjective and thus receives a different name - that of "determiner".
Many thanks for catching this, Jill! I've inserted a note in the video to clarify this.
+Jill Pomerantz I disagree. It functions as an adjective in Modern English because it defines, limits, and restricts the noun it modifies, the same as all other adjectives do.
Now, It is true that we no longer decline ANY adjectives, possessive or otherwise, for gender, number or case in Modern English, but the function of limiting, defining, or restricting the noun a possessive adjective modifies hasn't changed in the approximately 1,000 years since its use in Old English, where it did have to be declined for all three, just as it still does in German (as well as in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Dutch, although those four languages only require it and all other adjectives to be declined for gender and number, but not case).
Why does pop culture represent present day English while Literature represents all other epochs of English?