Re: Eald Englisc to Niwum Englisce

On Wed, 14 Apr 1999, dunn patrick w wrote:


> All right, I suspect that's wrong; annoying language.
>
> Which is, of course, why I'm thinking of working on creating a new
> language based on Anglo-Saxon.
A commendable project!  And there are at least two with a fair amount of
knowledge of AS to push you in the right direction.  Or at least to push
you about. :-)

>
> Some questions:
>
> Why do we say /gIv/ instead of /yIv/?  It comes from giefan, which was
> pronounced like /yievan/.
>
> Why did we choose to change cg -> dg, sc -> sh, thorn -> th, and ae -> a?
"We" didn't.  The Normans are the ones who introduced these orthographic
conventions, I believe.

>
> What caused the vowel shift?
>
> To vowels tend, in most languages, to become more open, more closed,
> longer, shorter, midder, backer, forwarder?  :)
>
> How does this look for a typical noun format?
I though 'ship' was one of those words with the same form in nom/acc sing.
and plural, like 'word'.  In any event, if you're after levelling of odd
forms like that, your declension looks fine.

>
> ship
>
> nom     ship            shipas
> gen     ships           shipa
> acc     ship            shipas
> dat     shipe           shipum
>
> This would hold true for most nouns (even those that don't follow the
> paradigm in OE, like "hond" and maybe even "man," but I doubt it -- man
> will probably be irregular:
>
> man             men
> mans            menna
> man             men
> men             mennum
>
> Then we'd have the definite article
>
> nom     se      the
> gen     the     the
> acc     thon    the
> dat     thom    the
>
Looks nice so far.

Padraic.