Re: Ander-Saxon and New Old English (was: RE: [CONLANG] Worldken bard Poul Anderson in deathstead (not a funny)

Sally:
> Interesting surmise, And.
>
> This is a question I raise almost every time
> I teach Old English.  What words would you
> bring back and what would they have evolved
> into?
Next time you teach it, send me the answers to
your question.

> It would take a philologist to reconstruct
> an Alternate Modern English, but I think this
> has been attempted, hasn't it?   At least in part?
Point me to where I can find the attempts...

> But not to the degree that you are suggesting?
>
> What about late Latin borrowings?  Would they
> be expelled from the AME?  Instead of
> "dormitory" we'd have "sleepstowe"? etc.
What does German do?

> "Gleed," ("coal") is one of my favorite recon-
> structions.  Actually, I think it's used in Yorkshire,
> though, isn't it?  Burning gleeds.
_Glede_, it's normally spelt, I think. I thought it
meant 'a burning coal'.

> "Beership" for "party" is another one I'd bring back.
> "Dright" for "lord" or "master."
> "Seal" for "occasion"?  "Songseal,"
>     "a time for singing"?
> "Overmood" for "arrogance"?
> "Gale" for "sing"?  gale, gole, galen?
> "Thorf" for "need"?  I thorf, he tharf, we thorf?
>     I thorfed yesterday?  Or:  he tharfs?
>     (would the preterite present verbs lose their
>     distinctive third person singular present
>     formation?)
> "Nay" for "suffice"?  It nay?  It nught?
>     (pronounced "newt" /nut/)
A very good start, this.

> It could function as a modal, as do most of the
> other pret.pres. verbs:  "It nay be said" (it
> suffices to be said, it's enough to say); "It nught
> be told," etc.
Could you have "He nay go" -- 'it suffices that he
go'?

> And then, our lovely Class 4 verb niman, nam,
> namon, numen, which got replaced by Scandinavian
> "take":  so  "I nam his horse for he hath numen me
> wain."  ("I took his horse because he's taken my
> wagon.")
>
> In a construction of an alternate modern English,
> though, we'd also have to decide if we're going to
> leave in other interventions, such as the assimilation
> of Scandinavian "th" in the pronouns and possessives:
> "they" instead of "hie," and so forth.  What about the
> Scandinavian assumption of "-s" in the third person
> singular present indicative?  Would it be "hath" or
> "has"?
Were I doing the AME, I'd remove from history only the
Norman conquest.

No modern dialects I'm acquainted with use 3sg -th or
a reflex of "hie", but 5 miles from my place of work
you can find people who quotidianly use _hoo_ /u:/
instead of _she_. (Unfortunately I don't get to hear it,
because such speakers wouldn't speak such broad dialect
to me, though I do get the odd _thee_ and _thou_.)

> What other assimilations would we allow?  What
> other changes or shortenings?  What spellings?
>
> Are you aware of our under-visited ENGLISC
> listserv where some of us, in varying degrees of
> enthusiasm, attempt to compose or translate into
> Old English?  At the moment, several members
> are writing a romance in Old English.  We've translated
> the Gettysburg Address, the Four Questions of the
> Seder, and we attempted to translate some of Isidore's
> De Portentis, "On Monsters."
>
> http://www.rochester.edu/englisc
I was aware of it, but lack the requisite knowledge and
competence to participate. Indeed, my anglophilia doesn't
stretch back beyond Early Modern English; that is, the
language that I love with all my soul was born around
five hundred years ago.

--And.

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