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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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Nem... you're acting rather strange of late... are you keeping up with your medication?
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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| Chad wrote: | | (Nice to see a bit of creative thought returning to this thread.) |
Actually, I agree. And I think I've solved the mystery, via Hatty's reference to crate and Ishmael's to Greek origins:.
She childide hir first goten sone, & wlappede hym in clothis & putte hym in a cracche
Mary (Hebrew "bitter water") is a type for Rhea (Greek "she who flows"), Jesus is Zeus (look how alike the names are! And loss of intervocalic "s" is usual in Greek). Rhea gave birth to Zeus and hid him (from Herod? Well, from Cronos: H = C, D = N [when you've got a cold]) ... hid him where? In a cave on Crete.
So "cracche" = "Crete"! Seemples!
Or there again, we could consider that, as Ishmael pointed out, "cracche" is clearly an early spelling of "cratch", and a cratch is (according to the OED) Middle English for "A rack for feeding animals out of doors; (now dialect) a manger". As I pointed out, the sentence was the odd one out in that it is expressely Middle English (late 14th Century).
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| Chad wrote: | | Nem... you're acting rather strange of late... are you keeping up with your medication? |
Due to crisis in world banking system, N8 has had to greatly reduce his intake of Shiraz. Things hit a new low when I could only afford to buy bottle with a screwtop.
I guess it is hard for you guys to know how much I suffer, just to keep you updated with my brilliance.
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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Ishmael says "It's English". Don says "It's Anglo-Saxon". I say, "Looks like they're both right". Enter the quantum universe and read on ...
| Ishmael wrote: | | Donmillion wrote: | | ...what conclusion do you draw from the fact that different sentences in the same document, from the same author, may appear to be "plain English" on the one hand, and "a completely foreign language" on the other? |
... ... The only matter of direct concern to me is establishing the nature of the data at hand: That we do, in fact (as any seven-year-old child could see) have a document that is composed of both English and Anglo-Saxon and not a hybrid third language or intermediary stage between the two. ... ... What you can't do is alter the character of the data to conform to some preferred outcome, merely because what you actually and obviously have is difficult to explain. |
I have no desire to alter the data, only to establish its nature (and, of course, to figure out what that means).
You say that Sentences (1) to (6) are plain English. But I claim that they're pure Anglo-Saxon, and that that's not incompatible with their also being English. If we examine Sentence (2) word for word, we find grammatically-correct Anglo-Saxon all the way. You may still say, "But Sentence (2) is plain English!" as you opined before, Ishmael, but if you do, think through the implications of its also being "pure Anglo-Saxon". I'll take further illustrative examples either from Blakely's OE Grammar or Sweet's Student's Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon.
Sentence (2):
| On siex dagum waeron geworhte heofonas and eorthe, sunne and mona, sae and fiscas. |
On:
Anglo-Saxons regularly used "on" where "English" would use "in". They swore oaths on Godes naman!; their fires would on fleame lacan, "leap into flame"; they even wrote on Ænglisc, "in English", as they called it.
On Ierusalem is an mere se is genemned on Ebreisc Bethsaida; se mere h�fth fif porticas.:
In Jerusalem [there] is a pool which is named in Hebrew Bethsaida; the pool has five porticos .
Siex
Not much to say about this. I have no "Middle English" examples (Morris has sixe and sexe, but not siex); but it's the standard A-S spelling, e.g. siex hyrnede = "six-cornered":
Tha gelamp hit swa th�t hie w�ron gesamnode binnan th�re byrig Hierusalem, siex hund thusend manna ...
Then happened it so that they were assembled within the city of Jerusalem, six humdred thousand men ... Dagum:
I confess to having falsified the data myself, here, to follow AE rules (and notice I'm still translitterating "th"): the original has dægum. Your ingenious guesses, Ishmael, significantly failed to account for the -um termination; you gave us a singular noun, "datum", where the numeral "six" demands a plural. But dæg is the regular A-S for "day", and -um is the regular ending for most masculine nouns in plural number and ablative case. "On" meant "into" as well as "in", as in the example I gave above. As in German, though, "into" takes accusative ("on fleam-e", "into flame"), where "in" takes ablative. "On siex dægum" is regular A-S for "in six days"; compare the next sentence in the "Pool of Bethesda" story:
On th�m porticum l�g micel menico geadligra ...
In the porticos lay [a] great multitude [of] sick [people] ...
See how fif porticas (accusative plural) changes to th�m porticum (ablative plural; the nominative singular is an portic) ...
Waeron:
More falsification, I'm afraid: w�ron is what the text says. "English" says "they were"; A-S says hie w�ron. There's an example quoted above: hie w�ron geamnode. Most A-S verbs used an -ath ending to indicate plural number, which we find also in Southern and Midland dialects of "Middle English". But other A-S verbs used the same plural ending as beon (to be), e.g.:
Tha cw�don tha Iudeas to th�m ...
Then quothe the Jews to them ...
So far, this "plain English" sentence is also pure Anglos-Saxon.
Geworhte
Students of German will be familiar with use of the ge- prefix to indicate the past participle: Er ist ins haus gekommen, "He has come into the house." Anglo-Saxon did the same; geworhte is the plural ("w�ron geworhte") past participle of wyrcan, "to work, make". (The singular is geworht, Modern Eglish "wrought".) My example also illustrates another dative pural:
Heo arn to cirican to th�m arwierthan halgan gebundenum handum ...
She ran to [the] church to the venerable saint [with] bound hands ...
heofonas and eorthe, sunne and mona, sae and fiscas
The main point here is the noun endings. In particular, why does "sun" end in -e, where "moon" ends in -a? "Sun" in A-S is a feminine noun, like tunge, burne, eorthe. heorte, and throte, all of which should be obvious in meaning. "Moon" is a masculine noun, like cnotta, hunta, nama, steda, and steorra. In Middle English, the masculine -a termination had become -e (same as feminine), then withered away altogether. But this is Anglo-Saxon.
Yet Ishmael insists it's English. So: Is the language of sentence (2) "English" or "Anglo-Saxon"? Or is it perhaps "Old English"--not a blend of the two, but but one as an earlier form of the other?
And all the sentences except number (4) were like that ...
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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I maintain my position.
There is an enormous gulf between the last excerpt you provided and all the others. This gulf is obvious to the non-scholar. It is less apparent to the scholar. This is consistent with paradigm bias.
No simple-minded, uneducated fool (such as I) could possibly conclude the last sentence was written in the same language as those that proceeded it. It takes a real education to reach that conclusion.
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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| Ishmael wrote: | I maintain my position.
... ...No simple-minded, uneducated fool (such as I) could possibly conclude the last sentence was written in the same language as those that proceeded it. It takes a real education to reach that conclusion. |
Een man gang te maaien
Any Geordie can tell you that means, "One man goes to mow".
How about, "Mijn tante's balpen is op het bureau van mijn oom"? ("Bureau" might give that one away.)
Then we come to, "Worden of niet te zijn, dat is de vraag".
Simple utterances in a language like Dutch can easily be read as English, gve-or-take a word here and there. But as you see more of them, it's increasingly clear that they're in a foreign language.
My Sentences (1) to (6) were isolated from their contexts, and, as I've explained, deliberately selected for their simplicity, along the lines of "Een man gang te maaien" ("een man en zijn hond"). Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of Ælfric's Bible to provide context; but have you looked at the sample quotations I put into my last posting? Are these sentences all in the same language?
(a) On siex dagum waeron geworhte heofonas and eorthe, sunne and mona, sae and fiscas.
(b) On Ierusalem is an mere se is genemned on Ebreisc Bethsaida; se mere h�fth fif porticas.
(c) Tha gelamp hit swa th�t hie w�ron gesamnode binnan th�re byrig Hierusalem, siex hund thusend manna.
(d) Heo arn to cirican to th�m arwierthan halgan gebundenum handum.
You claim that Sentence (a) is "plain English". Yet its phenomena are shared by sentences (b) to (d). are they "plain English" as well?
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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I think the case I have put forward here that the story of Christ was written first in English is a very strong case -- with allowance for the very little evidence in its favor to date. Those of you who have followed our work elsewhere will know this is the second instance where a Biblical anomaly can be accounted for by assuming an English precedent for the Biblical text.
Though it is more dramatic and eye-catching to claim that "The Bible was Written in English" (god how I want to write that book!) I have an alternative scenario that may fit the facts much better.
The Bible was Written in Anglo-Saxon.
Who exactly were these Anglo-Saxons? We don't know that much about them except that they were vaguely German. Germany is also the region from which emerged the original translations of the Bible. The German-speaking lands were also the seat of the Holy Roman Empire and, later, became the home of Protestantism as well.
And Germany is also the heartland of European Jewry. This makes it ground zero for three faiths: Catholicism, Judaism and Protestantism.
Let's assign three written languages to each of these faiths:
Catholicism = Latin
Judaism = Hebrew
Protestantism = Greek
Now let's start with an original set of religious books written in Anglo-Saxon (at this time, for reasons unknown). Those books were so popular, translations were made into each of the three languages listed above. Each sect selected a different set of books as canon. Each translation received official sanction within its community, such that the original was deprecated and, in time, forgotten.
Thus Hebrew became the "original" language of the Old Testament and "Greek" the original language of the new testament. Why not Latin? Because the Catholic bible was formulated in response to the Protestant bible, which was canonized first.
So what about Anglo-Saxon itself? What was this language all about and who spoke it?
The first question to occur to me is this: What is the relationship between Anglo-Saxon and Yiddish? Is there room for a reappraisal? Might it be possible that scholarship in this area has been hampered by paradigm error?
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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On Ierusalem is an mere se is genemned on Ebreisc Bethsaida; se mere hæfth fif porticas.
In Jerusalem [there] is a pool which is named in Hebrew Bethsaida; the pool has five porticos . |
Will you stop it with the word substitution! Just correct the spelling.
In Jerusalem is an mere se is a-named in Hebreisc Bethsaida; se mere has five porticos.
Tha gelamp hit swa thæt hie wæron gesamnode binnan thære byrig Hierusalem, siex hund thusend manna ...
Then happened it so that they were assembled within the city of Jerusalem, six humdred thousand men ... |
Then gelamp it so that they were assembled binnan there byrig Jerusalem, six hundred thousand men.
On thæm porticum læg micel menico geadligra ...
In the porticos lay [a] great multitude [of] sick [people] ...
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In the porticos lay micel menico geadligra ...
Tha cwædon tha Iudeas to thæm ...
Then quothe the Jews to them .. |
Then quothe the Judeas to them ..
Heo arn to cirican to thæm arwierthan halgan gebundenum handum ...
She ran to [the] church to the venerable saint [with] bound hands ...
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She ran to church to the arwierthan halgan gebundenum hands...
----
I wish Dan Crisp were here! I am a poor substitute.
All of these passages are Anglo-Saxon, not English. English and Anglo-Saxon are related languages so there will be overlap. Nevertheless, even alowing for the substitution of a word like "hands" for "handum", the difference is apparent.
If we look at the relationship between Dutch and German, we might discover a rate of general overlap between the two that approximates what we see here for Anglo-Saxon and English, yet that does not make either Dutch or German necessarily ancestral to the other.
What we have in Britain is, first, Anglo-Saxon written by scholars exposed to spoken English and, later, early written English authored by scholars trained in Anglo-Saxon. Eventually, we have English written by writers without direct exposure to Anglo-Saxon but who inherited many of the established spelling and grammatical conventions. Ultimately, as literacy expanded, most of those conventions were dropped to more-accurately reflect the vernacular.
We might imagine how writing would appear to evolve were a Dutch aristocracy once the overlords of Germany.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Donmillion wrote: | Een man gang te maaien
Any Geordie can tell you that means, "One man goes to mow". |
But he won't tell you it's English.
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Can I just ask a simple question.
Could anybody here actually understand a straight AS text, in the sense they can accurately translate it without help?
I just mention it because I reckon the answer is no....
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| nemesis8 wrote: | | I just mention it because I reckon the answer is no.... |
You recon right. Whereas Chaucer can be read by a high-school student.
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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| Ishmael wrote: | I think the case I have put forward here that the story of Christ was written first in English is a very strong case -- with allowance for the very little evidence in its favor to date. ... [But] I have an alternative scenario that may fit the facts much better.
The Bible was Written in Anglo-Saxon.
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I'll watch the developments with great interest, though I think they need a new thread/subject/forum/whatever ...
Germany is also the heartland of European Jewry. This makes it ground zero for three faiths: Catholicism, Judaism and Protestantism.
Let's assign three written languages to each of these faiths:
Catholicism = Latin
Judaism = Hebrew
Protestantism = Greek |
Anyone want to speak up for the Greek Orthodox? Also for Coptic and Syrian Christians, who have the Scriptures in their own languages?
| Thus Hebrew became the "original" language of the Old Testament and "Greek" the original language of the new testament. Why not Latin? Because the Catholic bible was formulated in response to the Protestant bible, which was canonized first. |
Hmmm. Canonized by whom? The Anglo-Saxons were German, weren't they? If Christianity originated in Germany, where the Bible was first written in Anglo-Saxon, then the Anglo-Saxons must have been Christian when they entered England in the fifth and sixth centuries; else Jerome couldn't have plundered the Anglo-Saxon Bible and paraphrased it into Latin in the fourth (thereby breaking the terms of his 382 employment by Pope Damasus, to edit and revise the existing "Old Latin" versions and assemble them into a coherent text).
So why did the Anglo-Saxons leave extensive accounts of their conversion to Christianity in the period from 597 to c. 650? And if the Germans (or Anglo-Saxons) invented the new faith, who converted them to it? For other German tribes, historic records have their conversion beginning in the 4th Century; Clovis converted at Christmas, 498, and was baptised into the Roman church by St Remigius, the Catholic Bishop of Rheims.
Supposedly, Ælfric's Bible that I've been quoting was translated (or rather, paraphrased) from Jerome's Vulgate Latin; it agrees with the Latin at numerous points where both differ from the Hebrew and the Greek. Does this mean that St Jerome, in the late 4th Century, had access to Ælfric's manuscript, written c. 600 years later?
Such a naive question! Obviously; both must have had access to a preceding manuscript, written presumably in Germany prior to c. 400 BC--prior, in fact, to 360, when Jerome received baptism in Rome. I would guess that appropriate linguistic and textual analysis would be able to reconstruct it from the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and AngloSaxon versions. For the moment, though, it must remain hypothetical.
But hang on a minute! Isn't that like Proto-Romance, and Proto-Germanic, and Proto-Indo-European? Aren't they purely hypothetical constructs, like this ancestral Anglo-Saxon Bible which has to predate the Anglo-Saxons leaving the European mainland, but post-date their arrival in England? Do I detect similar hypotheses, so obviously wrong in the case of linguistics, so obviously right (what other explanation fits?) for the origins of the BiblE?
Life's full of paradoxes. I don't claim they're irresoluble, only that they have to be plausibly dealt with. And if they can be backed up with evidence, so much the better.
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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| Ishmael wrote: | | nemesis8 wrote: | | I just mention it because I reckon the answer is no.... |
You recon right. Whereas Chaucer can be read by a high-school student. |
With appropriate footnotes. Yes, yes, I know you claim they're not needed because it's "plain English". But look what a fist Dan made of "soote", despite your protestations to the contrary.
Let's try once more. Here's some Middle English (not Ango-Saxon) from 200 years before Chaucer (an Old English Homily on Palm Sunday, c. 1190). I've transliterated, for the sake of those who can't otherwise cope:
It is custume that ech chirchsocne goth this dai a procession. & this wune haveth the biginnigge of the holie procession the ure helende makede to-ward te stede ther he solde deth tholen. Tho the com to bethphage Swo hatte the throp the preste one wunien. bi-sides ierusalem on the fot of the dune the men clepen munt olivete. tho sende tweien of hise diciples into the bureh of ierusalem, & bed hem bringen a wig one te riden, nother stede, ne palefrei, ne fair mule, ac the he alre lovrdes loverd were. & alre kingene king.
Ishmael wanted no truck with any language that was a "hybrid" of English and Anglo-Saxon, but even if you don't fully understand the text (I don't; I'm trying to work it out without consulting the glossary), consider some of the words and constructions here:
goth this dai a procession -- We'd write, "a procession goes this day"; but Anglo-Saxon regularly inverted subject-verb sequence in follow-on clauses. On the other hand, I suspect that the subject of "goth" is actually "chirchsocne", whatever that is, and a procession is French ("in procession").
makede: -- We write "made", the Anglo-Saxons wrote "maked".
haveth -- We write "has", but earlier "hath", the Anglo-Saxons wrote "hafth".
loverd -- We write "lord", the Anglo-Saxons wrote "hlafweard".
kingene king -- We write "king of kings", the Anglo-Saxons wrote "cyningene cyning", "of-kings king".
So what do we have here? An incompetent Anglo-Saxon scribe? An Englishman whose native English has been contaminated with AngloSaxon grammar? Very rare, that--whole chunks of grammar being trasnported from one language to another; in fact, I think there's no other case of it (and AE principles forbid unique examples), except where ... Could one language be in the process of developing out of another?
If you want to attempt your own translation, substituting obvious Modern English words for apparently obscure ones, remember that the obscure ones appear also in other manuscripts where their meaning is clearer.
Take "wune"--this wune haveth the biginnigge of the holie procession: perhaps it means "this one"?
But here it is in the Middle English version of Genesis and Exodus (c. 1250): "Me drempte, als ic was wune to don" (as a verb), and again (as a plural noun), "He thhogte of his faderes wunes, hu he sette at the mete hise sunes". (Sorry, there's a typical Anglio-Saxon-style genitive there: "at the mete his sunes" = "at his son's meat".) From these and other examples, we can make out that "wune" means "custom, usage", or in a word, "wont"--"as was his wont".
In other words, we don't have complete freedom to put in any word that takes our fancy--such as "suit" for "soote"--unless we've been able to test its appropriateness against other uses of the same word in the same (Middle English) period.
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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| Ishmael wrote: | | Donmillion wrote: | Een man gang te maaien
Any Geordie can tell you that means, "One man goes to mow". |
But he won't tell you it's English. |
I never claimed it was. I was merely illustrating the fact that it can be easy to interpret simple extracts from a foreign but related language, even for someone who doesn't "know" the language and would be unable to read a full paragraph.
Anglo-Saxon is no different from Dutch in that respect--in fact, I think less so: I suspect it's easier (for English speakers) to recognise and understand simple Anglo-Saxon sentences than the equivalent Dutch ones. But I have no evidence of that.
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| Ishmael wrote: | | nemesis8 wrote: | | I just mention it because I reckon the answer is no.... |
You reckon right. Whereas Chaucer can be read by a high-school student. |
I could be wrong but virtually all the AS I have seen is (to my way of thinking) much better understood as a form of mouth music rather than any simple reflection of a spoken language, it's about rhythm and mood, rather than brevity clarity and word order.
I just can't imagine anybody speaking AS (the way it appears in scripts). In fact I can't imagine anyone speaking on a day to day basis Middle English, say in the style of Orm (they might have chanted a verse a day, but that is different to speaking it). This is just about performing poets and priests being inventive and mystical and trying to keep a oral tradition (which was dying out) going.
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