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Flying Chaucers (Linguistics)
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nemesis8


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In fact there is a simple "orthodox" answer that is:

Prior to 1150, in the great majority of AS scripts the language looks very similar. Although there is of course some irregularity.

These older scripts are mainly translations, charters homilies etc containing little conversational language.

Between 1150 and 1500 there is a surprising level of novelty in the scripts. although it can (at a push) be argued you get AS scripts up to 1190. (I googled it, I ain't seen the script)

After 1500 things settle down.

That is why, according to orthodoxy, the "weight of evidence" gives an "approximate" time frame based on "approximate" start and end dates of 300-350 years.

If you can show orthodoxy wrong, (to me) that would be interesting but you really need to show that the great majority of scripts that fall within your 600 year time-frame could safely be called examples of ME scripts.

I have never seen that argued before, so on this I commend your originality.

By the way it was "watching" not "waking".
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Donmillion


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nemesis8 wrote:
By the way it was "watching" not "waking".

Given that both A-S verbs mean both "watch" and "wake", how can you tell?

The A-S text is based on the Latin Vulgate (or, by Ishmael's theory, vice versa), which has vigilantes et custodientes vigilias noctis. Vigilare is normally translated, "to be awake" (associated with the adjective vigil, "awake", "alert"). Custodire means "protect", "guard", "watch over".

Modern English translations are based on the Greek text, which says (transliterated), agraulountes kai phulassontes phulakas tees nuktos. Agrauleoo means "to dwell in the field"; phulassoo means "to keep watch".

So the Latin text, basis of the A-S text, means, "being awake and guarding the night wakefulness".. But the familiar King James Version is based on the Greek: "abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night". Or more literally, "field-dwelling, keeping [the] watch of the night watch".

Of course, the English words "watch" and "wake" are closely related. "The night watch" means "the night wakefulness". You can see similar alternations between "K" and "(T)CH" in words like "drink" and "drench", "hack" and "hatch", "link" and "linch". So in English, the question is moot anyway.

You can also see from the above why I said that Aelfric's translation is related to the Latin and not the Greek Bible.
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Donmillion


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nemesis8 wrote:
In fact there is a simple "orthodox" answer that is:

Prior to 1150, in the great majority of AS scripts the language looks very similar. Although there is of course some irregularity.

These older scripts are mainly translations, charters homilies etc containing little conversational language.

Between 1150 and 1500 there is a surprising level of novelty in the scripts. although it can (at a push) be argued you get AS scripts up to 1190. (I googled it, I ain't seen the script).

Pretty much what I said, Nate. After Alfred, a pretty uniform "official" language was taught in monasteries throughout the country. In the first half of the 12th Century, texts emerged which clearly cannot be considered to be in the "Anglo-Saxon" language, and which weren't under the control of a standard form. The following "Age of Dialects" was ended by the supremacy of a new standard, based on the East Midlands dialect, around the middle of the 15th Century. That's the written evidence of Middle English; but no-one (except for Mick in THOBR) claims that the ME dialects emerged "instantaneously" around 1150; there must have been a period in which they developed, before being put down in writing for the first time.

If you can show orthodoxy wrong, (to me) that would be interesting but you really need to show that the great majority of scripts that fall within your 600 year time-frame could safely be called examples of ME scripts.

Why? I've never claimed such a thing. As I see it, it's like asking me to prove that the green part of the visual spectrum is actually yellow. It isn't. The one shades into the other, and the "boundaries" between them are purely artificial boundaries erected for our convenience.

I have never seen that argued before, so on this I commend your originality.

--which, regretfully, I must repudiate, since I didn't make the argument you're attributing to me.

Thing is, Nate, it's impossible to say, "At such-and-such a date, people suddenly stopped speaking Brand X language and started speaking the later version, Brand Y". I illustrated this with my work on the erosion of inflections. Accepting for the sake of argument that A-S "morphed" into Middle English, we don't suddenly see the cessation of A-S inflections, but a gradual diminution in their use:

    c. 1050 inflectional forms = 122
    c. 1200 inflectional forms = 94 (28 lost)
    c. 1350 inflectional forms = 64 (30 lost)
    c. 1500 inflectional forms = 55 (9 lost)

Since 1500 (when we're already officially into "Modern English"),we've further lost inflections represented by "thou goest", "ye go", "he goeth", and "they goeth" (and doubtless others too), all of which were in use in the Middle English and Anglo-Saxon periods.

Remember also that, generally, the further north you were in "England" (including lowland Scoland), the more you were ahead of those statistical trends, whereas the further south you were, the more you were behind them. It's not just a rainbow-like spectrum of development from "blue" through to "red"; if you look across the top part of the spectrum, you pass from "green" to "yellow" noticeably earlier than at the bottom part. But in neither case can you put your finger on a point and say, this is where green becomes yellow!
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Mick Harper
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Anybody who thinks one language (Anglo-Saxon) can morph into another language "Middle" English in fifteen years (1116-1131) is either seriously weird or an Anglo-Saxonist running dog. You have been requested to keep to English orthography, Don, so please give us

Þa the suikes undergæton ðat he milde man was and softe and god, and na iustise ne dide, þa diden hi alle wunder.


in English letters so we can judge whether it is Anglo-Saxon fifteen years on or English, nine hundred years old.
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Donmillion


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nemesis8 wrote:
If you can show orthodoxy wrong, (to me) that would be interesting but you really need to show that the great majority of scripts that fall within your 600 year time-frame could safely be called examples of ME scripts.


Green isn't yellow, but somewhere the one shades into the other.

You know that the Anglo-Saxon noun system used three genders. Unlike Latin and Greek ("-us", "-a", "-um"), A-S gender wasn't strongly marked in noun endings, but was indicated more by agreement of adjective endings (including pronouns [including demonstratives]). Inflections of nouns, adjectives, and demonstratives also indicated case and number. So for example (singular nouns only):

    se hrafn fleah tha ut, "the raven then flew out" (masculine, nominative);
    he asende ut thone hrafn, "he sent out the raven" (masculine, accusative).

    seo næddr-e cwæth, "the adder said" (feminine, nominative);
    God cwæth to thære næddr-an, "God said to the adder" (feminine, dative).

    thæt wif andwyrde, "the woman answered" (neuter, nominative);
    God cwæth to tham wif-e, "God said to the woman" (neuter, dative)

There was some relationship between grammatical gender and natural sex, but as the examples show, this was mostly arbitrary. Children learnt gender in terms of the inflections "everyone" around them used during their infancy and early childhood; they had to remember (at an unconscious level) which endings went with which nouns in which grammatical situations.

    "But starting in the tenth century, we begin to see the loss of grammatical gender in Old English. This loss begins in the north of England and over the next few centuries spreads south, until grammatical gender is completely gone from the language by the middle of the fourteenth century." (Dave Wilton, "Loss of Gender in English", 2010).

Many of the inflections depended on a difference in vowel at the end of the words concerned, or within the demonstratives used--thæm versus tham, for example (one of the reasons I've tried to resist the substitution of a for æ in this forum: the different letters make a difference to the grammar).

When the strong stress accent on the stem syllables of Germanic languages met up with differences of grammatical gender and inflection between Anglo-Saxon speakers and Norse (Danish) speakers, the various unstressed vowels in the inflections all began to move towards the "indeterminate", "neutral" vowel ə, and grammatical gender began to be confused as a result, particularly where there were several endings that were very similar phonetically (e.g., -en, -on, -an, or tham versus thæm).

Starting early in the ninth Century, in Northumbria, we see increasing use of "wrong" inflections, such as masculine adjectives used with the normally feminine noun endung ("ending"), or different parts of the same manuscript using both masculine and neuter determinatives for the masculine noun stan ("stone")--here se stan (correct), there thæt stan (BEEP. Wrong. "thæt" didn't yet mean "that", by the way, only "the").

In the Anglo-Saxon interlinear glosses inserted into the Lindisfarne Gospels during the 10th Century, the phonetically distinct endings -ne, -(e)s and -um "have entirely replaced the earlier endings for accusative, genitive, and dative of all nouns, irrespective of gender," completely overriding the earlier system (Anne Curzan, Gender shifts in the history of English). The language was still Anglo-Saxon, "but not as we know it, Ælf".

Accompanying this, Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon also saw an increasing rise in the use of natural gender rather than grammatical gender, particularly with personal pronouns. The 10th-Century Northumbrian translator of Bede's Latin Ecclesiastical History into Anglo-Saxon gives us many examples. For instance, Queen Bertha is referred to, with grammatical correctness, as thæt wif, "the wife", of King Ethelbert of Kent; "wif" was a neuter noun, "thæt" was the neuter demonstrative. But in the very same sentence, she is identified as heo, "she", where grammatical correctness (as in preceding centuries) would demand hit ("it"--referring to "thæt wif").

    "The loss of grammatical gender is pretty much complete in Northumbria by the beginning of the eleventh century. By the middle of that century the loss becomes apparent in texts from the Midlands and is largely complete there by the beginning of the thirteenth century, although some Midlands dialects retain vestiges of grammatical gender until the end of the thirteenth century. The south of England loses grammatical gender over the course of the late-eleventh through thirteenth centuries, and Kent is the last holdout, maintaining grammatical gender into the middle of the fourteenth century." (Wilton, op. cit.)

I've tried to indicate in earlier postings (learning as I went on) how grammatical gender lingered on as late as Chaucer's time. But with its erosion went the erosion of the entire case-system, in which gender was intimately wrapped up with number and case, and the substitution of fixed word-order and the use of prepositions.

This process is till not complete--Modern English still has several residual traces of Anglo-Saxon inflection, most obviously in the pronouns, but also in plural formations and in the possessive (genitive) case, reminding us that there's still quite a lot of yellow in green even as green starts to shade into blue. (And see my earlier comments about the loss of some inflectional forms even after the end of "Middle English".)

Assuming that Anglo-Saxon was a spoken language, we can be sure that the grammatical changes that appeared in Northumbrian during the tenth century lagged behind similar changes in speech. It's impossible to know when they began, but an arbitrary date of 900 AD would seem okay. From 900 up to 1066, what was being written was still "Anglo-Saxon", but (in the north) with ever-decreasing dependence on inflections of nouns and adjectives.

So, N8, that's how I come up with my "600 years". The movement from a highly-inflected language to a low-inflection language was very clearly evident early in the 10th Century, and almost completed by the end of the 15th: six hundred years, at an average rate of loss of just over 11 inflections per century (a meaningless statisic, since the rate was highly variable, but one Mick asked for).
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Donmillion


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Mick Harper wrote:
Anybody who thinks one language (Anglo-Saxon) can morph into another language "Middle" English in fifteen years (1116-1131) is either seriously weird or an Anglo-Saxonist running dog.

Anyone who thinks I remotely suggested such a thing is seriously weird. Or just couldn't be bothered to read what I wrote lest it open his eyes to a missed truth. Read my lips:

I wrote:
(3) ... Assuming that the Second Continuation reflects the language spoken in the East Midlands at the time, (and that English grew out of Anglo-Saxon!), it's evident that considerable linguistic change must have taken place between the time that A-S was standardised (9th Century) and the 1130's.


Or perhaps deficient in arithmetic. That's three hundred years, Mick, not fifteen!

(See my latest for information on how we know that that change was taking place over those three hundred years.)

Mick wrote:
You have been requested to keep to English orthography, Don, so please give us

Þa the suikes undergæton ðat he milde man was and softe and god, and na iustise ne dide, þa diden hi alle wunder.

in English letters so we can judge whether it is Anglo-Saxon fifteen years on or English, nine hundred years old.


All but one letters are English letters. Edh and thorn were in use in English well into the seventeenth century. Why do you want to falsify the text? I know you can read it as it is--it isn't difficult! And while I can change ð and þ into "th", what do I change æ into? There is no modern English equivalent, so I'll have to use a question-mark.

Just to oblige, then, I change four letters out of ninety, to produce:

    Tha the suikes underg?ton that he milde man was and softe and god, and na iustise ne dide, tha diden hi alle wunder.

Now:

    (1) Is that Anglo-Saxon or Middle English?
    (2) What are the distinnguishing features by which you can tell which it is? An arbitrary statement by fiat isn't good enough.
    (3) And what does it mean?
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nemesis8


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Donmillion wrote:
.................So, N8, that's how I come up with my "600 years". The movement from a highly-inflected language to a low-inflection language was very clearly evident early in the 10th Century, and almost completed by the end of the 15th: six hundred years, at an average rate of loss of just over 11 inflections per century (a meaningless statistic, since the rate was highly variable, but one Mick asked for).


Sorry Don you have misunderstood, I was not asking you for the total time span, during which you believe the language became less Saxon more English (5 and half centuries according to orthodoxy, six centuries according to you) I was asking for the particular period of rapid change you were claiming, so as to win Mick's bet.

Orthodoxy claims start of 12th century onwards.

Please no more stuff about spectrums. Just give me some rough start and end dates. That way I can make my mind up whether you are an AS running dog.
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Mick Harper
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I prefer evidence, old fruit. If I have a text dated 1116 and another text dated 1131, and they appear to come from the same place, I'd much prefer to compare one with the other than to go in for several pages of special pleading.

All but one letters are English letters. Edh and thorn were in use in English well into the seventeenth century. Why do you want to falsify the text?

You really are a tiresome pedant, Don. We ask for the transliteration so we can understand the text not because we doubt the existence of thorns and edhs and yoghs and phligs and plugs. If they were still in use in the seventeenth century I think even you would have to agree there must be equivalent modern English letters/digraphs/etc.

Tha the suikes underg?ton that he milde man was and softe and god, and na iustise ne dide, tha diden hi alle wunder.

What Middle English? Just plain English written by somebody who only had Anglo-Saxon scribal conventions to guide him cos English wasn't quite yet a written language. Probably. I'd try and give a direct rendition but I don't trust that Don was being truly honest in his rendition.
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Donmillion


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nemesis8 wrote:
Donmillion wrote:
.................So, N8, that's how I come up with my "600 years". The movement from a highly-inflected language to a low-inflection language was very clearly evident early in the 10th Century, and almost completed by the end of the 15th: six hundred years, at an average rate of loss of just over 11 inflections per century (a meaningless statisic, since the rate was highly variable, but one Mick asked for).


Sorry Don you have misunderstood, I was not asking you for the total time span, during which you believe the language became less Saxon more English (5 and half centuries according to orthodoxy, six centuries according to you) I was asking for the partcular period of rapid change you were claiming, so as to win Micks bet.

Misunderstandings abound, Nate. It all depends on what you mean by "rapid". I've posted before about the "AS --> English" change not being so rapid as Mick supposes in THOBR:

I wrote:
It's not the kind of change you're describing that Mick objects to ("fink" instead of "think"), but the kind that results in effectively a wholly different language in 300 years. I've tried to show that the change from AS to Modern English took place over more like 600 years.

On the other hand, Mick found it incredible that the A-S inflections might have vanished at the rate of "say, ten a century" in the period "c. 1150-c. 1450". But this turned out to be close to the actual average rate, so perhaps we should see that as "rapid" after all. As I said, though, it's a meaningless statistic, because the actual rate was highly variable depending on when and where you were.

The "target", if you like, of recent postings hasn't been Mick's incredulity over "rapid" change, so much as his belief that it was all accomplished in "300 years" (THOBR) or fifteen years (todays posting).

Nothing to do with Mick's bet, you see; more a search for Truth, Justice, and the English Way!

You wrote:
Orthodoxy claims start of 12th century onwards.

"Orthodocy" claims no such thing; see my last-but-one posting. "Orthodoxy" only claims that that's the earliest rough date at which written texts emerge which are clearly not "Anglo-Saxon". The point about the Dutch reference was that there's a language in which the written standard is, or was until very recently, five or six hundred years behind the way people actually speak. I was claiming a similar capability (on a much smaller scale of time) for the continuance of written standard Anglo-Saxon while the spoken language changed to "Middle English" in the background. As far as I can tell, this is a perfectly orthodox point of view, supported by the evidence from Northumbria in the 10th Century and the English Midlands in the 11th.

Please no more stuff about spectrums. Just give me some rough start and end dates. That way I can make my mind up wether you are a AS running dog.

Okay, please give me a rough wavelength at which green turns into yellow.

I've given you all the dates I can. It started somwhere around 900 in the north of England; it culminated somewhere around 1500 in Kent. "Somewhere around" can have a wide latitude--elements of Middle English continued in Kentish country speech into the 19th century.

If you don't like spectra, tough; it's a continuum, not a series of discrete events.
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Donmillion


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Mick Harper wrote:
I prefer evidence, old fruit. If I have a text dated 1116 and another text dated 1131, and they appear to come from the same place, I'd much prefer to compare one with the other than to go in for several pages of special pleading.

But basic research like that seems to be very noticeably what you haven't done. Hence the pages, not of special pleading, but of quite ordinary statements of facts you ought to have been aware of (but so obviously didn't know about) when you condemned "the Anglo-Saxon hypothesis" and the 300-year change idea.

You really are a tiresome pedant, Don. We ask for the transliteration so we can understand the text

I do not believe that you, or any of the other intelligent people in these fora, are incapable of reading a sprinkling of edhs and thorns. But I transliterate them for you anyway, because they don't represent separate sounds; either can be used for either variety of "th" (as in "thick" and as in "this").

Aesc is a different matter: sometimes it corresponds to Modern English "a", sometimes to "e", sometimes to "ea". But when it crops up in words that don't exist in Modern English, like underg�ton, I don't know what to do. Should I render it undergeton? That would be a guess as to what it might have developed into, nothing more, and might mislead a modern reader as to what was meant. Alternatives like undergeaton, undergaton, and undergaeton have the same problem: they falsify the data.

You wrote:
Tha the suikes underg?ton that he milde man was and softe and god, and na iustise ne dide, tha diden hi alle wunder.

What Middle English?

You really are a tiresome pedant with this, Mick. "Middle English" is a convenient label for English as it was written in the period, roughly, 1150-1450. If you think that the sentence above is "Modern English", you're nuts. However, let's go with your alternate hypothesis for a moment:

Just plain English written by somebody who only had Anglo-Saxon scribal conventions to guide him cos English wasn't quite yet a written language.

So what's there isn't English. You are describing a stage of the written language that isn't Anglo-Saxon, isn't "Old English" as you seem to see it, and isn't Modern English as we know it, or even as Shakespeare knew it. For God's sake, if you don't like the "Middle English" label, invent one of your own--preferably one that won't confuse everyone else, as "Early Modern English" (for example) would. Meanwhile, I will continue to use "Middle English" with no implication as to its status vis-a-vis "Old English", only its historical setting and its difference from "Modern English".

This new hypothesis (I know it's not completely new, you raised something like it in response to earlier postings from me) needs exploration. How did communication function, in an era when the vocabulary and grammar that people used in writing was so very far removed from the vocabulary and grammar they used in speech, and so distant from their supposed exemplar, Anglo-Saxon? That exploration must wait a little, however.

You wrote:
I don't trust that Don was being truly honest in his rendition.


The initial version was copied and pasted without change from Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough_Chronicle (whence the funny letters you objected to). Here it is in context:

Second continuation (1132--1154)
The second, or final, continuation is remarkable for being in one authorial voice, and it relates the events of The Anarchy in England. Scholars speculate that the second continuation is dictated (because the language may reflect a version of early Middle English that scholars place later than Stephen and Matilda) or written as the recollections of a single elderly monk. It is a highly moving account of torture, fear, confusion, and starvation.

Henry I died in 1135, and Stephen and Matilda both had a claim to the throne. The monastic author describes the rebellion of the barons against Stephen, the escape of Matilda, and the tortures that the soldiers of the baronial powers inflicted upon the people. The author blames Stephen for the Anarchy for being "soft and good" when firmness and harshness were needed. When Stephen captured the rebelling barons, he let them go if they swore allegiance. According to the author,

"a the suikes underg�ton �at he milde man was and softe and god, and na iustise ne dide, �a diden hi alle wunder" (1137)
(-----< I snip the "translation" into Modern English >-----)

The barons then attempted to raise money as quickly as they could. They needed money and manpower to build castles (which the author regards as novel and rare), and so they robbed everyone they met:

I have been scrupulously honest in my presentation of the facts, and tried to be equally honest in interpreting their significance.

Is an apology called for?

And, again, since it's "just plain English" and not Anglo-Saxon--what does it mean?
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Donmillion


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nemesis8 wrote:
I was not asking you for the total time span, during which you believe the language became less Saxon more English (5 and half centuries according to orthodoxy, six centuries according to you) I was asking for the particular period of rapid change you were claiming, so as to win Mick's bet.

I don't think it qualifies for Mick's prize, but I'd say that the complete loss of a grammatical gender system, with all that that implies for the entire apparatus of case-endings, in 100 years (900-1000) is actually a pretty rapid rate of change.

And it's across a documented period, not one of those undocumented periods Mick wants no truck with (for understandable reasons).
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Mick Harper
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Is an apology called for?

Yes and no. What I meant is that you (and indeed any human being) would 'translate' the material bending the final message in a given direction, ie your direction. Just as we do when, for instance, 'translating' Chaucer. This tendency is most marked in academics' work (because of peer review and other AE influences) so it is no use claiming that you quoted verbatim from Wiki or wherever.

But naturally I apologise for imputing crypto-criminality on your part. I was merely accusing you of being humanoid.
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Donmillion


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Mick Harper wrote:
Is an apology called for?

... Naturally I apologise for imputing crypto-criminality on your part. I was merely accusing you of being humanoid.

Mick, your gentlemanly honour is restored (thank you).

As for the humanoid bit -- I'm still working on it.
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Donmillion


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I wrote:
Tha the suikes underg?ton that he milde man was and softe and god, and na iustise ne dide, tha diden hi alle wunder.

Mick wrote:
Just plain English written by somebody who only had Anglo-Saxon scribal conventions to guide him cos English wasn't quite yet a written language.

Has anyone succeeded in interpreting the words of this sentence as 'just plain English' words?

Some of them seem obvious, and you might have got something like:
    Then (?) the suikes ? underg?ton ? that he [a] mild man was and soft and good, and no justice not did, then (?) did he all wonder (?)

Anyone who followed up my Wikipedia link will have seen the translation given there, which I amend in one word [bracketed] to increase conformity to the original:

    When the traitors understood that he (Stephen) was a gentle man, and soft and good, and did not execute justice, [then] they committed all manner of atrocity.

Mick's hypothesis has to account for the following, which seem not to be "plain English":

    Tha = 'When'
    suikes = 'traitors'
    underg�ton = (they) 'understood'
    tha = 'then'
    hi = 'they'
    wunder = 'atrocities'

The first question is, 'Is the Wikipedia translation reliable?' I pursue this question in detail below, but the answer is 'Yes', as far as I can tell from comparison of the 'obscure' words with their occurrence in other ME documents (i.e., not just relying on the Glossaries).

The second question is, 'Do the 'obscure' words reflect Anglo-Saxon vocabulary and grammar?' Again, the detail is provided below, and again the answer is 'Yes'. So is this evidence that Mick is right?

Mick's hypothesis is that the 'obscure' words and 'un-English' grammar reflect, not the continuation of Anglo-Saxon into Middle English, but English scribes struggling to express their own language, using the 'conventions' of a different language. This would be quite understandable if it applied only to orthography; if Shakespeare had only learnt French spelling, for instance, 'To be or not to be' might have been written as, 'Tou bi or notte tou bi'.

Now, ME writers clearly understood the use and pronunciation of 'th' (in the letters edh and thorn), and were perfectly happy to write 'the' (where the Anglo-Saxons wrote se and seo) and 'that' and 'hwither' and 'drinketh'. Mick would have us believe, though, that although they were happy with those spellings, when it came to 'they', 'them', and 'their', ME scribes pronounced them as we do, but spelt them as 'hi', 'hem', and 'hire'. With the, they followed their own pronunciation and repudiated the Anglo-Saxon spelling; with they, they followed A-S spelling in repudiation of their own pronunciation.

And not just at isolated locations, either. There was a mass buy-in to this potty arrangement across the whole of southern and midland England, for a period of between 200 and 350 years. It would be ridiculous to claim that this was a totally uniform system, yet essentially the same conventions seem to have been used in Lincolnshire and Derbyshire, in Hungtingdon and Hampshire, in Essex and in Worcestershire. Surely this demands a better explanation than "plain English written by somebody who only had Anglo-Saxon scribal conventions to guide him"?

'Middle English' was 'Modern English spelt funny', we are asked to believe. But Modern English doesn't use Anglo-Saxon words like 'tha', 'swike', or 'underget', for which it has perfectly respectable English equivalents in 'when', 'traitor', and 'understand'. On the other hand, Anglo-Saxon lacked the word 'justice' (though not the concept). What guided our ME author to pick a mixture of A-S words that didn't exist in his own language, and English words that didn't exist in A-S?

Then there are the inflections. Modern English has around fifty; Middle English, in its earlier phases (through to about 1250) had almost 100; Anglo-Saxon had over 120. The Middle English inflection system clearly resembles the Anglo-Saxon system, but is clearly different; why? And why, if Middle English was 'Modern English spelt funny', did about 50% of the inflections it used in writing bear no resemblance to anything anyone actually said? They could only serve to confuse, unless all the author's readers had learnt the same conventions. Yet the inflections hung on for centuries, again with variations, but again with much similarity throughout the country.

Was there a National Academy of Bad Modern English?

As always, I'm not saying that Mick's hypothesis is false, merely pointing out a number of hurdles it has to leap before we could say it's adequate to account for the data. But here's one more: AE principles forbid unique cases, yet I suspect that there is no parallel case of the vocabulary and, particularly, grammar of a dead language being used for centuries, across the whole of a country, intermixed in such a way with the vocabulary and grammar of the native language.

Happy to be proved wrong. Remember the grammar part of that, though, guys and gals.

Analysis of the text
Tha is the normal Anglo-Saxon adverb equivalent to our 'when' when introducing a time-dependent clause. But it's also the regular early Middle English word for 'when' in the same circumstance. Here it is in a (transliterated) passage from the Life of St Juliana (c. 1210):

    Tha eleusius seh that ha thus feng on to festnin hire seoluen isothe bileaue; thohte he walde don hire anan ut of dahene[/b]

    'When Eleusis saw that she thus be-gan [feng on] to establish ['fasten'] her self in-true belief, [he] thought he would do her anon out of days [genitive plural dahene] [i.e., 'kill her']

Tha � tha � is a similarly regular expression, in Anglo-Saxon and early Middle English, for 'When then
Suikes (also swike, with alternative plural swiken) in ME manuscripts means 'traitor', 'deceiver'; it matches the verb biswike(n), 'to betray':

    Thu thoghtest, so doth thin i-like,
    Mid faire worde me bi-swike


    �Thou thoughtest, as doth thy like,
    With fair words me [to] betray�

    (The Owl and the Nightingale, 1246-1250)

Underg�ton, with its -on suffix, is a plural verb. Southern and Midlands Middle English used two main suffixes to indicate plural numbers in verbs, -eth corresponding to Anglo-Saxon -ath for the present tense, and -on comparable to A-S -on, for the past tense. This verb corresponds to A-S undergeaton, past plural of undergietan. In AS, it meant [they] 'understood', 'perceived'; if it existed in Modern English, it would be 'undergot' (get it?). The translation, 'When the traitors understood', seems to fit the context.

Hi could naively be interpreted as 'he'; but 'When the traitors understood that he (Stephen) was a gentle man, and soft and good, and did not execute justice, [then] he committed all manner of atrocity' does violence to any sensible meaning of the sentence. It makes sense, though, when we realise that hi in the text corresponds to A-S hie, the third person plural pronoun in the nominative case: in a word, 'they'. 'They' (which corresponds to Old Danish their with the same meaning as A-S hie) is regular in Northern Middle English manuscripts throughout the period; but Midlands and Southern manuscripts stick with hie until very late. Hi and its offshoots hire ('their') and hem ('them'), corresponding to A-S hira and him, are still standard in Chaucer's dialect at the end of the 14th Century, almost 300 years after the Peterborough text.

And that leaves ...

Wunder = not "wonder", but "atrocities" (plural). Let's state straight off that A-S wundor is best translated as "wonder; wonderful thing; miracle" (Sweet's Student's Dict. of A-S). Depending on your viewpoint, it's either the ancestor of or obviosuly related to Modern English wonder. But a more sinister meaning can be traced in Middle English manuscripts; wundren means "bring ruin on"; to wundre is "to wrong" someone:

    A lefmon hu mon folhes te; thine frend sariliche with reming & sorhe; thine fend hokerliche to schome & wundren up o the.

    'Ah love-man [= beloved], how man [=one] follows thee; thy friend sorely with weeping & sorrow; thine enemy [fiend] scornfully to shame and [to] ruin up of thee.'

    (The wohunge [wooing]of ure lauerd, c. 1210.)

    I this hus is the huse lauerd, ant te ful-itohe wif; mei beon wil ihaten. that ga the hus efter hire; ha diht hit al to-wundre.

    'In this house is the house's [genitive "huse"] lord, and the full-drawn [un-disciplined] wife; may [they] be well called, that go [in] the house after her; she dights [= directs] it all a-wrong.'

    (Sawle's Warde, c. 1210)

Final point to note: Middle English words ending in -er frequently didn't mark the plural (originally a Northumbrian trait), so 'brether, childer, wunder' could just as well mean 'brothers, children, wonders', as 'brother, child, wonder'; a plural numeral, plural demonstrative, or plural verb would let you know the difference.
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Ishmael


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From this video we learn that modern Hindi was once English but is now half-way toward becoming an indigenous language.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-MQLFGNUBA&feature=related
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