A Conversation in Old English and Old Norse

golden ammorian golden morrigan [Music] sat or [Music] [Music] let me let me just take one second to compliment both of us on how perfectly historically authentic our costumes were down to the last stitch we we discussed this briefly and i think we both i mean you you you said first but i think we both thought that um modern modern outfits were less distracting um and i i think you said material culture and things like that start to make it more people will focus on on that and not so much on the language whereas this happens to me all the time because like uh you know real recent examples assassin's creed valhalla where i consulted on language and names and runes and stuff you know i don't consult on the costumes or the weapons or anything like that but people say this isn't historically accurate because this this axe wouldn't have been used in this decade that's that's not what i did but but that's what people obsess about is material culture so i'm like no i'm taking all that stuff away from you all you get in this video is language okay so i just pulled up this question from a r christian son i a supporter who couldn't be here and uh he he mentions an ego saga of course you have eagle scala grimson and his brother thor over joining the army of king adelstan uh the battle of brunenburg often dated to about 937 and egel composes poetry in the court of the english king and is represented as just talking to the king without any mention of translators or anything like that how how realistic is this scenario i think i watched one of your videos where you mentioned that there's a situation where it explains that um the person was able to compile poetry for an english king because um because their languages were the same at that point or something like that i might have got that well there's there's two old norse texts that say something very like that so in in the saga of gun lag warm tongue um it says that he goes and he serves for a while in the court of the english king and there's a very explicit note and this song is written in the late 1200s but it says at that time which would be around 1000 at that time the language in england and scandinavia was the same um which is an interesting little note and then um the first grammatical treatise where he is proposing how to write old norse more phonetically he says we ought to as much as possible follow the example of the english who speak the same language as us this isn't about the mid 1100s or who speak a language so close to ours that they are not very different he's it's it's something very close to that so there's a a certain consciousness that early on or earlier on the languages were quote unquote the same are nearly the same do you know if there's anywhere in english older middle english or anything like that is said about old norse i don't know of anywhere but i haven't i haven't really looked um most of my i suppose most of my intuition on that kind of thing comes from um uh i suppose kind of deductions from the way loans were passed into old english so in a video not that long ago i commented that a lot of um words in northern english dialects and probably some in southern english dialects as well uh that are clearly taken from old norse for example don't don't preserve inflection endings which implies i think that people were aware what was an inflectional ending and what wasn't and things like that so i i as far as i the furthest i would go with that would be to say that i think people were probably aware enough of the structure um that that kind of loaning um took place where the word wasn't loaned as a whole but it was loaned as the stem which which they recognized as the stem but i don't i don't actually know if that accords with modern ideas about loaning so that could be well off but but i'm not sure if it's ever referenced in in the literature then maybe there may be references i don't know about you know what it occurred to me that just that that reminds me of is how in english you can make up fakey latin words or fakey spanish words by adding use for latin or o for spanish right like people just you know like you could say my my computeris you know um carpe computer room or something like that like people are kind of vaguely aware of these endings um that could be something really similar between old english and old norse even if people don't always know exactly what the ending means they know it's an ending that's true so it doesn't necessarily have to be that they're aware of that there's any mutual intelligibility they just know i suppose if something occurs at the end of a word enough then you probably recognize it as an inflection yeah i think that's actually potentially what's going on there it doesn't necessarily have to be that they're speaking but they see it or they encounter the language so much they're kind of aware that oh yeah other words in an r yeah that makes sense the thing the thing you've said in the past about um correspondences is i think that's kind of reinforced in my mind so um there was the thing uh where the the english speaker says bardos and the north speaker says the great barack so i think that i think that's um definitely a factor there are obviously a few old norse words that that wouldn't necessarily be immediately intuitive so um something like i'm going to pronounce it wrong but o for not which i i suppose that must be related to in um textbook old norse that may be wrong there yeah it's just something that i see in old danish so much that i thought i would just bring it into this uh for for no i think it is just a shorter form from that same thing from eggy yeah okay um i'm not aware of that having an old english cog mate so that and and i think the standard old way uh the standard way of saying that in old english would just be affixing there to the start of the verb so that might be um that might take a minute to pick up but i think it i think it would probably be obvious from context um after a little while it might be confusing at first um and then there are things like sorry no i was just thinking about that and it's interesting how nay as a negative is almost completely gone in old norse except for sometimes in poetry does it happen you do see it in poetry science but only pretty archaic poetry um it's you know it's surprising old norse just drops that old germanic and old end of european nay it's just gone are there cognates of it in if if you were disagreeing with the statement would nay be the standard way of doing that or is that is that not the case either yeah to say to say no that's nay and in fact i think i think in the way that i spelled what because i did the captions and the way that i spelled your name in old english i spelled it as the old norse word because i because i thought actually i was i was looking it up and it looked like the old the middle english maybe old english word nay actually is from the old norse as a as an interjection yeah yeah i i could imagine that yeah because i'm trying to think so i've seen it as an interjection it's it's definitely used as an interjection in old english but i don't know if that's later on um but yeah but this would be late enough that so actually in a sense it's kind of fun because we potentially already have one little borrowing yeah well we discussed a little bit didn't we um or at least we we sort of touched on the possibility that maybe some some things have been borrowed already so i think i say um for are not are you not um and i think aaron which is the um what i've taken to be a sort of northern mercy and northumbrian version of auron um i think that's an old norse borrowing although i mean i don't know if it's a borrowing i think it's actually just a cognate um i because i for one thing i don't know how you would borrow it and get the n um i've got boy i've got some old english morphology books like 10 feet away from me i could look this up but i actually think it's a cognate not a borrowing and still it would be an easy enough cognate to to understand you know the our own arrow it's not that hard to figure out yeah um what else i suppose pronouns like han for he is is fairly sort of different from old english here um but but again i think that kind of thing would come with context wouldn't it you know there's a few places where old norse doesn't have a word anything like the old english word like there's no cognate anywhere close to it um you know the the most noticeable as i'm looking at my notes here um to me is is luck so you asked me is the day unlucky he said lookie that luck word is completely foreign to old norse it does come into the modern scandinavian languages from german but it's a west dramatic word so you know the closest thing an old norse would be what oh oh heppin unlucky so that would be a word you just have to learn you just have to right and there's a few places like that we mentioned that maybe nay the interjection might be a borrowing into old norse uh from until things from old norse there may actually be a case uh that's invisible a little bit in our dialogue of the opposite because when i was trying to figure out what your lines would be in in old norse dough the the dough a female deer um was a little bit interesting to me because i noticed danish does have that word but the other scandinavian languages don't so quite possibly it's actually a borrowing into danish from english um because otherwise you'd expect something from like hind which you have two in old english because hen's call is his cav yeah is him called a natively occurring old norse word um yep as well yep it's the same word so yeah it's it's literally like the docaf right dose cap yeah it's hinder culver and and old norse so the same thing it'd be easy to figure out you know i think personally they're a little bit less instantaneously mutually intelligible that i initially thought i i would agree i think um sorry were you gonna well i was just gonna say i you know you look at the stuff on paper you think about all the cognates that you see especially if you know both languages pretty well you know heck i can read beowulf see an unfamiliar old english word kind of think about it and you know guess what the old norse word is and figure it out that way sometimes right but that's that's sitting in you know the cool of the modern study yeah and then there's all these places like luck um maybe with dialects other than danish the do word where there's just going to be no way to guess what the word is in the language if you don't know it and so i'm kind of thinking now my my classic analogy to people has been it would be like someone with an american accent maybe a really thick regional american accent trying to talk to someone with a with a pretty broad scots where initially it sounds kind of unfamiliar but you pretty quickly figure out what the substitutions are yeah but i think it's actually a little bit wider than that now i think it's maybe closer to spanish portuguese uh i don't know if you where where you're at on this i i don't know i i'm not don't intuitively know how how easy one is to understand for the other thing well in that case there's a funny thing because it's actually easier for one side of that equation to understand the other which i'm not necessarily proposing but i think there's just enough places where there's not a cognate and i also noticed as we were going through this the the verb conjugation is pretty different um yeah yeah yeah hang on let me draw up here um translations i can follow along well yeah so the main thing is i was thinking about the singular verbs where in old english of course you have the classic thing that you still see in the king james bible where you have the st second singular and the f third third singular whereas an old norse both of those are are are right so uh my dane would say fusakar and you would say you know thu what would that be c could be like say chest yeah i think so but in certain dialects of old english i think because seiton comes from a course i suppose it comes from a um a word which i think in proto-germanic had all so i think there's i think that a arises from i um so um in certain the further north you go the later ion lap forms tend to get unrounded so it might have been something like search on or even because because palatalized forms are slightly rarer in northumbrian so if you weren't really fun or you might actually there's something like each circa or something like that which is a lot more probably a lot more bridgeable okay that would certainly yeah that would certainly be an easy bridge to cross the inflection would still be different although it occurs to me now i mean the english third singular s comes from something uh i think you can actually see it sometimes and i think it's actually originally a northumbrian ending isn't it yeah it is yeah yeah and it's more widely applicable in northumbrian as well so you can have it in the second person as well um in english anyway i mean that's not such a jump to go from you know s you know sukkah sukkas the sucker sucker that's not yeah that's not very formidable so yeah and northumbrian certainly you would expect that to be pretty easy i've also heard it said um if there's kind of an old argument that that s ending and the verb in english actually comes from old norse because the r ending in old norse is from proto-germanic z but that z has turned r from runic evidence a few centuries before so i don't think that it's actually responsible for the english ending yeah it's so you know i think i think our experiment has made me a little more cautious about claiming that these are so mutually intelligible and i think the argument i would make is a little bit closer to it would be very very easy to learn the other yeah yeah i think i think that was the the impression i got from a video you did a while ago um where i think you actually said a similar thing like they wouldn't be immediately intelligible but they'd be easy for for speakers of the other to learn because i think as you say i think there are probably situations where um yeah well i suppose it's going back to the spanish portuguese example do you think that in that situation it would just be a case of learning the substitutions and then maybe picking up a few words once you had those substitutions yeah i think so and i think also that they would be close enough that there would be cases of you know it would be pretty hard to get over your actual native language um you know where you'd be tempted because the words are similar enough you'd be tempted to kind of like fall back into your english plurals or something because that's the like that's a place where i think the substitutions are pretty easy you know english english plurals and s are just blatantly equivalent to norse plurals and r you know so i think my dane speaker really wouldn't struggle with the badass badar thing because it's a perfect correspondence long a old english plural is always our plural nor so it would just be you would figure that out real fast you mentioned the doe thing actually that was something i i thought when i looked at your translation i thought that seems like because i think it was like the door or something again and then but it it it struck me that that should be like dead or something like that from my limited knowledge of the correspondences so that yeah as you said earlier that it might be a uh alone yep that's that's me just taking it as a loan and and and i i looked through um the danish academy dictionary for and and they yeah they took it as a loan for molding this so i just treated it as that um now that is a place where you have a plural inflection in old english that you don't see in old norse that in plural you never you don't have any of those in plurals in old norse so that would be a little different but then actually old norse is a lot more consistent in a sense about plurals plurals are almost always r so if the old norse speaker kind of learns that oh yeah sometimes they've got this weird plural ending in n i'll just substitute an r and i can probably figure out what what's meant like i don't think that would be a huge jump maybe that would be one situation where it would be like you said there'd be there'd be an imbalanced imbalance so maybe an old english speaker would have less trouble because the endings were so consistent in old norse true because you could just learn basically well you know i throw an r at the end of this and i can make it plural you know i might get the vowel right but but i'll get my meaning across especially as danish is already kind of losing its uh it's the distinction between unstressed vowels um whereas the old norse speaker trying to speak old english might have a lot more hesitation and uncertainty about plurals this is actually an imbalance between german and english today because german speakers figure out pretty fast they can just had s to everything yeah english speakers you know we have to go okay crap this is just an umlaut thing or yeah it's it's actually that is a a good example i think for that imbalance yeah and the german inflection morphology system is obviously cognate with the albin well not not perfectly cognate but the same kind of system as the old english one so i suppose maybe that's quite a good a good analogy yeah but i think so i i think modern german and modern english are a much bigger gulf but than old norse old english i think so yeah yeah but you know like i'm trying to i was trying to think what the ref equivalent for modern english would be which it's it's kind of unfair because of course more space has separated english from any other cognitive language now much space and time um i mean it's closer than modern english to modern dutch yeah um which is pretty easy to figure out if you kind of get rolling on it um i still think spain i still think spanish portuguese are a good example uh understory some missions plot deutsche potters yeah similar to dutch is a pretty easy goal for an english speaker to jump yeah i wonder i wonder how it works with dutch and german as well i've seen some videos of people trying to understand between those two that might be a good example too and that also has that imbalance because of course german is so much more reflected than dutch yeah that's true grace asked what do you think the mutual intelligibility would have been like during the reign of alfred and the forming of the dane law so that would be perhaps a hundred and ten twenty years before this but i think the main difference there is actually the dialects involved because i think alfred's wes saxon has a bigger jump to make to old norse than your mercy in northumbrian one of the big things that comes to my mind besides the palatalization you already mentioned he's saying chalf versus we're both called um one of the big things that comes to my mind is um the the r verb so you say aron i say eru but alfred's west saxon says sinned like german right that's a pretty big jump that you're not going to be able to just guess right away so i think actually it's it's you know you could never confirm this without a time machine but my impression is that your northumbrian north speaker northumbrian speaker and north speaker after some initial uncertainty about some vowel equivalences and stuff like that are gonna get pretty close to eighty percent understanding of each other yeah that sounds reasonable which i just calculated with a super computer that's exactly correct like but you know roughly eighty percent i think with wes saxon with the some of those big differences of vocabulary and some of those big differences in phonology that might drop to more like 60. yeah i think that that's one thing i think is that i um i couldn't have um it's hard to know in in ordinary speech exactly what would have been the normal word for something so there could be a situation where there's a well i mean like baras and bailar like there could be a situation where there's a word um which is the standard i i don't know if it would have been more common than elbow that was just a sort of a thing for the for the experiment but you have it you have a word like bar and then there's a less used word elbor which is which is cognate with a word but that you might not immediately work out that that's that's cognate because it's a word you don't use as much so it might have been um that i suppose it depends on the core vocabularies maybe and how much they would have aligned rather than whether there was an existing cognate somewhere in the language yeah because that existing cognate somewhere in the language that also requires some thought and it's not always obvious right away i actually encounter this teaching modern scandinavian languages because you know when i was teaching old i'm not old when assisting modernistic at berkeley i would point out you know you're learning the verb to be m okay it's pretty easy to s actually modern slightly air which doesn't sound that familiar at first then you say thou art yeah right but you have to think about it because you're not saying thou art all the time or or learning um say norwegian or swedish um look for the same verb i used actually and our conversation is sukar and that doesn't seem like anything that you would say in english you know look for but then if you remember that it's seek yeah it's not so but you have to think about that stuff it's it's not gonna be right there on the 10. and i think yeah that would be a much bigger challenge with west saxon than with uh than with anglian or northumbrian yeah angling like dioxide i pointed out to one of my friends once that german dine as in your his cognitive design in english and that that really surprised them because even though even though the vowels are kind of evolved convergently and that's not that's not like an ancient preservation of some vowel similarity it's it's um yes it's the same word it's just not immediately intuitive yep especially because it's less used in one language than the other yeah which is exactly what we did with the boar words yeah i'm really curious if you can tell us a little bit more about the specific things you did with your old english year to adapt it to the spoken conditions of the east midlands and about 1000 okay um so i went for something that was somewhere between mercy and northumbrian was the aim because it's sort of it it is within mercy i think that the nottingham setting but it's just shy of the northumbrian dialect area so i thought it'd be interesting to combine features um and i actually possibly went a bit overboard on the northumbrian in relation to the mercian um but um that's not too egregious because they're they're both considered um angry in dialect so they both share a lot of features which it doesn't necessarily imply that they're a continuation of um whatever the angles spoke on the continent before the migration period but it's it's just it's just like a um a scholarly term that refers to both of them because they share a lot of features i got a lot of these from folks introductory grammar of old english and also from extrapolations from um modern dialects and things so for example the word bridge which in in textbook holding this would be bleach um i put it here as big because it was in the dative i think um and that's based on for one thing it's based on the fact that we see parallelization happening a bit less in northumbrian old english than it does in other dialects um and for another thing there is a modern dialect word brig which i suppose might come from old norse but it occurs in a lot of place names and it it means bridge so i interpreted that as probably native because we see this um palatalization not occurring in certain situations and the same occurs to words like rig meaning ridge and stuff like that um and that lack of parallelization i also applied to the word each in textbook old english which means i so um in uh in the anglian dialect you have sometimes you have a um lenition of k at the end of a word when it occurs in in a low sort of low stress location so something like which i think i put in the translation which i sent over to you with the word meaning but um often it's spelt a h which suggests it's pronounced something like ah um and in northumbrian that occurs more widely in situations where you would expect the curve to be palatalized so one example of that is each where uh a proto-germanic or west germanic word something like eek has become each through palatalization um and in this situation because it retains that k this is then united to sure so ich well that well it's written in texas ih which which is interpreted as pronounced something like but i'm not sure but that's what i've gone with here hilda is saying and you see um evidence of that um unparallelized even in the middle english period where you have chaucer's reeves tale which uses deliberately northern forms is describing a northern setting um and one of those is that it says ich instead of each for i and so that was that was one example of a thing which was possibly a bit too northumbrian um so while that lunation definitely happened in mercy and i'm not sure if the lack of palatalization would have occurred that far south but but that that was a tentative one um as for uh a lot of the vowels a lot a lot of the diphthongs aren't there where they would be in textbook old english so they're smooth to monophthongs and that's uh that's a result of a couple of things so so for one you have this thing called anglian smoothing where all of the diphthongs can be smooth to monophthongs in certain situations before um certain specific consonants um but also you have a situation where certain sounds never diphthonized in the first place because they weren't in a um because a sound change happened early on that meant that they weren't in a position to differentiate so an example of that is kulf here which would be chalf in textbook old english so in textbook holding this you have a breaking of and then um because there's an ah that means that the cur at the start of the word palatalizes to ch so where you'd have you have calf because that ad has retracted to ah so a lot of the bowel differences can be can be put down to those those kinds of things um and that's also why i've had i i've put instead of now then with the with the back valve instead of the front with instead of the diphthong um i think i think that might be it one thing is that i haven't included eu because that's something that tends to occur in west saxon um it's it's normally i think it's as far as i know it's always the eye mutation of something and those things i mutated to different things in them uh in non west saxon dialect so there's no eu i thought about putting ew in which is a proto-germanic sound that got preserved in um uh northumbrian for quite a long time and mercy and for a certain amount of time but not quite as long so i think that would have affected the word hail day which is which means today so it would have been something like heal day but um because because of the mercian setting i thought um that would probably have already merged with ale by this point so maybe in northumbria you still have eu at this point but i think even by the even in northumbria by that point it was probably starting to merge with eel um and then speaking of hail day um just to preempt corrections i wasn't sure which case to go with the hail day and so i i went with um i sort of did it by analogy with uh saunders day which i put in the accusative because that's that's how i've seen it used in um bosworth polar examples and stuff like that when it follows the preposition on so i thought maybe on today works but if that's right if there's textual evidence against that then then by all means that's that's my mistake and i'm sorry for tarnishing the video with it no i would support that being accusative because it's accusative in old norse and after all you might be losing your noun endings at this point like just a little bit so um actually so what you mentioned about palatalization makes your old english more intelligible to my old norse speaker because it's a lot further from old norse culve than golf is right so that's and and actually it occurs to me too that that might be another place where an old english speaker has a tiny advantage over the old norse speaker because if you're a southern old english speaker you might have heard northern old english here there and yawn right so you might say chill but you've heard some northerners say call so when an endorsement says call you're already a little bit more ready for what that might mean oh yeah they don't that sounds like the northern word yeah something like that and it might be sorry go ahead um i was just going to say we discussed in the crowd cast um that we did a week or two ago as well the the possibility that were still possibly telephones with the same phoneme for quite a while in old english because they're they're alliterated with each other which doesn't necessarily mean their elephants are the same phoneme but um there was probably some recognition that che was in some way related to ka um by all english speakers so they might they might just intuitively recognize kurt before a front van was equivalent of but right which would be an advantage the english speaker speaking to the norseman who who knows what chess sounds like to endorsement i'm not quite sure what that would sound like um so i i see two questions over here from mason stitch uh let me make uh and now from grace let me make some comments just just parallel to what you said about your your sort of localization because i of course didn't use a completely standard classical uh ultimate from the 1200s i was trying to make this danish in the 1000s so i read a lot of old danish in preparation for this i was looking at some of the earliest leech books preserved in danish some of those come from close to 1300 which is pretty early for danish i looked at runic inscriptions found in england and i also took a look at just you know anything from the first couple centuries of the danish manuscript tradition just to kind of see what direction danish was going in so taking that and then also considering some of the more archaic features you'd expect to still be there are constructed by viking angel danish so some of the archaic stuff i've still got is is he still saying s and presumably vas or wass for is and was not air var because those have been analogized to the r that's in the plural yet i've never seen those rs that early anywhere in scandinavia so i think this guy probably still says which would still which would by the way also be more intelligible to the english speaker than classical old norse aero and var yes sounds a lot like english is loss um i still have him saying w instead of v but i spelled it v i tried to keep my spellings as recognizable as i could for people that might know classical norse but i pronounce the visa's w's i actually just released a video about this today uh i think the w it just like like 37 minutes ago the the w to v change seems to happen at different times in different parts of scandinavia i think it happened later in east norse so i just went ahead and said w that's also something that makes the english and norse closer than classical old norse would be the classical english for instance i said weather which sounds exactly like english word weather good weather pronouns are a little bit different so uh one of the really distinct things about west scandinavian versus east scandinavian west scandinavian which of course includes icelandic it says ek for i all these scandinavians says yak uh it's broken but it's not broken in the west so of course i did that um and then you don't have lowering of long iir to long er so the date of me is mir nominative you all plural or you polite is ear instead of instead of mayor air and i had his um singular verb inflection a little bit more collapsed so you see that really really early in east scandinavian where the second third singular ending r spreads to the first singular i'm just letting that already happen so he says yaksukar not yaksuki or something like that and i have his vowels kind of collapsing in unstressed position when he's speaking carefully you can hear the distinct vowels of the endings so when he's considering like really thinking and saying it slowly you can hear that distinct ah but at the very beginning of the dialogue when we're just saying good morning i just have schwa there go then morgan because it looks like danish is moving really really early toward uh just merging all those unstressed vowels of schwa um because already in like the late 1000's and danish inscriptions i'm seeing confusion between the vowels so i'm assuming that's already kind of kind of going on um but anyway all that actually all those things really kind of make it more like old english right um both the archaeoisms like s and wasps and the uh the innovations like kind of simplifying the verb system it gets it a little bit closer to something an english speaker could understand then what you're going to see if you pick up you know gordon's introduction to old norse which is old icelandic 250 years later i wonder whether i should have reduced the vowels a bit more for that for that period because i know generally um historically northern middle english dialects have had a lot of bowel reduction which later ends up happening the south but um i think i naturally i have to i have to push myself not to use unstressed vowels in certain positions so maybe maybe that works my benefit another thing i forgot to mention which might also have increased intelligibility is that in um in a lot of northumbrian texts you see the a n ending of certain verbs in the infinitive um getting reduced to just ah and i think that occurs in words in certain verbs in old norse like laker and things like that as well that's that's always the infinitive in old norse it's always ah just yeah so that would actually be exactly equivalent then so then you would be saying you know uh driva and i would be saying deriva yeah right yeah that would hopefully make things a lot more i wonder i i wonder if there was any nasalization in old english before the loss but i i feel like if there was still natalization at the time then it probably would still be pronounced it would probably still be spelt vowel and in text but i could be wrong i forgot to mention that too is i i sort of tried to nasalize so um in the 1140s the first grammarian in iceland says there's a distinct class of long nasal valves and you definitely see evidence for that being distinct in runic inscriptions because nasal a is written with a different rune than oral long a long nasal long a is different from oral long a um icelandic seems to preserve that longer than other dialects but this is still so early that i thought there were probably still at least traces of it so i sort of compromised where again kind of like with my unstressed vowels where he's speaking more distinctly i tried to kind of nasalize right aren't you out in front of a [Music] but then one just says e-dog i don't have i don't you know today i don't since that's so unstressed said e-dog not e-dog like so i'm kind of thinking of this as being again a little bit of a transitional period the uh personal pronouns like han he hana her also you'd expect to have the nasal vowel at this point so i subtly tried to do that and say han hana but not quite i don't know it's it's it's it's probably not very audible but i'm trying to kind of faintly do it modern english speakers are differentiating between them anyway although maybe i'm terrible at it i'm not good at it uh after all i'm slightly better now after having spent a a pretty intensive week in montreal but that's but i'm still not graded um so we got a couple questions over here let me see what we've got so mace asks uh if you guys were to do this again is there any places you feel you could either invent slang or informal speech or contractions you feel would make logical sense to apply in a spoken sense well you did this simon you had some some contractions hang on let me check that let me refer back to the um can i have one oh uh do you mean in terms of like nut for near oh yeah well that that kind of thing is attested in old um an old english text so that the um the word ne is often just reduced to nut and then that's shoved at the start of a um a verb or in some cases actually replaces the first um letter of a verb so uh will one and kneel one for one and not one and things like that and i think yeah yeah absolutely um you did thoughts didn't you yeah which is also tested yeah there's the good attestation of some of some um i suppose what have become formalized um contractions yeah and then as far as slaying it's sort of hard like actually i'm sort of reminded of a video i did about cussing in about august where you know what's cussing in one language it's pretty hard to sort of anticipate what cussing is in another language because different things are taboo slang is the same way it's hard to anticipate what's slang in one language from what's saying in yours because you know what sounds really informal in one language is actually formal in the other a good example of this is you know in english how's it going it's a pretty informal way of greeting someone whereas in you know norwegian pokemon gorda which means the exact same thing is actually like a formal polite how are you doing so you know i i don't really know how to anticipate slang but i will say that one thing that we did consciously try to do was make this conversation both casual like it it doesn't like we're not trying to be really stilted with each other but also not such a predictable situation as most of these the example conversations you see in like a textbook learning you know how to speak french in 50 days or something all those conversations are so stilted and predictable i wanted to have a situation that's not like one of those phrasebook conversations but also isn't like what was coming next right and it's also not like something really stereotyped with vikings and englishmen like i just got off the boat and i'm going to burn your house down i want to burn your house and you say please do not burn my house or something like i'm just like please do not burn my house just looking at the phrase book i do not wish you to burn my house that you know so i think actually although we're not going to get to slaying i think that we got a conversation that's informal which is actually it was tough like this was one of the hardest in terms of videos that i've made as short as this was it it's it's hard yeah i i'm still expecting somebody to pick out some mistake that i've not noticed in which case that's not an indictment on jackson that's that's pretty much my my errors i've been known to make mistakes in the past with syntax and stuff always be indictments one one thing we tried to do with the formalities is the old english um in uh at least in texas as far as i'm aware it doesn't have a tv distinction but i think old norse does um so we i i started off using stool and you started off using eid i think that was the pronoun wasn't it and at one point i say you can use stool um indicating possibly an understanding of the um formality conventions of the other language maybe i was curious about that because i i wondered if if you saw that in old english that early you do see it on old norse early because skaldic poetry from the pre-christian period has uh the polite plural you and and also the royal we really i didn't know if that was in old english that early i don't know i think it was but okay so so that's actually something i didn't know you weren't saying that because your language at that convention you were saying that because you were aware my language did which is pretty cool and i think that's actually that's potentially realistic i mean i've definitely had um i've definitely had professors that would have made me call them z if they could have um you know yeah it's it's something that yeah if you do understand the convention that you would understand that i'm trying to be polite yeah that's that's cool um so that's actually that's another little informality formality thing uh stitch over here as did you encounter any words that led to the wrong interpretation because they're similarities take for example that's german comparison someone who speaks dutch might think the german word das maya means lake because the dutch word for lake is mare and german however das mere means the sea an interesting thing i noticed was uh you said when you were saying um i wish i'd seen the deer you used a word like this or something which um i don't know if that's is that cognate with um wish with wushon because i know i know he must be which then became and it used to have the end which which i assume disappeared because of the spiral the it must be cognate with old english wish on because um what you've got there is just an old norse the w or later v is dropping before a rounded vowel yeah that makes sense and then the nasal is lost in old english before a fricative um old nurse too really oh because it's not bunch it's not like true oh yeah i've just seen i had it in my head that there was an n in there but i didn't know i was wrong um yeah but i was thinking that that might be interpreted by an old english speaker as um cognate with ascion instead of wisconsin so it might be they might have heard it as something like um i'm i'm asking myself that whereas in fact i wish that for myself sort of thing well but even contextually you could maybe figure that out because it sounds like to the english speaker maybe something like i asked that for me like i'm asking you know the powers that be yeah huh yeah that's a funny possibility there'd be just that minor confusion of of what you're hearing yeah i suppose it's like a maybe that counts as a false friend kind of situation um but of course we don't we can't know how they would have interpreted that but um yeah like you say it might be one of those things that became became obvious from context very quickly i think you also have to wonder if um if speakers these two languages would notice the way that those w's drop before rounded vowels so if they could anticipate after enough contact with the other language that you would have something like you know old english ward old norse and if they would even lead in situations like this to sort of like false insertions of a w if you were an old norse speaker trying to speak old english right that would be a possibility that we didn't consider because we're not trying to speak each other's languages we're trying to communicate on our own yeah yeah i i wonder whether there would have been widespread kind of attempts to accommodate for the other language in actual everyday speech whether people would try deliberately try to sort of uh you know settle on a middle ground by by deliberately pulling in things like that like the w sound at the start of certain words and over compensating um another possible one is when you say that the boar not the boar the the dough that you saw is probably already roasted on the lord's spit uh the word he used for lord freya here's the new one that is brown that's the name of a god an old norse right that's freud so it is occasionally used in english i mean excuse me an old norse for a uh for a human lord but it's you know most of the occurrences of that word are referring to the name of the god whose name just means the lord yeah so i think i think the north speaker's gonna understand that fine but like there's a quick moment where he's thinking like like just the god haunting this forest or something like i don't know but but i think that he could figure it out pretty fast and it wouldn't actually cause confusion but it would be a funny place where there'd just be that one little little stumble gila asks in many countries we have greetings like ahoy or hey or from a maritime context but today used in everyday language what do we know about old english and old norse welcome terms the same question for the short form of good morning on the north coast of germany it's moin and in two northeastern provinces of the netherlands moy both completely unusual and the rest of both countries i mean you could imagine there would be shortenings like that in in conversational old norse old english too actually morin is a really good example because you know the the the germanic root i think in and i'm 10 feet away from the book that would confirm this but i'm pretty sure in gothic it's like morgans and so in the the in the oldest stages of english and german and scandinavian you see something like morgan but many of these languages independent independently develop a conversational shorting of that that's something pretty close to mourn a man or something like that well i think that english mauryan um became more possibly oh no actually it would become moro oh i don't know sorry carry on i need to think more about it no but i'm just thinking like so it's conceivable that an old english or old norse you know speaking more casually you might say you know go the mourn right just to lie the g and that second vowel together which is something that's happened in the later stages of all these languages again it's sort of hard to predict where that's happening because our written records tend to be pretty formal and so they're they're they're often not going to use those casual forms like that but it's very very plausible those casual forms existed yeah yeah another thing is i i always wonder how um things like pronoun reduction because in um in modern english well in standard modern english and in modern english dialects you have various levels of pronoun reduction where the vowels of a pronoun might get replaced with schwa so you have instead of you in dialects that have have thou until late on you have the instead of vowel um and in some places you'll still hear that instead of they in certain positions of low stress but in theory um old english isn't really supposed to have had schwa i suppose it until later on so i suppose it could have had it electronically but i wonder if it would have had weakened forms like that or if old norse would have had weakened forms like that in in casual rapid speech i mean it's plausible you see it in um in the modern scandinavian languages where you often have na from hana her uh that's that sort of thing is pretty frequent um of course the prime english example is um um yeah i'm sure they probably were reduced if not if the vowel wasn't reduced you'd still expect yeah something like nah wouldn't be unexpected in old old norse poetry you see uh eck i often reduced to just k on on a verb right so amp for i am instead of ekm actually but then that only seems to be in poetry that i've ever seen i think um you have later examples so from around the i'll find a source before i actually do the video put the video up but um i think from around the 17th century you have some dialects which which still retain itch um as a pronoun and they tend to uh reduce it to check in certain situations so if they're saying i will it will then it often becomes chill or something like that so i can imagine the same thing i i think i've actually um no that's really cool but yeah so that's my thing although i don't know of any text from early on but it's very it's very cool that the number of contractions you get from open sex that's very nice yeah well they're always trying to save syllables in poetry so that's that's about an hour uh we've got some good questions i think we covered a lot of the ground of what we did here that was a lot of work on my own i think it was a lot of work on your end too yeah um any any last thoughts you want to you want to leave with us about about this little project let me check that i've not missed anything off my list of things i was gonna um mention um i think that's everything but thank you very much indeed because you did the bulk of the work here you suggested it and you you came up with the the bulk of the script so thank you very much indeed for this this project it's very very very fun well you came up with the cool parts of the script and you're a better actor i don't think that's actually true well we'll see who hollywood calls after this all right well well patreon thank you so much for coming here for this conversation about this and um i've enjoyed talking about you know this is actually this was more fun for me than a lot of videos are in as much as i know that 20 years ago i would have loved coming across this yeah so would i well more recently but yeah before right before i was into linguistics i would have loved it yeah this would have been awesome to me then so it's kind of cool to make something that i know i would have really liked before i was on the other side of this and the one making it all right well thank you simon so much and uh thank you patreon and for now gold weather or indeed all right all the best everybody

Channel: Simon Roper

Views: 112,247

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Id: DKzJEIUSWtc

Length: 58min 45sec (3525 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Xtanto]

Simon Roper and Dr. Jackson Crawford (the Guy who did the language from ACV) have a short conversation in Old English and Norse. Followed by a discussion of language.

[u/griffraff0701]

This was absolutely fantastic to watch. I’ve always been very into old Norse history & mythology. Playing valheim only enhanced that curiosity. This was great.