| > We have an excellent idea of what the Anglo Saxon language would have sounded like, in part because it has close living relatives. The phonology is well reconstructed; that is not the issue. The issue is that it is not just a dead language, but a dead passive language which is only read, but never written, unlike, say Latin, which is both read and written — I seriously doubt that there are more than a handful of people on this planet who can claim to have true Sprachgefühl for any period of Old English, and if they have it for 800's English, it is unlikely they have it for 1000's English. It's simply prætentious to claim that one can enjoy the æsthetics of a poem written in this language, for which one requires an intimate sense of Sprachgefühl — I can Latin myself and understand the meaning of the text, but I cannot claim to have the same sense of æsthetics I have for English, where I can decide what phrasings sound beautiful, and what sound stiff, and that's very hard to ever acquire for a dead language. > If you want to hear it, you can listen to the first few lines here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH-_GwoO4xI Listening to the sounds is different from understanding the meaning and nuance, much of what you wrote seems to be about surface realization of sounds rather than appreciating the choice of words from an æsthetic standpoint. That speaker also clearly sounds as what he almost certainly is: a non-native who would certainly appear to have an heavy accent and appear stiff and wooden to actual native speakers. |
Here's a more fluent reading, if you like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CpKlEiahtI
Enjoy it, don't enjoy it, hop in your time machine and go back to the 9th century to enjoy it; whatever floats your boat. Personally, I enjoy it, "pretentious" or not.