[englishrookie]

Well, for a native speaker of Dutch who doesn't speak English at all (not many left since my grandmother died in 2014), I'd say old English is actually easier to read than modern - starting around 1400.

Around 1000, English and Dutch must have been mutually understandable.

[vidarh]

Eddie Izzard speaking old English to a Frisian farmer:

https://youtu.be/OeC1yAaWG34?si=lkoQ--uZNN8Ntpqy

As a Norwegian who speaks English and school-German, Dutch is fairly easy to read but sounds like you're speaking a mix of English, Norse and German with a mouthful of gravel (similar to the Danish, who Norwegians like to say speaks Norwegian with a potato in their mouth)

[CRConrad]

Almost correct, except it's Swedish the Danes are speaking with a hot potato in their mouth.

[dboreham]

My experience traveling to the Netherlands as an English speaker is that people are speaking English, but they're drunk!

[phpnode]

When they seamlessly switch from English to Dutch I feel like I’m having a stroke: all the same intonation, the same accent, but nothing makes sense any more

[mattmanser]

That doesn't jive with my experience at all. I'm half-dutch, raised in England.

Dutch doesn't have the same intonation, has harsher pronunciations, and has a whole extra sound most English people struggle with (a rolled r).

The older generations also can't pronounce -thew very well as it's not a thing in Dutch, so struggle to pronounce my name, calling me Matchoo instead of Matthew. It still boggles my mind that my Mum would pick a name the Dutch can't pronounce.

The Dutch accent is also extremely noticeable to a native English speaker.

Ultimately, they're not the same at all as English is Germanic/Latin hybrid where half the words are French/Italian words, and half the words are Germanic/Dutch words.

Dutch is not.

You can usually tell by looking at the word and the end of the word.

Words like fantastic, manual, vision, aquatic, consume are all from -ique, -alle, -umme and will have similar words in French/Italian. The tend to be longer words with more syllables.

Words like mother, strong, good, are Germanic in root. The -er, -ong, -od words will all be similar to the German/Dutch words. Shorter, quicker to pronounce.

[CRConrad]

> It still boggles my mind that my Mum would pick a name the Dutch can't pronounce.

Maybe she meant for you to go by Mathias (or whatever the local equivalent is) when in the Netherlands?

[Agingcoder]

The intonation is different, there are harsher sounds, but there are diphtongs everywhere in Dutch, and to me thisbis what makes it sound like English. French, Spanish, German etc don’t have diphtongs ( or they’re quite rare )

[marssaxman]

I had a strange experience during one episode of the show "Amsterdam Empire", which is spoken in Dutch. There's a scene where one of the characters addresses some foreign tourists: the (Dutch) subtitles continued to make sense, but his speech was just absolute gibberish. It was startling to realize that he had been speaking English, my native language: in the moment, I did not recognize it at all.

[satvikpendem]

There's a meme about how Dutch doesn't seem like a serious language to English speakers, and what's funnier is Dutch speakers trying to figure out why it's so funny to English speakers.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/english-to-dutch-translations

[jakevoytko]

As someone who took German in high school, Dutch had my brain flailing for vocabulary to understand but nothing connected.

[ekr]

That's strange (i.e. different from my experience). I've been living in the Netherlands since 2021, speak some (~ B1) Dutch, but good English and German. Dutch language was from day one comprehensible due to German similarity. Many/most words either sound like the German equivalent to the point where you naturally match them in your thought, or they are written (mostly) like the German equivalent.

The connection between Dutch and English languages is far more minimal in comparison. In fact, when I first faced the language, I would have said it was a combination of ~80% German, 10% English, 5% French, +5% Others.

[vidarh]

Written Dutch is fairly easy for me, on the basis of English + native Norwegian + German from school. Spoken Dutch is largely unintelligible for me, on the other hand, unless they speak very slowly.

> In fact, when I first faced the language, I would have said it was a combination of ~80% German, 10% English, 5% French, +5% Others.

But the vocabulary of English itself is majority of Germanic origin. So while Dutch is often closer to the modern German, there's definitely far more than 10% that has a common origin with English as well as German.

[marssaxman]

I've often had the same thought coming from the other direction, as an English speaker learning Dutch for the past couple of years: I hear many little echoes in Dutch of archaic or poetic English forms.

[roysting]

That’s because English and Dutch are basically German dialects that the ruling aristocrat classes worked hard to differentiate and abstract from their ruling aristocrat class competitors in other places.

You may want lol into that, since you are realizing and noticing things, but you are seemingly still not connecting the dots correctly. Another hint, Dutch comes from Deutsche, how the “Germans” refer to themselves, which is also where the “English” came from, Angles and Saxony, the latter still being a region of “Germany” today.

In other words, you really should be referring to themselves Germans as the Deutsche of you wanted to differentiate them from the Dutch, which are basically the same Deutsche people who just live on the coast, the lowlands, i.e., the Nether-lands.

[cmrdporcupine]

The Anglo-Saxons were not Germans, and their language was not a "German" language.

It was Germanic, derived from a common ancestor with German but absolutely distinct separate lineage and your weird ethonationalist quasi-fascist soup of of thoughts here and below is both factually incorrect and incoherent.

Actual scholars of Germanic languages don't share your bizarre biases.

[vidarh]

The continuum of the North Sea languages is much more apparent if you undo the High German consonant shift... (and of course if you minimise the use of the words English have imported from France)

[roysting]

That seems to me like a really worthwhile effort, especially for the continental Europeans if they want to keep the EU alive, even if it needs major, structural reform that I am not confident it can implement without total deconstruction first. If the EU wants to survive it simply cannot allow English to dominate it, nor is even French ideal, making Dutch the official language is of course silly for obvious reasons (regardless of my affinity for it), contemporary German seems to be self-deleting in many different way for many different reasons, and nonsense like Esperanto speaks for itself. But a kind of merging or integration of the German languages of central Europe would be an ideal candidate to bring about European unity in a sustainable and healthy manner... a meeting in the middle, maybe a restoration of old high German even that is the common node.

I am generally even just sad writing this because even my proposal invariably means the total destruction of many languages, traditions, cultures, and true and healthy diversity that has defined Europe over all of recorded history; but at least if this effort of trying to mash Europe into a kind of neo-communist of uniform sludge, at least try to create something new and beautiful out of it, not some disgusting brown mush where the non-english EU speaks English, while by the end of the century the majority of people will not even be indigenous Europeans anymore.

It is sad realizing that what we are all currently witness to is a cataclysmic collapse and destruction of civilization in Europe on an order that humanity has not witness since the civilizational collapse of the Americas or even the Bronze Age collapse and minor cultural collapses and ethnocides that were perpetrated through the French proto-communist Revolution, the Russian communist revolution and the Chinese communist revolutions. It is astonishing knowing that I am living through a historical event that may even never be recorded, let alone well, because the likelihood that it will be recorded at all, let alone accurately is very low.

If a common German language could be created, along with maybe a common Romance language for Hispania and Italy, etc. at least there would be a kind of remaining legacy akin to how the Egyptian icons are enigmatic, even if their culture did not survive.

[vidarh]

Trying to put your bizarre ethnonationalism aside, as HN is not the place for that:

Firstly, you're conflating German and Germanic, while ignoring that the common ancestor here dates to before the High German consonant shift between the 3rd and 5th centuries, that further split the German* languages, that had already long since split from the other Germanic languages.

Secondly, my point was merely that there is a closer relationship between the Germanic languages historically spoken around the North Sea, than with modern standard German that has carried with it the consonant shift, and so if you take into account Low German/Plattdeutsch, the similarities are more visible and obvious.

I see no reason to try to mush them together, but it would be interesting to see German take the approach of Norway: Norwegian have had a few fairly successful reforms actually moving it further away from Danish in some respect, but which also in some respects have mean allowing older forms closer to Norse in the majority form of Bokmål, that were retained/included in Nynorsk.

If German did the same thing and started encouraging and allowing those of the forms of minority Low German dialects that are closer to the older Germanic forms (e.g. Dag instead of Tag, for dag/day), it might over time restore some of the continuum.

[mmooss]

Beowulf was discovered and translated by Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín, an Icelander who was National Archivist [0] in Denmark, researching Danish history in the British Library.

[0] Or at the time promised the post, I don't remember the details.

[vaylian]

A native Frisian speaker would probably have an even easier time, given that Frisian is the closest language to English. However, Frisian is still more similar to other west-germanic languages than English.

[trelane]

Probably not a coincidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Anglo-Saxon_England

[lbourdages]

Native French speaker here. 1300s I could still kinda follow the story with difficulty but from the 1200s I just couldn't anymore.

I felt like it helped to use an "old english" accent in my inner voice when reading.

[LAC-Tech]

Really? I read German (not at a very high level anymore admittedly), and I find that while Old English is closer to German than modern English is, I would still say a deep knowledge of Modern English helps me more, and that most things have be learned frlm scratch.

Like does Dutch have anything like "cƿæð"? Or "Hlaford"? Or "soð"? "þeah þe"?

I know Dutch should be a little closer to Old English than German, but if you truly can pick up words like that leaning on Dutch, maybe I should learn to read it. (I can read the 1000 Old English sentence pretty well).

[cmrdporcupine]

As a native English speaker who also knows some German and has studied some Anglo-Saxon... I'd say the High German sound shift can really mess up hearing Anglo-Saxon for German speakers but reading it is easier than it might be for a modern English speaker...

The orthography of Anglo-Saxon can make it look easier to read for a modern German or Dutch speaker, but to actually hear it could be confusing. Specifically around the words written with the past tense marker "ge" -- or other words using "ge", which is pronounced like modern English "ye" (hence English 'yester[day]' instead of German 'gestern'), not hard "ge" like in modern high German.

And yes Dutch (or modern Low Saxon dialects or Frisian) could be closer but the orthography is very different and also Anglo-Saxon had a palette closer to the front of the mouth than the back like Dutch.

Also other West Germanic (and North) languages lost the dental fricatives ("thorn" (þ) and "eth" (ð)) while English (and Icelandic) kept it. And Anglo Saxon used them heavily. Old Franconian and Old Saxon had this sound, too, but lost it (hence "the" vs der/die/das etc)

[LAC-Tech]

I dont think reading will be much easier. A modern English speaker - assuming he is well read, will know things like "sooth", "quoth", "art thou", "ere", "sayeth"... I feel knowing this stuff helps me a lot more than cognates of high german "schön" or "wohnen".

Actually knowing Tolkien well has been helpful because the way he writes is very anglo-saxon, not so even his word choices but just the rhythm or syntax.

But yeah I went into Old English thinking it would be more like German, but really it is much more like English than people think IMO.

[vidarh]

> Actually knowing Tolkien well has been helpful because the way he writes is very anglo-saxon, not so even his word choices but just the rhythm or syntax.

In English class at school in Norway, I went through a phase after reading LOTR in Eglish for the first time, where I'd frustrate my teacher by using words that were archaic enough that my teacher had to look them up.

> Old English thinking it would be more like German, but really it is much more like English than people think IMO.

Compare it to Old Norse, and Old Dutch, though, and there are many similarities that stand out. My Norwegian lessons very brief foray into Old Norse definitely made it easier for me to dechipher parts of Old English and Old Dutch (the latter also helped a lot by my halting German). I think a lot of the similarities comes down to learning to recognise a few of the key sound and ortography shifts, at which point they start to look a lot more similar than it looks at first glance.

[zingar]

Most of what I understood from that far back was because of Afrikaans, more than English.

[trueismywork]

I am Indian. I read easily to 1400. But then 1300 is suddenly difficult to read

[riffraff]

Italian here, and it was the same for me, the language feels very different by 1300.

Which is interesting cause 1200 italian[0] seems pretty readable by everyone who can read italian (and likely every other romance language), you have to go further back to have a shift.

[0] E.g. Saint Francis' Canticle of the Sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canticle_of_the_Sun

[thaumasiotes]

> it was the same for me, the language feels very different by 1300.

The language in section 1300 isn't much different from section 1400. Almost all of it is still good English today if you give the words their modern spelling:

Then after much time spoke the Master, and his words were cold as winter is. His voice was as the crying of ravens, sharp and shrill, and all that heard him were adread and durst not speak.

"I deem¹ thee to the death, stranger. Here shalt thou die, far from thy kin and far from thine own land, and none shall know thy name, nor none shall thee beweep."

And I said to him, with what boldness I might gather, "Why farest thou with me thus? What trespass have I wrought against thee, that thou deemst¹ me so hard a doom?"

"[Swie!]"² quoth he, and smote me with his hand, so that I fell to the earth. And the blood ran down from my mouth.

And I [swied],² for the great dread that was come upon me was more than I might bear. My heart became as stone, and my limbs were heavy as lead, and I []³ might no more stand nor speak.

The evil man laughed, when that he saw my pain, and it was a cruel laughter, without mercy or pity as of a man that hath no [rewthe]⁴ in his heart.

Alas! I should never have come to this town of Wolvesfleet! Cursed be the day and cursed be the hour that I first set foot therein!

¹ We still have this word in modern English, but the meaning is different.

² No idea what this word is.

³ I assume the ne in the text here is required by some kind of grammatical negative agreement with the rest of the clause. In more modern (but still fairly archaic) English, nothing goes here. In actual modern-day English, the grammar of this clause isn't really available for use, but it's intelligible.

⁴ This turns out to be the element ruth in ruthless, and a man with no ruth in his heart is one who is literally ruthless, without "ruth". It literally means "regret", but the use in the text clearly matches the metaphorical sense of the modern word ruthless.

[riffraff]

Yeah but the spelling is part of how the language feels :)

Also, you say spelling but e.g. "speken" feels more a grammatical than orthographic difference.

By comparison, Dante's incipit to the Divine Comedy is 100% the same spelling and grammar as modern Italian (nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita/mi ritrovai per una selva oscura/che la diritta via era smarrita)

[Amezarak]

Are you sure you haven't been victimized by manuscripts with modernized spellings?

When I look up ealry manuscript scans of the Comedy, I get:

*Nel mezo delcamin dinra uita / mi trouai puna(?) felua (long s letter) ofcura / che la diricta (some bizarre letter in there) uia era fmarrita (long s).

https://www.digitalcollections.manchester.ac.uk/view/PR-INCU...

[thaumasiotes]

> puna(?)

Note that the p is struck through below its loop; that is probably an abbreviation for "per". That would be an example of the spelling being the same as modern Italian, but the manuscript is written in a kind of shorthand because writing takes a lot of time and effort.

dinrã is probably also an abbreviation, given the diacritic.

> diricta (some bizarre letter in there)

No, the letters are exactly what you've just typed. There is a ligature between the c and the t. You could call this a difference in font, but not in spelling. (Though diricta for modern diritta is a real difference.)

> Nel mezo delcamin

This is a real spelling difference. There's a really glaring one in stanza 3, where poco is spelled pocho in contravention of the rules of Italian spelling. I don't know what an Italian today would think if confronted with -cho-.

[thaumasiotes]

> Also, you say spelling but e.g. "speken" feels more a grammatical than orthographic difference.

Doesn't make a difference if you're reading it.¹ If you were trying to produce correct Middle English, you're correct that this would cause difficulties.

(And to me it looks like it has caused difficulties for the author. The passage has several verbs introduced by auxiliary modals. Check out the list:

1. Here ſchaltou dyen Here shalt thou die

2. non ſchal knowen þi name none shall know thy name

3. non schal þe biwepe none shall thee beweep

4. wiþ what boldenesse I miȝte gaderen with what boldness I might gather

5. more þan I miȝte beren more than I might bear

6. I ne miȝte namore stonden ne spoken I [] might no more stand nor speak

Three examples use shall and three examples use might. Five of them have an -n suffix (must be infinitive or subjunctive; not to be confused with the 3rd person plural -n suffix that we also see) on the verb, but that suffix is missing from non schal þe biwepe, which is otherwise an exact grammatical match to non ſchal knowen þi name)

¹ The reason it doesn't make a difference is that the sentence structure is still that of modern English and there's only one permissible form of the verb in the modernized sentence. So it's sufficient to know (a) what verb is being used; plus (b) what the sentence it's being used in is.

[CRConrad]

> No idea what this word ["swie"] is.

"Be silent" (or "shut up"). Feels like it must be a cognate of Ger. "Schweige[n]".

[ajb]

From some random googling it seems like "swie" could be "silence", but it doesn't seem to be quite that meaning. There may be some religious overtones .

[CRConrad]

I'm almost certain it's the imperative form of a verb, in the grammar of the time apparently "to swien", "to be silent" or "to shut up".

"Swie!" from "swien" looks kind of exactly like "Schweige!" from "zu Schweigen" in modern German. Must go back to the same root (closer to "swie" than "schweigen", I'd guess) in Proto-Germanic.

[thaumasiotes]

Yes, I found https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dicti... , which glosses "swie" as "silence".

Here the text says "I swied", so it has to be a verb, but the meaning "be silent" makes sense in the passage.

Something to think about in this exercise is that the shortness of the passages adds difficulty.

Consider section 1200, where a verb with the root ner is used. It's given so much focus and contextual elaboration that you can easily tell what it means, even though the word is unfamiliar.

If you read longer passages of Middle English, this same phenomenon will occur with more words.

[SilasX]

Wiktionary doesn't mention it for either word, but it looks to be cognate with German schweigen, "to be silent":

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schweigen

[NoFunPedant]

"Rewthe" is ruth, an old word for mercy, which today only survives in the negative form "ruthless."

[sokols]

Albanian, managed to understand till 1300. Then it gets more germanic i think, though I speak a bit of German as well, the characters make it a bit difficult to parse.

“Swie!” is interesting, I understood it somehow naturally. In Gheg Albanian we say “Shuj!”, which means “Be silent!”.

[Gander5739]

I speak English natively. I read to 1400 without difficulty, read 1400 and 1300 with some sruggle, and found beyond that it was largely unintelligible; I can understand maybe 1 in 3 words.

[thaumasiotes]

1200 looks harder than it is because of the change in pronouns.

...Nor shall I never it forget, not while I live!

... and that was a wife [= woman], strong and [stith]! She came in among the evil men and me [nerede] from their hands.

She slew the heathen men that me pinned, slew them and felled them to the ground. There was blood and [bale] enough. And they fell [and] lay still, for they [] might no more stand. And the Master, the [wraþþe] Master, he flew away in the darkness and was seen no more.

I said [to] her, "I thank thee, [leove] wife, for thou hast me [ineredd] from death and from all mine [ifoan]!"

Interestingly, nerede/ineredd has no descendant in modern English, but it's not difficult to understand in the passage, while leove and ifoan do have descendants, and in the case of ifoan the meaning hasn't changed, but they are harder to read.

In 1100 the idea of "just substitute the modern word in for the old word" starts to break down.

[roysting]

That’s because Dutch is close to the original old german that it is derived from, just like English and modern German. English or as it is also known as Anglish, the language of the German tribe of the Angles, also known as the Anglo-Saxon group of Germanic people, are essentially Germans just like the indigenous ethnic people of modern Germany, as well as the ethnically German people of the Netherlands, aka the Dutch. That is of course also why the Netherlands is called the Nederlande in “Dutch” which is a reference to the lowland Germans. This becomes far clearer when you understand that the Germans refer to themselves as die Deutsche, which is where the “Dutch” get their English name, i.e., Nederland Deutsch, which means… self-referential… the lowland German people.

The unfortunate history of Europe is that the indigenous people of Central Europe are essentially all German people who have been divided and conquered by a ruling parasitic class that we all know moved around the continent, marrying into each other’s families and becoming the people’s aristocratic slave masters over centuries, which included linguistic divisions in things like naming, and even language “reforms”. Heck the English ruling class itself are Germans and they just changed their names when it was expedient to do so in order to continue filling the English people by not drawing attention to the fact that they were being set to fight their item bothers and sisters in WWI so that the British ruling class could remain their parasitic masters.

[CRConrad]

I'm fairly certain the "ruling parasitic class" in this bit:

> ...all German people who have been divided and conquered by a ruling parasitic class that we all know moved around the continent, marrying into each other’s families and becoming the people’s aristocratic slave masters over centuries

...is a weasel-worded way of saying "Jews". That is, this is just a re-spewing of the same old racist talking points from the original Nazis (and earlier).

Just in case anyone didn't see this for what it (almost certainly) is.

[Kim_Bruning]

What accent did you read it in? Vlaams? Gronings?

[englishrookie]

I don't have a voice in my head when I read. Knowledge of West-Fries helps though.

[rapidfl]

tried to read Prince and I assume it is a translation to English from Italian or whatever.

Assuming that translation was done a while ago (100+ yrs?)... It is hard to read. I can understand it if I try. But the phrasing is not current. 100 pages will take double the time at the least.

Almost think AI needs to rephrase it into current English.

Probably has these double negatives, long sentences, etc.