[simonask]

Thanks, came to the comments for this!

Reading Old English as a Scandinavian is always interesting, because if you squint hard enough, you can easily see how the languages are so deeply related. So many modern Scandinavian words have what seem to be lost cognates in Old English, and I suppose vice versa.

That said, I wish translations into contemporary English went further to preserve the etymology of certain words and the grammatical structure of the poem, even if it would make for a much more awkward text. For example, this text translates "middangeard" as "middle-world", which is correct, but it is cognate with "Midgård", which is the Norse mythological name for Earth. (In Scandinavian translations of J.R.R. Tolkien, "Middle Earth" is translated as "Midgård".) I think this lets us understand more about how writers of Old English understood the world, and how it was connected to the broader mythological landscape in North/Western Europe around this time, how Christian and Pagan belief systems were interacting through language as the region was in the process of christianization.

[WillAdams]

Yes, but J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a guide on this (after seeing a couple of really bad quality translations) which later translations benefited from:

https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Guide_to_the_Names_in_The_Lo...

that this was in _A Tolkien Compass_ which was one of the first books I purchased w/ my own money (along w/ _A Tolkien Reader_) is arguably a big part of why I chose to study languages early on in my life.

[vi_sextus_vi]

Pedantry:

Tolkien's "Middle-Earth" is itself a "folksy mistranslation"

Closer translation-- "Middle-Yard"

Old English word eardgeard =Earth-Yard

/ ˈæ͜ɑrdˌjæ͜ɑrd / "ardyard" /

https://www.theundergroundmap.com/article.html?id=104937

https://english.nsms.ox.ac.uk/oecoursepack/wanderer/notes/no...

[vintermann]

I guess that's where Tolkien's "Arda" comes from as well then.

[card_zero]

Or even garden.

[herewulf]

'garden' came into English via Old French but it's ultimately Frankish (another Germanic language) so 'yard' and 'garden' are cognates. Interestingly they have a close sense.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/garden

[lostlogin]

Thank you. I’m not American and was trying work that out.

I went straight to metric and Middle Metre approximate and is wrong.

[vi_sextus_vi]

"Nasty, British, and Small," screams the Hanging Yards of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_(TV_series)

[SSLy]

wish the link would let itself be read

[WillAdams]

_A Tolkien Compass_ is pretty affordable, and _The Lord of the Rings: A Readers Companion_ is quite a worthwhile text which is readily available --- see if your local library can provide?

[shelled]

As someone with native command over Hindi and, unless it's spoken by folks from certain UK countries, English, who also spoke and read Sanskrit quite well during school, I had a period of a few months when I went down the rabbit-hole of wonderful general linguistic history and the interrelation among them. I was shocked beyond imagination to see how we might actually have been more the same than different, if we go back far enough (not even prehistoric 'far enough') in each case (even the languages which are geographically distant currently). But then, of course, civilisation happened.

[nephihaha]

The Lithuanian Swadesh list includes the following words and I was able to find numerous relatives to Gaelic. I could be wrong about some. Obvious similarities to Latin in some cases too, maybe loanwords. But one can see the Indo-European connections.

Lithuanian and Celtic had no direct contact with each other AFAIK, although Celtic was in contact with Vasconic, Romance, Germanic and Slavic... And Lithuanian was in contact with Slavic and Germanic, maybe Finno-Ugric...

Obviously numbers...

Sniegas - Sneachd — Snow

In — An(n) — In

Najas — Nuadh — New

Marios — Muir (genitive mara) — Sea

Srūti (to flow) — Sruth (stream)

Mirti (to die) — Murt/mort (murder)

klausytis (to hear) – cluas (ear), cluinntinn (listen)

sekla — sìol — seed

Senas — Sean — Old

Vyras - Fear (plural Fir)- Man (wer(e))

Dantas (tooth) - Deudag (toothache)

Ugnis (fire) — Aigeann (fireplace)

Raudonas — Ruadh — Red

Dienas (day) — Di- (day in day names) – Day

Pilnas — Làn — Full

Kaire — Ceàrr — Left

Dešinė — Deas — Right

[Bayart]

Baltic and the older layers of Celtic languages are known to be pretty conservative, if not archaic, within the context of IE languages. If you look at Old Irish the ressemblance will be blatant.

[walthamstow]

My father in law is a Persian speaker. I was very surprised to learn that thank you (mersi) is the same as in French, and OK/indeed (baleh) is the same as in Spanish.

[bradrn]

Persian mersi is actually a direct borrowing from the French [1]. Not sure about the other one, but I guess it’s just a coincidence, as happens so often in language [2].

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%B3%DB%8C#Pers...

[2] https://zompist.com/chance.htm

[nephihaha]

Arigato in Japanese is said to be a borrowing from Portuguese Obrigado (might want to verify that!).

[qingcharles]

Japanese is fascinating to me as a language freak for the enormous amount of borrowing. As an English speaker, as long as you can decode katakana (easy to learn) you can probably walk around the streets of Tokyo and read half the signs.

[lproven]

No, it's documented, as is tempura. It's like pancakes: you make them before the time of fasting. "The Time of X" in Spanish is "tempora X" and I would bet Portuguese is similar.

There are loads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_words_of_Port...

[card_zero]

It's listed there under False cognates.

> evidence indicates arigatō has a purely Japanese origin

I remain suspicious, though. Maybe what happened was the popularization of an existing Japanese term under the influence of Portuguese Jesuits, since it sounded similar to obrigado?

[nephihaha]

Perfectly possible. I think I've seen evidence elsewhere of similar but unrelated words influencing each other. For example, round about where I live the Romany word "shan" is used meaning "mean" or "worthless", but it seems to have been influenced by the unrelated "sean" in Gaelic (also pronounced "shan") which means "old". So it's come to mean something worn out as well.

[nephihaha]

Gura mie eu.

[lproven]

She dty vea. :-)

(I do not actually speak Manx, but 2026 is the Year of the Manx Language. I should learn some.)

[rhplus]

Even more interesting is when words are borrowed back!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reborrowing

For example, katsu from cutlet, is borrowed back into English to mean… cutlet.

And when combined with “curry” as in “katsu curry” the journey meanders all the way through Tamil, Portuguese, Japanese and English, following sailors where they went.

[tralarpa]

Spanish vale and English value have the same Latin origin. Persian bale is an Arabic loanword.

[btilly]

Yes. There is a reason why a family of languages is known as Indo-European.

For something completely different, try learning Mandarin.

[roysting]

I’ve long thought about how wonderful it would be to create a contemporary new hybrid language whose objective was to unify communication along the very common linguistic origins at least some language clusters have. The core challenge of course is that it would be contrived in a time when top down imposition does not work as effectively. It’s a dream I have nonetheless.

It would be a gargantuan effort just alone to devise a language that would unify historic language origins roots in a contemporary time. The objective would be to stop the death and eradication of languages, e.g., Welsh, German, or any of the numerous other smaller languages and dialects that are all under varying states and types of endangerment or extinction risk, but also prevent an ignoble, unstable, and inadequate language like contemporary English from dominating the whole world.

[tsimionescu]

> The objective would be to stop the death and eradication of languages, e.g., Welsh, German, or any of the numerous other smaller languages and dialects

How is German, a langauge natively spoken in two nation states and quite a few neighboring regions, being eradicated?

[dahart]

Yes I’ve been having similar thoughts - how amazing would it be to have a common global tongue. Last time I looked, Chinese and the Spanish were the two most spoken languages, at least counting native speakers - there are other legit ways to measure this! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...)

What I’m personally curious about is the goal to prevent extinction of languages. Isn’t that fully at odds with the goal to unify languages? In a single language, we can’t possibly keep enough of even just the Germanic languages for anyone to feel like their language was preserved, and we’re talking about something that also has to work for all the wildly different language families is Asian, African, Slavic, Indian, and South American countries, just to name a few. I’m not sure it’s possible to borrow from languages in any way that preserves them. The thought I keep having is that maybe the goal to preserve languages is working against us. Yes it’s sad to lose some languages, but I think it was sad for the languages to split in the first place, and it would be amazing if there was a common language.

What about the idea of archiving all the languages we have, so the history is there, and then after that dropping the objective to preserve any of them? Still a gargantuan effort, but maybe being able to focus on unification and ignore preservation would help us get there? This is a hypothetical, of course, pie in the sky dreaming… but I share at least part of your dream. Language will continue to evolve as it always has, and maybe geopolitics will drive us toward one or a few languages being super common.

[schoen]

The official position of modern IAL advocates like Esperantists is that everyone should be bilingual in a local or family language as well as in the world language. There is someone on HN who has pointed out (I forgot exactly when) that this is actually not the historical tradition in Esperanto, but it's extremely strong nowadays.

I guess one thing that leads to divergent attitudes about multilingualism and language planning is people's different intuitions about whether bilingualism is easy or hard. Some people feel bilingualism is literally automatic (just have children regularly spend time in different language environments), while some people feel it's expensive or prone to failure modes where some children favor one language or another, suffer cross-linguistic interference (which might not harm their intelligibility at all in their own immediate environments, but might be at odds with language planning goals), or become less than fully fluent or less than fully literate in one or more languages.

I was taught the "bilingualism is automatic" view and I know there's a lot of scientific consensus behind it, but it also seems like the fine details are complicated: not all children and not all adults will be enthusiastic about achieving and maintaining equal fluency in languages they use in different contexts, or necessarily about following a national or international standard to maximize understanding with outsiders!

My father's family (in New York) stopped speaking German in his generation, so I'm not a native German speaker, as my grandfather was. I've been sad about this, especially with the intuition that I could "easily" have been a fluent native German bilingual speaker "for free" with no adverse consequences to my English proficiency. But maybe that's not literally true (maybe my English would have been more idiosyncratic and less standard, maybe I would have lost interest in German as a child and become bad at it, maybe I would have divided my reading time between languages and ended up with a slightly smaller English vocabulary?).

[dahart]

That is a more reasonable position than trying to imagine or push a single language. And yes, acknowledging it’s not everywhere necessarily, it does seem like multilingualism is fairly automatic out of necessity in much of the world. As an American, I’m sad that the US scores so poorly on multilingualism. I’m very impressed when I travel how many people speak multiple languages. There are so many places where even entry level jobs require 2 or 3 languages.

[schoen]

Yeah, I know people's intuitions are also different there, as almost everyone I've met from Europe speaks 2-4 languages fluently and doesn't consider this exceptional. That makes multilingualism feel very attainable, because it's socially normal. From the U.S. point of view this is amazing, because it's taken for granted there, where it might be a celebrated achievement here.

What I know less about is how much time or effort that multilingualism took, whether peer pressure forced some reluctant kids to stick with languages they were otherwise less interested in, and whether there are any hidden costs.

An example could be replacement of some native vocabulary by English vocabulary (which is happening in many languages). This is a benefit for many people who work internationally, but it probably harms intergenerational understanding on some topics. For example, a Brazilian friend of mine gave a computing history lecture where he noted that Brazilians briefly used Portuguese vocabulary for computer engineering in the 1970s before it was supplanted by English loanwords. That change might mean that older speakers would understand younger speakers less well on some technical topics, or that younger speakers would have a harder time reading older technical documentation. From the point of view of monolingual Portuguese speakers, the internationalization of that vocabulary might not seem like a pure advantage.

I also know that some majority language speakers in Finland (who probably expect to speak English with non-Finnish speakers) greatly resent having to spend a lot of time studying Swedish, the "other national language", if they don't anticipate using it in their day-to-day lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_Swedish

In that case, it feels to some of them like the government is requiring them to be multilingual in a specific way that isn't their own preference or that doesn't align with their existing sense of ethnolinguistic identity. It doesn't seem like it's doing any kind of long-term harm, but I guess having any mandatory school subject that you don't enjoy can be pretty unpleasant, and maybe give you a more negative experience of formal education in general.

Some of the Swedish minority there doesn't prefer a future in which Finnish speakers only speak English to them (a phenomenon that already exists and that I think is growing over time). Even though it's officially legally protected, the practical status of their local minority language is being eroded by international culture.

I also have a native Finnish-speaking friend who enjoyed learning Swedish as a foreign language as a child, and ended up moving to Sweden and becoming a university lecturer (who usually teaches in Swedish). Foreign language learning can always be a benefit to anyone of any background.

To again brainstorm trade-offs, it's possible that that outcome is a bit disagreeable to her family back in Finland (who might have preferred her to stay closer to where she grew up, which might have been more likely if she had been more monolingual).

[detourdog]

I’m sure you are aware of Esperanto.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

[lproven]

I preferred Interlingua...

But these days, Slovio would help me more.

I've tried Slovio on Slavs of about 10 nationalities. None had ever heard of it. All of then, no exceptions, could just understand it perfectly well, to their great surprise.

https://www.interlingua.com/interlingua-en/

https://www.slovio.com/

[amdsn]

I find slovio to be jarring. It's like someone took vaguely slavic words and slammed Esperanto-inspired grammar onto them. Something like Interslavic at least has noun/verb morphology that is much more familiar to all Slavic language speakers. I could imagine myself actually speaking Interslavic, but not the case for Slovio. It's simply too strange.

Straight from the Slovio website:

>Slovio es novju mezxunarodju jazika ktor razumijut cxtirsto milion ludis na celoju zemla.

>Slovio is a new international language that 400 million people on the planet understand

I am a Russian speaker so the copula "es" being written is strange but obviously I speak other languages that use their copula in the present tense so that's not so bad, but to 100% of slavic speakers "jazik" (tongue/language) is masculine, yet the adjectives here are reminiscent of ones for a feminine noun in the accusative case which is doubly weird as that case would also make no sense here. The second half of the sentence isn't so bad aside from "ludis" (-s plural is alien to the entire family) and "na celoju zemla" (more confusion where my brain expects a different case form). It's just odd that it completely drops noun cases on the floor when almost all the Slavic languages still have healthy productive inflection systems.

[lproven]

Very interesting. Thanks. Those are good points...

[detourdog]

You are both more involved than I am. I only brought up Esperanto because it seemed as if there was no awareness of effort in this type of language development.

[mdp2021]

Brother! I hope you have have also studied a bit of Latin and Greek, to see the great similarities, and paths like that of "jñāna, gnō̃́sis, gnosco, knowledge".

It is a very great thing that so many peoples now speak languages with clear common roots buried behind the deviations of use; and outmost interesting to recognize the plan and the deep thought in those radixes.

[anthk]

"Conocimiento, conocer" in Spanish (to know).

[wolfi1]

isn't Spanish some form of Latin (being colonized by Rome for centuries), what I would be interested in, if there are some Vandal leftovers in nowadays Spanish

[anthk]

Guerra, perro, more that I can't remember, and a good chunk of names (in Spanish):

https://muyinteresante.okdiario.com/historia/60526.html

Well, let's see:

Perro, guerra, mes, pagar, ver, fuego, tierra, cima, perro, clero, altar, tribunal, rey... lots more. Tapa, dardo, ganso, ropa, guardia, sala, cama, barro, guijarro, zarza... more than anyone would think. Aspa, espía, brotar... and the -engo suffix. Visicothic and Celtic cultures are more ingrained in the North/Middle of Spain more than anyone would think despite everyone pictured it as a 100% Mediterranean culture.

Rico/rich, fresco/fresh, Blanco/blank, ganar/win... is not a coincidence.

Heck, tons of Medieval lore in the Castilles use a Gothic typeface...

Engo/enco suffix in words, related to -ingos in Gothic.

On names and surnames... Alonso, Alfonso, Guillermo, Fernando, Hernando, Hernández, López, -everything ending with -ez-, Leovigildo, Rodrigo and tons more.

[wolfi1]

sorry, it was the Visigoths, not the Vandals

[anthk]

It's all about Proto-Indoeuropean. You can get tons of words from Latin and Sanskrit and compare them.

[helsinkiandrew]

There was a UK TV show years ago that I've always remembered where the presenter tried to buy a cow using Old English with a Frisian speaking farmer in Holland:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34

[jschveibinz]

You'd probably enjoy "The Story of English" series:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6D54D1C7DAE31B36&si=Kw3J...

or "The History of English" series:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV50II2XzmY-9GLZWAuieOp27...

In the second series, there is a weather report in Frisian that vaguely sounds like English.

[arethuza]

I suspect a lot of people in the UK today would pronounce "brown cow" as "broon coo" - certainly I would have when I was a wee loon ;-)

[gilleain]

'The presenter' here being Eddie Izzard :)

[TFNA]

> I wish translations into contemporary English went further to preserve the etymology of certain words

This is how the Icelandic sagas were translated into English in the nineteenth century. Translators then almost always chose the English cognate of the Old Norse world, even if that English cognate was obsolete or its meaning had changed. Far from helping immerse readers in the medieval world, the effect (at least for modern sensibilities) is offputting and goofy, and in the twentieth century publishers like Penguin replaced those translations by new ones with a very different approach. More judicious use of the Germanic lexicon in English, à la Tolkien, provides a more appealing atmosphere of olden times.

[lproven]

> the effect (at least for modern sensibilities) is offputting and goofy.

Oh my. I find the reverse. It's spooky and enchanting because once I know all the cognates I feel like I can magically understand the original.

[jgilias]

Out of curiosity, what are the other two realms? (I assume it’s two)

[e12e]

In Norse mythology "the nine realms" encompass the entire world - but there's no definive list of what realms constitute the nine.

In the center, humans inhabit Midtgård. The gods in Valhall and the Jotun in Jotunheim.

Then there's also Helheim or Hel - for the dead, Alfheim for the elves, Svartalfheim for the dwarves...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Locations_in_Nor...

[simonask]

There's actually nine:

- Vanaheim, home of the Vanir, a group of gods associated with fertility.

- Asgård, home of the Aesir, the big-name gods (Thor, Odin, Freya, etc.).

- Jötunheim, home of the Giants.

- Alfheim, home of the elves.

- Helheim, the underworld ("Hell").

- Svartalfheim / Nidavellir, home of the dwarves.

- Midgård, home of the humans.

- Muspelheim, home of fire elementals.

- Niflheim, world of mists.

(This is the commonly accepted list, but it's always worth mentioning that surviving literary sources of Norse mythology are very scarce. Much of the lore was reconstructed in the 19th century.)

[yesbabyyes]

> - Asgård, home of the Aesir, the big-name gods (Thor, Odin, Freya, etc.).

Freyja, along with her brother Freyr and their father, Njörðr, is one of the Vanir.

[simonask]

Yes, but lives in Asgård.

[KurSix]

This is exactly the kind of thing that makes Old English fascinating even if you don't know the language properly

[PaulRobinson]

English is claimed as being influenced heavily by every nation that conquered England, because of course it was: Latin via the Romans; Anglo-Saxon/Gemanic; then Viking; and, then the Latin/Romance influence again via France/Normandy.

And of course, English develops organically (unlike, say, French), allowing new words to emerge, and for old words to take on new meanings. I love it.

As an Englishman, I always find it interesting that there is this weird defined notion of "Englishness" in language, culture, whatever, when our entire history is one of mashing and remixing ideas over at least 2,000 years, and recent discoveries at Stonehenge push that back potentially by 3,000-5,000 years more.

I particularly like the irony of the far-right going on about English identity on a march in London before going to have a lager and chicken tikka masala before heading home to a bungalow and putting on their pyjamas... :)

I think the Scandinavian roots you talk about trace back to common Germanic roots perhaps, but also the Viking aspect will influence a lot. I think English has been "dipped into" by those roots a few times in history, as has Latin.

On the need to keep the etymology aligned in translation: I think this is a routine challenge of the translator's skill, and why so many people have different views of different translations of the same texts.

The Bible could easily be translated in many different ways, but the "King James" version is considered the standard within the Anglican churches in the UK (and seems to be the common root for US church bibles too), but a more modern translation would be possible, as would one that has a closer etymological meaning to the original sources.

It's all interpretative. If people are building entire belief systems and ways of life (and arguably, laws for society), around a translation, and getting it off in a few places, it's likely we're going to run into the same problems even more when translating Tolkien or an ancient poem...

[pbhjpbhj]

>the "King James" version is considered the standard within the Anglican churches in the UK

I don't find this to be true. Even at high mass ('bells & smells' type communion) you get more modern versions. To my recollection NIV would be most common. Obviously not a representative survey. Also, it might be at traditional/formal services you get [N]KJV as I've been to less of those.

Amongst very old people you see strong support for KJV because that's what they learnt 70 years ago. It sounds very archaic to modern ears. I'd say KJV hasn't been favoured this side of the millennium.

Just my impression.

[celebril]

A bit of correction: the version you'll most likely see being used across the Church of England nowadays is NRSV. It's the scholarly translation.

NIV is the preferred translation for the low-church side, the evangelicals, so definitely won't be used by the bells-and-smells high church crowd. KJV is preferred by a niche who also prefers the Book of Common Prayer liturgy over Common Worship. Usually this is either an older population, a certain ethnic subgroup with calcified traditions, or old-school low church folks (so not modern evangelicals) who prefer the old ways and even the Thirty-Nine Articles.

[devilbunny]

> It's the scholarly translation

And even then, only written at IIRC ninth-grade level (don't know the UK term; ages 14-15). I bought one in college because it was the highest-reading-level Bible they had at Barnes and Noble (major US bookseller; think Waterstones) and I wanted a decent text for some religion classes.

[pbhjpbhj]

You're right re [N]RSV in CoE. But I think of Anglican - perhaps wrongly - as extending outside CoE to encompass a range of reformed Protestant communions. I've seen NIV used in CoE too, but yes NRSV too and more often.

[rsynnott]

> I particularly like the irony of the far-right going on about English identity on a march in London before going to have a lager and chicken tikka masala before heading home to a bungalow and putting on their pyjamas... :)

Stewart Lee had a good bit about this:

> [..] > ‘Bloody Beaker folk. Coming over here, rowing up the Tagus Estuary from the Iberian Peninsula in improvised rafts. Coming here with their drinking vessels. What's wrong with just cupping up the water in your hands and licking it up like a cat?’

Racism always tends towards the silly, of course, but British ethnic nationalism particularly so, given the history. What’s ’British’, anyway?

[simonask]

Yeah, I share your fascination.

My understanding is that Old English vocabulary mostly predates Viking invasion, but even then the colonizers would have a large shared vocabulary with (non-Celtic) British natives, who would be the descendants of Anglo-Saxon settlers a couple of centuries earlier.

[mc32]

Well you had the Norman invasion; acquired lots of Norman French words yet fought the French several times over the centuries. One thing doesn’t have to do much with the other.

[jfengel]

The Roman influence is limited mostly to place names. Otherwise Latin had basically disappeared from the island.

Latin influences English as a learned tongue, used by clerics and academics. Other than that most of it comes via French, when the Normans brought it.

[TFNA]

> The Roman influence is limited mostly to place names. Otherwise Latin had basically disappeared from the island.

Recent research, namely an article by Lars Nooij & Peter Schrijver [0], suggests that a population speaking Latin/Romance may have remained present in Britain until the late first millennium. Granted, the effect of this local Latin would have been on Welsh more than English.

[0] https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110776492-004