Language Lessons

by popular request!

(well, Annie asked me to do this, and she's popular) 

Petro's Teach Yourself Anglo-Saxon

(with a little bit of Latin thrown in)

(we could go on to do some more Latin afterwards, if anyone's interested)

So, where to start…?   

Inflected Languages

For those who aren't familiar with the concept, I suppose I should explain what is meant by an inflected language.  

In most (if not all) languages, including Modern English, there are some inflections, ie changes to the form of a word for grammatical purposes, eg dog, dog's, dogs' and dogs;  goose, goose's, and geese;  say, says, saying, said.  However, by and large, grammatical meaning in Modern English relies heavily on word order.  By contrast, in Latin and Anglo-Saxon inflections are used to carry the grammatical meaning. 

An example: 

Modern English:               the dog bites the man 

Latin:                                     canis hominem mordet 

Anglo-Saxon:                        se docga bitt thone guman

Modern English:               the man bites the dog 

Latin:                                     canem homo mordet 

Anglo-Saxon:                       thone docgan bitt se guma  

So to change the meaning in Latin and Anglo-Saxon, you change the form of the words themselves.  To change the meaning in Modern English , you change the order of the words.   

In the Latin examples above, the words can go in any order. In the Anglo-Saxon examples, the word-order is slightly less flexible. In both Latin and Anglo-Saxon, it doesn't matter whether the man comes first in the sentence or the dog does:who bites whom is shown by the ending of the words man (guma) and dog (docga), and not by their position in the sentence. However, in Anglo-Saxon the definite article the (se and thone) must always go immediately in front of its noun, dog or man. Whichever is doing the biting (ie the subject of the verb to bite), is in the nominative case (se docga, se guma), and whichever is being bitten (ie the object of the verb to bite), is in the accusative case (thone docgan, thone guman). More later on the different cases. 

To sum up:

You can put words in almost any order in Latin and the basic meaning will stay the same (although changing the word-order in Latin can produce subtle differences of emphasis).

In Anglo-Saxon, word-order is starting to become fixed (especially in prose, but in poetry it is still much more flexible).

In Modern English, especially in poetry, you can still play about with word-order to a small extent ("The throstle in the pear tree sings"), but by and large if you change the word-order, you will change the basic meaning of the sentence. 

With me so far?  In which case, you will have gathered that learning Latin and Anglo-Saxon is largely about learning all the ways in which the form of the words changes in order to convey grammatical meaning. 

Vocabulary  

Obviously you will also need to learn the vocabulary of the two languages. Much of this is surprisingly easy for a speaker of Modern English, because a huge amount of Modern English is derived either from Latin or from Anglo-Saxon. As a general rule, Latin (either directly or via Norman French and later linguistic routes) gives us what might be loosely described as educated or formal vocabulary, and Anglo-Saxon gives us simple, basic words, and particles of language such as most of the pronouns, the definite and indefinite articles, and words like when, who, on, in, and, to, from, etc. Where there are two words in Modern English that mean roughly the same thing, the more formal word is likely to be derived from Latin, and the simpler word from Anglo-Saxon: thus regal and kingly, amorous and loving, amicable and friendly, equine and horsy, sorority and sisterhood, agriculture and farming, century and hundred years, and so on. 

A huge number of the Latin words that you will come across are still around in Modern English in some form or another.  By contrast, much Anglo-Saxon vocabulary has fallen out of use and been lost to the language.  These days we generally no longer need more than one word each for things like blood, spear, shield, sword and overlord, but, with their very different cultural preoccupations, the Anglo-Saxons needed rather more (just like the Inuit reputedly having 28 different words for snow). 

Latin words are easy to relate to their Modern English equivalents, because they use more or less the same alphabet.  By contrast, Anglo-Saxon looks more difficult on the page, because it has its own alphabet (or, strictly speaking, not an alphabet at all, but a futhorc).  However, once you know which Anglo-Saxon letters correspond to which letters in Modern English, all becomes much clearer, and you will find that you can recognise a large number of the words.   

The Futhorc  

This is the runic "alphabet" and is so called because the first six letters, feoh, ur, thorn, os, rad and cen, represent the sounds F, U, TH, O, R and K. There are many runic futhorcs. They are all slightly different, and in fact most of them are actually futharcs, since, unlike the Anglo-Saxon version, they begin f,u,th,a,r,c). They are found mainly inscribed upon precious objects, for reasons that are not entirely clear, but almost certainly involve some sort of ritual or magic element. Rune means secret, and it is likely that the writing of runes was confined to a very small, probably priestly class. 

Most modern printed Anglo-Saxon texts use runic letters only when there is no Modern English equivalent, but sadly these texts are not always consistent.  Many early ones use the runic letter wyn (meaning joy), which looks like a pointy letter p; others use the letter w instead.  I can see no reason to use wyn at all, since w is available in Modern English.

All the printed texts that I know represent the two th sounds ("voiced" as in then, "unvoiced" as in thick) by using the runic letter thorn (þ),and the letter bar-d, also known as eth (ð). 

Finally there is æsc, pronounced ash, and meaning ashtree.  This is written as æ, and represents the a sound in cat, and there is also a long æsc, written ǽ, and representing the a sound in stare.  Anglo-Saxon manuscripts don't distinguish between long and short æsc (or any other short and long vowels), but most modern printed texts do. 

Once you transliterate wyn, thorn, bar-d/eth and æ to w, th and a, Anglo-Saxon becomes a lot easier to read:  for example, what looks like piþor pið suddenly becomes with, and ðæt becomes that. If you also remember that sc in Anglo-Saxon is pronounced sh, then words like scip are immediately recognisable (and you can see why æsc is pronounced ash).  

(In Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and in some older printed texts and grammars (notably Brunner and Wardale) you will also find the letter yog, which looks like a long-tailed z, and is pronounced yuh.  Almost everyone now uses g for both yog and g, and the yog symbol has fallen out of use - but if you do see it, now you'll know what it is). 

Bits to learn

There's no getting round some learning-by-heart, so here's the first "paradigm" as they are called, ie the list of all the forms of a particular word, in this case the first person pronoun: 

Latin                             Anglo-Saxon                         Modern English

singular

ego                                         ich                                         I 

me                                          me                                         me 

mei                                         min                                        mine 

mihi                                        me                                         to/for me          

me                                          me                                         by/with/from me 

dual

                                               wit                                         we two 

                                               unc                                       us two 

                                               uncer                                    belonging to us two 

                                               unc                                       to/for/by/with/from us two 

plural

nos                                         we                                         we 

nos                                         us                                          us 

nostrum                                 ure                                        ours 

nobis                                     us                                          to/for/by/with/from us 

---o0o---

31^st October 2009

With a broken arm, it's going to be a while before I can post any more Language Lessons - I just can't type and manage the reference books one-handed!  But here is something to be going on with that may be of interest: 

The Anglo-Saxon Year

Anglo-Saxon                      Meaning                                               Modern English

Æftera-Geol-Monaþ            After Yule Month                                                  January

Sol-Monaþ                           Sun Month                                                          February

                                              (the month when the sun returns)

Hreð-Monaþ                        Month of Victory                                                     March

Eostur-Monaþ                     Month of Eostre

                                              (the dawn goddess)                                                 April

Ðrimilce-Monaþ                  Month of Three Milkings                                           May

                                              (when the grass was so good that cows

                                              could be milked three times a day)

Ærra-Liða-Monaþ               First Sailing Month                                                  June

Æftera-Liða-Monaþ            Second Sailing Month                                              July

Weod-Monaþ                      Month of Weeds                                                   August

Halig-Monaþ                        Holy Month                                                    September

Winter-Fylleð                       Winter Full Moon                                                October

                                              (monaþ-fyllen = time of the full moon)

Blot-Monaþ                          Blood Month                                                   November

                                              (perhaps so called because it is when surplus

                                              livestock would be slaughtered before winter)

Ærra-Geol-Monaþ               Before Yule Month                                        December

Modra-Niht                           Mother's Night                                       Winter Solstice

                                              (because it is the night of the birth of the New Year)

If any of these sound familiar, you're probably a Tolkein fan.  He bases the Shire calendar largely on the Anglo-Saxon calendar as recorded by the Venerable Bede.