Top Schools that offer Old English?

mythmom · June 12, 2010, 9:44pm

Sorry mathmom. I figured you did know most of that, if not all, but I took a chance.

mathmom · June 12, 2010, 9:50pm

mythmom, not insulted at all! Actually Dutch is what it reminded me of. When I’ve been in Holland it’s very weird because everything looks like a cross between English and German - though easier to read than understand. (At least for me.)

I’ve been interested in linguistics for a long time, unfortunately I have no natural ability for languages though I did learn two other than English.

mathinokc · June 12, 2010, 10:06pm

If this is just for fun and you don’t care if you get credit, Dr. Nokes from Troy University blogged most of the Old English class he taught in 2008.

It’s mixed in with his other blog posts, but I think this is a list of all posts relevant to the class:

Plymeth · June 12, 2010, 11:09pm

Holy cow, mathinokc. :O

That’s looks great. Thanks for taking the time to dig up/post all that.

nemom · June 13, 2010, 12:17am

I love the unlocked stuff - it’s just a blast - as is the Wheaton stuff. Check out this one too - Bagby has been at this for a long time.
[Benjamin</a> Bagby’s Beowulf](<a href=“http://www.bagbybeowulf.com/background/medieval_epic.html]Benjamin”>http://www.bagbybeowulf.com/background/medieval_epic.html)

Dutch - yeah - For me, trying to read Dutch is very strange. I can stagger along by guess and by golly, and then suddenly, I’ll hit a short word that is unguessable. I’m not at all a linguist, but I have a little of Latin, Greek(VERY little), French and German, so I have plenty of material to draw from, but it only takes me a very little ways.

jingle · June 13, 2010, 12:26am

UVA offers Old English.

DonnaL · June 13, 2010, 12:54am

I just noticed mythmom’s comment about Thomas Malory, and wanted to mention that he actually wrote in early Modern English, not Middle English. (He wrote in the late 15th century, 100 years after Chaucer.) Rendering his work fully understandable to a modern reader doesn’t technically require translation, but simply modernizing a great deal of the spelling and footnoting a little vocabulary. Many decades ago, I had an interest in Arthurian legend for a while – probably inspired, at the beginning, by the fact that in the summer of 1962, when I was 7, we spent a few weeks in Montauk and I occupied myself most of the time with Howard Pyle’s four-volume retelling of the Arthur stories, along with his Robin Hood. (I know, I should have spent more time picking berries. This was more fun.) In any event, some years later, I was easily able to read a lot of Le Morte Darthur in the original (until I got tired of dealing with the old spelling!); Chaucer requires more practice. For example, this is the beginning of the first chapter of Le Morte Darthur:

The only word I didn’t recognize right away was myȝty, until I remembered the unfamiliar letter and realized that it simply means mighty.

coureur · June 13, 2010, 1:06am

The Anglo-Saxons were a Germanic tribe alright. Writing in his book “Germania” in the first century AD, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote:

“Contra Langobardos paucitas nobilitat: plurimis ac valentissimis nationibus cincti, non per obsequium, sed proeliis et periclitando tuti sunt. Reudigni deinde et Aviones et Anglii et Varini et Eudoses et Suardones et Nuithones fluminibus aut silvis muniuntur: nec quidquam notabile in singulis, nisi quod in commune Nerthum, id est Terram matrem colunt, eamque intervenire rebus hominum, invehi populis arbitrantur.”

Translation:
“To the Langobardi, on the contrary, their scanty numbers are a distinction. Though surrounded by a host of most powerful tribes, they are safe, not by submitting, but by daring the perils of war. Next come the Reudigni, the Aviones, the Anglii, the Varini, the Eudoses, the Suardones, and Nuithones who are fenced in by rivers or forests. None of these tribes have any noteworthy feature, except their common worship of Ertha, or mother-Earth, and their belief that she interposes in human affairs, and visits the nations in her car.”

There you have it. While they were still back in Germany, centuries before they migrated to Britain, this passage is believed to be the earliest reference to the Angles, or as Tacitus calls them “the Anglii.” The “Eudoses” mentioned in this passage are believed to be the Jutes.

DonnaL · June 13, 2010, 1:12am

What kind of car did she have?

nemom · June 13, 2010, 2:03am

Hmm…maybe it is easier to deal with that spelling when you are young and flexible on such issues.

I suppose the conventional witty answer about the car would be “Whatever car she chooses.” But considering the tribal names, the Van would be the most obvious.

mythmom · June 13, 2010, 2:13am

I still teach Mallory. I think there is so much French in Mallory that although you call it early Modern English, if one has never looked at French, it’s going to be a difficult go.

Of course, there is a lot of French in Chaucer, too.

I think it’s fair to say the French and German elements are more integrated in Mallory than in Chaucer, the French still stands out a bit.

I teach the Brit Lit Survey, but since I teach at community college, no one has to read Mallory or Chaucer in the original.

DonnaL · June 13, 2010, 11:53am

mythmom, it’s obviously a hard line to draw; some people consider Malory late Middle English, and others consider him early Modern English. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that both chronologically and in language, he’s essentially halfway between Chaucer (clearly Middle English) and Shakespeare (clearly Modern English, although some high school students may feel differently). So neither of us is wrong! Both Chaucer and Malory, it seems to me, are much closer to Modern English than they are to Old English. I doubt that either Chaucer or Malory could have had an intelligible conversation in English with the author of, say, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Who would undoubtedly have had a much easier time conversing with someone speaking Old Norse, since it’s my understanding that the two languages were mutually intelligible even though one was West Germanic and the other Northern. But I suspect that with some effort, either Chaucer or Malory could make themselves understood today.

Two books I loved – since I very much enjoy reading about this sort of thing, even as a complete layperson on the subject – were Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, and a book called The Story of English that was published in the 1980’s in conjunction with a PBS television series. Both are fascinating.

One other thing I learned in college (out of the very few things I still remember!) is that the so-called Old French (Ancien Francais) of the 14th Century, at least the written variety used in England, is much easier for someone familiar with modern French to understand than even Chaucer is for someone familiar with modern English. For my senior essay in history, I did an analysis of the commons petitions to the Parliaments of Edward III (I found a two-volume edition, printed in the 18th century, in the Yale Law Library), and in order to do that first translated all of them from 14th-century French into English . At the time, I read French pretty well after studying it for 5 years in high school, and I didn’t find the task all that difficult, with the help of a dictionary of Ancien Francais I bought in a French bookstore in Manhattan. The most difficult part was understanding all the Latin phrases interspersed throughout, as well as the legal concepts they represented (since I had not yet been to law school!). I largely ignored that kind of thing, since I was focusing on the petitions concerning social/economic/political issues, not on the ones dealing with abstruse issues of 14th-century legal pleading requirements! In any event, “Old French” is really a misnomer; I assume there must be earlier versions of the language that would not be intelligible to a modern reader.

It ended up not being a great senior essay, by the way, and I only got a B+, which, even though I was disappointed at the time (since I had gotten used to getting all A’s when I was in college), may have been more than I deserved. It isn’t that I procrastinated, exactly; it’s that I spent months and months reading and translating all the petitions (of which there were more than 1000, if I recall correctly – I carted around all the index cards for years, but I doubt I have them anymore), which didn’t leave sufficient time to absorb and analyze them, let alone write a good essay. It was probably an over-ambitious project for an undergraduate with no legal training, who had taken only one course on 14th-century English history, and I would have been much better off with something far narrower.

Even now, all these years later, I feel embarrassed thinking about it.

Ever since, I have strenuously avoided ambition of all kinds.

mythmom · June 13, 2010, 12:45pm

Too funny, Donna. No embarrassment necessary IMO. That’s an awesome project and clearly it served you well in that you remember the salient elements quite well.

The questions of “Old French” vs. Modern French (and Italian) is that these issues are confused by the profusion of dialects spoken in these countries.

Modern French comes directly from Parisian French and even in the eighteenth century there were many dialects unintelligible to Parisians.

Italian comes directly from Dante’s Italian (specifically chosen at the time of unification.)

To complete PhD. I had to learn a third language. Since I was fluent in French, no problem there. I chose Italian because I am also (or rather have been at times) a Classical singer. After only one semester of really intensive study I had no difficulty at all translation a canto of The Commedia. In fact, that was the final. And we were not provided with dictionaries either! We had to translate that and a critical article on Shakespeare in Italian. It was a course especially designed for English PhD’s.

JHS · June 13, 2010, 4:36pm

I find I can read Chretien de Troyes pretty well without a lot of help from dictionaries or notes. It takes a couple hundred lines to get the hang of it, but then it goes fairly smoothly, and, yes, it’s easier than reading Chaucer. So I agree with DonnaL.

mathmom · June 13, 2010, 5:01pm

DonnaL that sounds sooo much like my experience with my Harvard senior thesis except my readers were kinder to me!

Italian is incredibly easy if you are fluent in French. I found I could read magazines after only a semester in an adult education class in Germany.

boiledegg · June 13, 2010, 5:53pm

Believe Vassar offers a class or classes in Old English

spdf · June 14, 2010, 4:36pm

nvilla, that was funny. :)

nvilla · June 14, 2010, 5:31pm

I was waiting for someone to get it :D

mathmom · June 14, 2010, 5:48pm

nvilla, obviously I should click on more links!

anothermom2 · June 14, 2010, 6:02pm

Ditto re: Vassar @ post 56. I believe the Beowulf professor is well regarded.

Re: Old french, I actually studied some of this. I still can’t quite figure out why. It might have been better to take more modern french.

Top Schools that offer Old English?

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