When this video had only 7,000 views, a former Fellow Librarian of the Parker Library observed, "That’s probably a larger number than ever heard that text read aloud in Anglo-Saxon England." How much more must that be true today, with 20 times that number of views! Thank you, everyone. Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!
@@joshtyra oh my goodness!!!!!!!! You are so talented!!!!!! 😍😍 It's such a beautiful Christmas medieval song! You really are a medieval monk composer😂🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗
It’s fascinating how “mīne ēagan” is so similar to “meine augen” in german. And the verbs that are formulated in the past tense, like “gesāwon” and “ge-earwodest” are the same as verbs formulated in the perfect tense in German “with the “ge” added to the start of the verb”. So interesting
Anglia and Saxony are both in Germanium. Anglo Saxons were originally Germanic tribes. In fact they were some of the most primitive. Odd no, how a language spawned from barbarian tribes considered barbaric by other barbarians became the language spoken across all the world. Last shall be first indeed.
English and German both belong to the Germanic Language Family. If the Norman conquest of 1066 hadn't happened English most likely would have remained intact like that of German, Icelandic, Norwegian, and the other Germanic Languages. Actual English without the Latin is quite beautiful!
I’ve heard several linguist’s reading old English, and many sounded very good to my ears, some though, were a little rough in interpretation. Yours, sounds to me, exactly as I would’ve imagined it! This sounds softer, and more natural; something akin to modern English, with a dominant but clear Germanic flavor.
It's always amusing to me that people bemoan the 'lack of purity' in Modern English when Old English itself contained like 25% borrowings from Latin in its vocabulary. I think these people seem to think German and Dutch (or even the Scandinavian languages) didn't also borrow massively from Latin and other Romance languages over the centuries. Or that Latin itself didn't borrow massively from Greek, or that Greek didn't borrow massively from Phoenician and other Semitic languages. Languages are always changing and evolving and adapting and borrowing and influencing. They will only ever change through use so if you continue to use all those Romance loanwords when there are perfectly suitable Germanic words already in English or when you can just create new English words by directly translating the Latin loanword (for example/forshow 'upfind' for 'invent' or 'underseaboat' for 'submarine' or 'wordstock/wordbook' for 'vocabulary/dictionary' or 'foodfill/foodhouse/foodhall' for 'restaurant', that's on you. But stop the endless whining and complaining about it if you're going to do f*** all to change it. Good Lord.
@@palepilgrim1174 life is short, and isn’t worth being pissed off about things we can't change. If want to spend it being pissed on things that don't matter, that’s on you.
Wow, unlike in Old Spanish and Modern Spanish where you can still somewhat grasp some words like: fablo = hablo, fierro = hierro, In the case of Old English it's almost totally unintelligible to Modern English speakers.
After injections of Old Norse during the Viking invasions in the 800s and Old French during the Norman conquest in 1066, Old English had so many foreign words that its case system no longer really 'worked'. You couldn't really predictably inflect the French or Norse nouns according to OE's rules so nouns just stopped being inflected and auxiliary verbs, prepositions, and strict word order started taking the place of an actual case system. By the time of Chaucer in the 1300s (when English started being taken seriously by the upper classes again), case had pretty much vanished from the language. Nowadays, case only exists as a remnant in the form of pronouns (he/she, his/hers, him/her). AFAIK English is the only major Indo-European language to undergo this transformation - others have gradually simplified their case systems, but none of them have completely dropped case like English has. In a way, OE and Modern English almost exist in completely different paradigms, which is part of what makes OE so incomprehensible to modern speakers.
The Arabs who controlled Spain for 7 centuries didn't mess with Spanish too much, but the French and old Germanic people who controlled England for years for some time effed with English so much.
@hunter0one Unfortunately, that only extends so far as vocabulary. I'd love to see something like Anglish, but that keeps Old English's noun and verb conjugations, and an orthography reminiscent of Old English
Old English is my dream foreign language: word for word translation, idiom for idiom, the grammar is the foundation of the language I use every day, and if you sound out the words, they sound like what they mean. Thank you for reading this, please give us more.
When most folks here in the United States think "Old English," they think of the 1611 King James Bible or Shakespeare. Thank you for giving me this so that I can demonstrate to all my friends here in the States what true Old English, or as I like to call it, Anglo-Saxon sounds like!
This is the nicest thing ever. Interesting to see how some old pronunciations still persist in certain aspects of current English. I noticed how "child" was pronounced with the same vowel as in "children" back then... That's very interesting!
Old English reminds me to Plattdeutsch or Frisian, the languages of my father and grandfather. It has a pure soul and heart without the distructive forces of the french-norman invasion.
The Norman invasion was irrelevant. All it did was set Anglonorman French as a literary and elite language which in turn influenced later Standard English in its vocabulary. This language here was 'destroyed' by mixing a very similar language, basically the same just removed by a few hundred years, which was Danish Old Norse. New grammar had to develop to account for the grammatical omissions brought about by this. And because that dialect would become the dominant language and eventually displace all other varieties (this only happened in modern times).
I doubt the aloof Norman elites forced the Anglo-Saxons to change language ... it was natives themselves who changed their own words just like Asians and Africans today speak English words to sound educated.
Absolutely beautiful. Wonderfully done! Old English/Anglo-Saxon is an incredible language that is far too underrated. No matter how many languages I've dabbled in over the years, I always come back to Old English.
Well done. This is a great learning tool, enabling us to both hear and see the connection between some Anglo Saxon and Modern English words in a familiar, beloved text. The music and expressive reading enhance the experience. Thank you.
@@brookesmith9413 If my understanding is correct, I think the elven language of Quenya is based off of Finnish. Rohan's language is based off of Old English. Tolkien seemed to think of Rohan as what the Anglo-Saxons were before 1066 or if they had their cavalry to fight William.
@@VTdarkangel Quenya is indeed inspired by Finnish language. However, the language we see most used in both the books and the movies is Sindarin, which was based off of Welsh and other celtic languages.
This is very transporting; I found myself listening & following very attentively to the “Godspellen”. Since part of my ancestry is English, I imagine my long-ago pagan ancestors hearing & receiving the Good News, and it dawning on them what God had done for them, too.
Reading this as someone who has studied Latin and German was really interesting. Amazing how English has evolved from the ancestors of other modern languages!
Its fascinating how the written language looks completely alien but when its spoken its more comprehensible than it would be just written. Also i appreciate that the reader gives life to the story by how they read it, such as making Simeon's words sound like theyre being said by an old man, by giving alemorion to ehen the angels come in, that sort of thing. Instead of just reading it with no vocal inflection. Thanks for posting!
Tolkien knew old English well. He was the most accomplished polyglot the world has ever seen: he spoke 51 languages, plus 3 of his own, fluently. The Hobbits’ names come from Old English! Have a look. X
Thank you for putting this up. It’s very clear and easy to follow. I’ve been trying to learn Old English for about six months from a book. I’m getting on ok but I struggle with pronunciation and rhythm. Over the Christmas period I’ve learnt the first few verses by heart with the help of your post. I think it’s really helping my pronunciation.
From what I understand, the prefix was spelled 'ġe' (notice the dot atop the letter), and pronounced as 'ye-'. Might be wrong there, as I'm still a novice in the language.
Today is 10th Dec 2016 .. Merry Christmas dear All.. Thank you Mr. Joshua for uploading this lovely blessed story of our Lord Jesus Christ. Subscribed already
I saved this video some three years ago. I don't know what caused me to listen to it today, but I'm glad I did. It was fascinating, and more important, it was beautiful. Thanks!
For a native speaker of Eastern Dutch Saxon this is a revalation. Allthough Old English also seems to have many Latin and Celtic influences, which especailly makes some plural nouns very different, most verbs are quite familair. Translated into Saxon Dutch the first sentence goes like this; ''Waorlick in die dag'n was `eword'n `n gebod van keizer Augustos dat de hiele weerld was te beschriev'n.''
Really cool and interesting to hear. At first I couldn’t understand it but strangely after listening to it for a couple minutes my brain started to understand most of what they were saying.
I often feel regret over dead or dying languages; or at least a longing to travel back in time and hear what they really sounded like. But I take solace in the fact that although there are no more native speakers, we can still enjoy these languages through written texts, and we can creatively reconstruct them and make them live again. There is no doubt in my mind that a 10th century person could understand this recording, even if I didn't get every detail right. It might sound a little strange to them, but I believe it would be intelligible. It's sort of like a dinosaur skeleton with muscles and skin reconstructed according to the best available educated guesses.
For the same reason people 900 years from now won't speak like us. What kind of question is that? Would you prefer a language stays rigid and stagnant?
There's nothing sad about it. All languages evolve over time. If they didn't, inhabitants of Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, and Romania would all be speaking Latin. The language in this video is not a dead language. We're speaking it now. It has just evolved over a thousand years or so to arrive at this point. In fact, if language didn't evolve, most people in Europe and India would be speaking Proto-Indo-European. Or perhaps we'd all be grunting and making ape-like sounds. I think it's a testament to the strength and resilience of the English language that even after many invasions by different peoples, a ruling class trying to keep the language down, and a plague that wiped out a huge percentage of the population, it still managed to survive and go from the language used by a few tribes on a tiny island off the European mainland to a language spoken internationally.
Excellent reading! I love how you captured the delicate fluidity of Old English without resorting to an overly affected faux-Scandanavian or even an Italian accent like I've heard some people do.
I find ancient and medieval languages especially challenging simply due to the lack of a speech community amongst which to absorb the target language. I’ve managed to reach a decent level in Mandarin not due to any talent for languages, but rather because of an immersive environment. For some reason I’m sitting in Beijing teaching myself Anglo-Saxon (古英语)! Wonderful video!
Wunderbar ist es, das zu hoeren und gleichzeitig in der Luther Bibel mitzulesen. Man merkt viele Stellen, die gleich oder fast gleich sind. Trotz dem, versteht man nicht alles, trotz Verstaendnis der Englischen Sprache von Heute. Vielen Dank.
Danke für deinen Kommentar! Ich liebe es, von Sprechern germanischer Sprachen über die Ähnlichkeiten zwischen ihrer Sprache und dem Altenglischen zu hören.
@@joshtyraVielen Dank. Ich freue mich, dein Video entdeckt zu haben. Ich bin mit Afrikaans als Muttersprache aufgewachsen, kann deswegen Niederlaendisch lesen und verstehen, habe natuerlich Englisch gelernt und Deutsch. Ich glaube, wir vergessen die Geschichte, die von unseren germanische Sprachen geteilt wird, ganz zu oft. Weil ich jetzt mit Middle English der Schriften vonChaucer beschaeftigt bin, habe ich auch eine Interesse in Altenglisch entwickelt. Ihr Video fand ich als ich nach Texten forschte, die auf Altenglisch geschrieben sind. Jetzt ist meine Interesse bestimmt erweckt worden, die Sprache kennenzulernen. Leider kann ich, wie ich jetzt sehe, gut tippen mit dem Handy.
Loved it! Thanks for doing this. As a recent student of Old English (self taught, using Peter Baker's text) I truly enjoyed hearing this and following along. Great video.
It is our indigenous language, free from colonial mindset and still to this day in my opinion the closest link we have to our proto-Germanic paganism. I think it is worth a revival ten times over.
@@road-eo6911 Not so. It was Yule-tide, a pagan celebration that sprang forth from medieval to bronze age Europe. Each reindeer of Santa's (Ođinn's) sleigh represents one of 8 legs of Sleipnir, his mystical horse. Christmas Eve is also the night of the Wild Hunt. Any cursory knowledge if history would reveal the simple knowledge that our modern day Christmas has pagan roots and was superceded by images of the Christ god. But alas it's not my responsibility to bring anyone out of ignorance. Remain there if it works for you mate.
Oh the days of glory when that island jewel of angels heeded true religion. In the land of angels, in the time of it's youth, faithful to the Petrine line, glory abounded in England in that age.
I wish English was still like this. For any non-native English speakers, I apologize sincerely for modern English being unhelpful at best and contradictory at worst.
Ok, I am Flemish and it is very similar to my language that came from the Franks(West-Germanic tribes who came from the North and North-East for the rich farming lands in the North of Belgium and mixed with the Belgian Celts). The Franks, Saxons and North sea West-Germanic tribes are family tribes. Flemish is old Frankonish and didn't change much. It is a very very old languages. The verbs are extremily similar to Flemish and Dutch(Frisian). Dagas is dagen(days), waes geworden is in Flemish: was geworden etc.... I gives me a home feeling. Ge is not pronounced as ye but realy as a Flemish G. Not a Dutch one.
It’s good, yes, but I’m just curious - if I may be as bold - to ask about the pronunciation here of , which sounds to be more like the in ‘best’ or a Danish or a German or Swedish , whereas I thought it was generally believed that ‘ash’/‘æsc’ in Old English was more like the in ‘cat’ or a Finnish , both short and long (merely with extra length). Thus, the pronunciation in this recording of , for instance, seems a little weird, or have I genuinely misunderstood how it’s normally thought to have been pronounced? I don’t wish to take anything away from the quality of the recording - I’m simply curious. Thanks.
English is such an amazing language! I really wished that its Germanic origins weren't overshadowed by the foreign influence... I also have a question: do students in England learn Old English, like we learn Ancient Greek in Greece?
No. In English-speaking countries, Old English is a thing you study if you take on English as a course of study at the university level, and even then it's a specialized subject. OE doesn't have the same 'usefulness' that Ancient Greek does and there's not as much literature or important material written in it. OE texts are mostly just Beowulf, Early Bible Translations, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles detailing the history of England from ~500 AD to the Norman conquest.
You portray the text as a singing - miraculous, touching, and sublime
Thank you, that's very kind.
That's how they used to remember epic poems -- they "sang" them. You can still hear this in Ireland.
Great vid to sleeping
It's nice to know the word "and" hasn't changed much. :)
I didn't realise I was the only one in the And protection society...' Back off Norman! XD
even in german it's und - not too different
LittleImpaler temple and sword were hardly changed as well.
Horny Aleks not all British dialects
as well as "today"
When this video had only 7,000 views, a former Fellow Librarian of the Parker Library observed, "That’s probably a larger number than ever heard that text read aloud in Anglo-Saxon England." How much more must that be true today, with 20 times that number of views! Thank you, everyone. Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!
Yes❤️❤️❤️❤️
Sorry if it's out of context but does anyone know the name of the background song? It's beautiful 😍😍😍
@@sagidasyed6314 Thanks! I wrote the music. The details are in the description field.
@@joshtyra oh my goodness!!!!!!!! You are so talented!!!!!! 😍😍 It's such a beautiful Christmas medieval song! You really are a medieval monk composer😂🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗
@@sagidasyed6314 Thank you, that's very kind!
It’s fascinating how “mīne ēagan” is so similar to “meine augen” in german. And the verbs that are formulated in the past tense, like “gesāwon” and “ge-earwodest” are the same as verbs formulated in the perfect tense in German “with the “ge” added to the start of the verb”. So interesting
Anglia and Saxony are both in Germanium. Anglo Saxons were originally Germanic tribes. In fact they were some of the most primitive. Odd no, how a language spawned from barbarian tribes considered barbaric by other barbarians became the language spoken across all the world.
Last shall be first indeed.
English and German both belong to the Germanic Language Family. If the Norman conquest of 1066 hadn't happened English most likely would have remained intact like that of German, Icelandic, Norwegian, and the other Germanic Languages. Actual English without the Latin is quite beautiful!
"Faran" means "Fahren" in German
@@Evenvesper “English without the Latin” Anglish?
(Personally, I think English and Anglish are both cool in their own way 🙂)
In Norwegian it's "augo mine"
This is the best reading of Old English that I've ever heard. The intonation is superb.
Thank you, that's very kind!
"You will find a child, wrapped in cloth and laying in a bin"
"Excuse me?"
"The kid's in a bin"
Ha a binne. I didn’t catch that. That’s pretty funny.
kid's in a cage
I saw that haha
Keep on rocking in the free world
THINE NUTS!
This is so relaxing, imagine an old english asmr
I imagine it would sound kind of like Cate Blanchett whispering in Elvish at the beginning of LOTR.
I’ve heard several linguist’s reading old English, and many sounded very good to my ears, some though, were a little rough in interpretation. Yours, sounds to me, exactly as I would’ve imagined it! This sounds softer, and more natural; something akin to modern English, with a dominant but clear Germanic flavor.
It's always amusing to me that people bemoan the 'lack of purity' in Modern English when Old English itself contained like 25% borrowings from Latin in its vocabulary. I think these people seem to think German and Dutch (or even the Scandinavian languages) didn't also borrow massively from Latin and other Romance languages over the centuries. Or that Latin itself didn't borrow massively from Greek, or that Greek didn't borrow massively from Phoenician and other Semitic languages.
Languages are always changing and evolving and adapting and borrowing and influencing. They will only ever change through use so if you continue to use all those Romance loanwords when there are perfectly suitable Germanic words already in English or when you can just create new English words by directly translating the Latin loanword (for example/forshow 'upfind' for 'invent' or 'underseaboat' for 'submarine' or 'wordstock/wordbook' for 'vocabulary/dictionary' or 'foodfill/foodhouse/foodhall' for 'restaurant', that's on you.
But stop the endless whining and complaining about it if you're going to do f*** all to change it. Good Lord.
@@palepilgrim1174 you're not wrong but bro chill...
@@BlueFlame414mdftw Yeah it just p**** me off tbh. Be the change you want manifest in the world, what's stopping you, lol.
@@palepilgrim1174 life is short, and isn’t worth being pissed off about things we can't change. If want to spend it being pissed on things that don't matter, that’s on you.
Wow, unlike in Old Spanish and Modern Spanish where you can still somewhat grasp some words like: fablo = hablo, fierro = hierro, In the case of Old English it's almost totally unintelligible to Modern English speakers.
Indeed, but the point is that technically Old English and Present day English = English, while Spanish = Old Spanish but Spanish =/= Latin.
It's more intelligible if you have studied other languages that are related to the proto indo-european. Like Swedish, English, German, etc.
After injections of Old Norse during the Viking invasions in the 800s and Old French during the Norman conquest in 1066, Old English had so many foreign words that its case system no longer really 'worked'. You couldn't really predictably inflect the French or Norse nouns according to OE's rules so nouns just stopped being inflected and auxiliary verbs, prepositions, and strict word order started taking the place of an actual case system. By the time of Chaucer in the 1300s (when English started being taken seriously by the upper classes again), case had pretty much vanished from the language. Nowadays, case only exists as a remnant in the form of pronouns (he/she, his/hers, him/her). AFAIK English is the only major Indo-European language to undergo this transformation - others have gradually simplified their case systems, but none of them have completely dropped case like English has.
In a way, OE and Modern English almost exist in completely different paradigms, which is part of what makes OE so incomprehensible to modern speakers.
I got "after" -- that was about it for what sounded familiar to me in our modern English! ;o
The Arabs who controlled Spain for 7 centuries didn't mess with Spanish too much, but the French and old Germanic people who controlled England for years for some time effed with English so much.
I wish English still was like this. Sounds so pretty.
Anna Rose icelandic is like this somewhat
sounds German
@Denise Bond you mean the diversity dump it was back then too? Because this has a different grammar based on gaelic.
@hunter0one Unfortunately, that only extends so far as vocabulary. I'd love to see something like Anglish, but that keeps Old English's noun and verb conjugations, and an orthography reminiscent of Old English
@hunter0one Not really. Without Norse influence, English probably would have kept a lot of its grammar, like the other North Germanic languages did.
Old English is my dream foreign language: word for word translation, idiom for idiom, the grammar is the foundation of the language I use every day, and if you sound out the words, they sound like what they mean. Thank you for reading this, please give us more.
When most folks here in the United States think "Old English," they think of the 1611 King James Bible or Shakespeare. Thank you for giving me this so that I can demonstrate to all my friends here in the States what true Old English, or as I like to call it, Anglo-Saxon sounds like!
English is just French and German together its easy
@@ugfolder smh
@@basedgodkyon it was supposed to be a basic explanation put together
@@ugfolder Even that basic explanation is just plain wrong
@@ugfolder old English is old Norse Dutch and Danish. German has nothing to do with it
skillful reading
Survive the Jive *VERY*
@@Shoegazebasedgenre0.
*INDO*
@@raykdreisatzgehtanders7239 *EUROPEAN*
Indo European
@@anglishbookcraft1516 West Germanic
This is the nicest thing ever. Interesting to see how some old pronunciations still persist in certain aspects of current English. I noticed how "child" was pronounced with the same vowel as in "children" back then... That's very interesting!
Old English reminds me to Plattdeutsch or Frisian, the languages of my father and grandfather. It has a pure soul and heart without the distructive forces of the french-norman invasion.
Norwegian, danish, swedish, faroese, icelandic = north germanic
English, german, dutch, frisian, luxemburgish, afrikaans = west germanic
Roman, french = sounds like 🐕🐶
The Norman invasion was irrelevant. All it did was set Anglonorman French as a literary and elite language which in turn influenced later Standard English in its vocabulary. This language here was 'destroyed' by mixing a very similar language, basically the same just removed by a few hundred years, which was Danish Old Norse. New grammar had to develop to account for the grammatical omissions brought about by this. And because that dialect would become the dominant language and eventually displace all other varieties (this only happened in modern times).
I doubt the aloof Norman elites forced the Anglo-Saxons to change language ... it was natives themselves who changed their own words just like Asians and Africans today speak English words to sound educated.
just came upon this today. BRILLIANT! thank you.
This is just beauty. I love things like this, old English has changed but yet I can still get a feel of what they are talking about
It's a gorgeous language.
Absolutely beautiful. Wonderfully done! Old English/Anglo-Saxon is an incredible language that is far too underrated. No matter how many languages I've dabbled in over the years, I always come back to Old English.
Well done. This is a great learning tool, enabling us to both hear and see the connection between some Anglo Saxon and Modern English words in a familiar, beloved text. The music and expressive reading enhance the experience. Thank you.
I'm so pleased you enjoyed it! Happy New Year.
... it is very good. I'm a fan also. I play through many times. With hope people will do more vids. Great stuff. This one is the best I have seen.
Old English is pleasant to listen to.
musicaldooder20 any language is pleasant to listen to with a soothing voice and music.
@@callmeJAF Except for French
It's amazing how phonetic English was before the influence of several more languages and the great vowel shift In the following centuries.
I blame the french
@@JasperSynth Always a good plan.
Hearing the most amazing news in the tongue of my ancestors...priceless. Thank you.
Lets revive Old English
Who's with me?
No. The English language language should die and should be replaced with something less mutated and less stoopid sounding.
I feel like I'm in Lord of the Rings listening to an elf in Rivendale
i heard that was what the elf language was based off of.
I think Welsh sounds more Elvish. Old English sounds more like the language of Rohan.
@@brookesmith9413 If my understanding is correct, I think the elven language of Quenya is based off of Finnish. Rohan's language is based off of Old English. Tolkien seemed to think of Rohan as what the Anglo-Saxons were before 1066 or if they had their cavalry to fight William.
Isn't the quenya who's based to Finnish ?
@@VTdarkangel Quenya is indeed inspired by Finnish language. However, the language we see most used in both the books and the movies is Sindarin, which was based off of Welsh and other celtic languages.
This sounds like an interesting mix of modern English, Dutch, German, and Danish
Have you heard of Fryslân before its like the Brother language of old english
It’s like Dutch and Danish yea more like old Norse also
This would be a great language for a metal band.
This is perfect
I've been trying to find a video of just talking in Old English, without translations, and at an actual good speed
* Warning *
Auto Captions, tells a wildly different story.
Here’s a wonderful example:
“After thumb they tasted ass”
E P where is that😂
boomerplays 9112 4:25
Auto generated Captions, is both a Nonsensical thing to do, and Amazingly Hilarious.
Bahahahahaaa!!!! Thank you for the suggestion. That's wild!!!!
This is very transporting; I found myself listening & following very attentively to the “Godspellen”. Since part of my ancestry is English, I imagine my long-ago pagan ancestors hearing & receiving the Good News, and it dawning on them what God had done for them, too.
Reading this as someone who has studied Latin and German was really interesting. Amazing how English has evolved from the ancestors of other modern languages!
Beautifully read. I'm learning Old English in college and its very helpful and inspiring to hear it read so beautifully and with such enthusiasm.
Picked out Latin,Celtic and German sounding words in this reading.This is definitely cool!
Lelleith Murray yeah I’ve been learning latin and I noticed the ae(aye) sound a lot!!!
Its fascinating how the written language looks completely alien but when its spoken its more comprehensible than it would be just written.
Also i appreciate that the reader gives life to the story by how they read it, such as making Simeon's words sound like theyre being said by an old man, by giving alemorion to ehen the angels come in, that sort of thing. Instead of just reading it with no vocal inflection.
Thanks for posting!
Thank you for your kind comment. I'm so glad you enjoyed the reading. I enjoyed playing all the roles, including the elderly Simeon!
Sounds like the elves from Lord of the Rings.
Mordor means Mother?
Melon=friend?
Tolkien knew old English well. He was the most accomplished polyglot the world has ever seen: he spoke 51 languages, plus 3 of his own, fluently.
The Hobbits’ names come from Old English! Have a look. X
Théoden of Rohan: "Did you just call me an Elf?"
Mellon. "Speak 'friend' and enter" on the West Gate of Moria.
Imagine rapping in Old English... now that would be interesting to hear.
not a rap, but it’s pumped up kicks in old English th-cam.com/video/JcKqhDFhNHI/w-d-xo.html
No it wouldn't
Thank you for putting this up. It’s very clear and easy to follow. I’ve been trying to learn Old English for about six months from a book. I’m getting on ok but I struggle with pronunciation and rhythm. Over the Christmas period I’ve learnt the first few verses by heart with the help of your post. I think it’s really helping my pronunciation.
I love knowing that this reading has been put to use in this way. Thank you so much for sharing! Happy New Year.
I notice ge- prefix denoting certain past participle as in modern German.
Also modern dutch
From what I understand, the prefix was spelled 'ġe' (notice the dot atop the letter), and pronounced as 'ye-'. Might be wrong there, as I'm still a novice in the language.
The “a” in English today is the same only shortened. “Asleep” “away” and others.
@@nathanielcrosby2426 The German ge- is pronounced 'ye' in modern Berlin dialect!
Your voice is tender, lyrical and beautiful.
Thanks be to God!
When I hear this, I think of elves- and fairies... This beautiful and very old language.
Magnificent reading, sōþlīċe.
Your reading made my heart glad.
Really a beautiful, overlooked language, and a marvellous reading too. It's a pity that it's so obscure even to English speakers. =[
I think that's because you've listened it with music.
You've done a great job with this translation and reading. Love it!
What a small world! I come wandering in search of some Anglo-Saxon Scripture, and find myself in the online workshop of an old friend!
Welcome, old friend! My pronunciation is better on the "Creation" video. But this is the "viral" one. 🙂
Welp, that settles it. If I ever got thrown back in time to England a thousand years ago, I’d be screwed.
Finally a TH-camr who doesn’t lip smack all over a microphone while trying to speak an old Germanic language
What an absolutely gorgeous reading. Such exquisite sounds.
I like to listen to Old English to relax. This reading is very nice!!
Today is 10th Dec 2016 .. Merry Christmas dear All..
Thank you Mr. Joshua for uploading this lovely blessed story of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Subscribed already
I saved this video some three years ago. I don't know what caused me to listen to it today, but I'm glad I did. It was fascinating, and more important, it was beautiful. Thanks!
Anyone else find this language extremely soothing ?
Me)))
I love how the word "geworden" still exist in the German language. Although it rather means "became"
I love old english
So do I!
This is an exceptional reading. I can't see how it could have been done any better! Thank you!
For a native speaker of Eastern Dutch Saxon this is a revalation.
Allthough Old English also seems to have many Latin and Celtic influences, which especailly makes some plural nouns very different, most verbs are quite familair. Translated into Saxon Dutch the first sentence goes like this;
''Waorlick in die dag'n was `eword'n `n gebod van keizer Augustos dat de hiele weerld was te beschriev'n.''
Really cool and interesting to hear. At first I couldn’t understand it but strangely after listening to it for a couple minutes my brain started to understand most of what they were saying.
Extraordinarily vivid and touching.
This is glorious! It puts me in mind of Tolkien and his LOTR cycle.
Sounds líke scandinavian language
Both English and the Scandinavian languages are of Germanic descent, although different branches.
SIN NOMBRE nah, modern Scandinavian except for icelandic? Not at all.
well, britain had saxon influence and later received a norse influence, so it make sense that the old english was similar to scandinavian language
Sounds more like Dutch to me
@@Giovanni_Team_Rocket_UK Your right. Fresian is the closest language to English.
why do we not speak like this anymore.... as a book lover and a language lover this makes me sad. Such a beautiful language that has almost died...
I often feel regret over dead or dying languages; or at least a longing to travel back in time and hear what they really sounded like. But I take solace in the fact that although there are no more native speakers, we can still enjoy these languages through written texts, and we can creatively reconstruct them and make them live again. There is no doubt in my mind that a 10th century person could understand this recording, even if I didn't get every detail right. It might sound a little strange to them, but I believe it would be intelligible. It's sort of like a dinosaur skeleton with muscles and skin reconstructed according to the best available educated guesses.
By being mixed with french and greek language. I wonder how greek could been though.
blame the French Norman invaders
For the same reason people 900 years from now won't speak like us. What kind of question is that? Would you prefer a language stays rigid and stagnant?
There's nothing sad about it. All languages evolve over time. If they didn't, inhabitants of Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, and Romania would all be speaking Latin.
The language in this video is not a dead language. We're speaking it now. It has just evolved over a thousand years or so to arrive at this point. In fact, if language didn't evolve, most people in Europe and India would be speaking Proto-Indo-European. Or perhaps we'd all be grunting and making ape-like sounds.
I think it's a testament to the strength and resilience of the English language that even after many invasions by different peoples, a ruling class trying to keep the language down, and a plague that wiped out a huge percentage of the population, it still managed to survive and go from the language used by a few tribes on a tiny island off the European mainland to a language spoken internationally.
Excellent reading! I love how you captured the delicate fluidity of Old English without resorting to an overly affected faux-Scandanavian or even an Italian accent like I've heard some people do.
I'm so glad you enjoyed it. Thank you for this lovely and kind comment!
Very sensitive and rhytmic reading. I am very impressed and would know from who to learn...
This is amazingly beautiful. The Germanic root is so clear.
i'm glad that this appeared on my Recommendations
Beautiful. Truly a beautiful language and spoken with such an expressive voice .... thank you!
Somebody : So what words do you understand?
Me : And
We need to bring all these old words back to life...
This upload is extraordinary! Thank you for taking the time to make this!
I find ancient and medieval languages especially challenging simply due to the lack of a speech community amongst which to absorb the target language. I’ve managed to reach a decent level in Mandarin not due to any talent for languages, but rather because of an immersive environment. For some reason I’m sitting in Beijing teaching myself Anglo-Saxon (古英语)! Wonderful video!
I found it interesting how aspects of Old English's word order are exactly the same as they are in modern English.
Wunderbar ist es, das zu hoeren und gleichzeitig in der Luther Bibel mitzulesen. Man merkt viele Stellen, die gleich oder fast gleich sind. Trotz dem, versteht man nicht alles, trotz Verstaendnis der Englischen Sprache von Heute.
Vielen Dank.
Danke für deinen Kommentar! Ich liebe es, von Sprechern germanischer Sprachen über die Ähnlichkeiten zwischen ihrer Sprache und dem Altenglischen zu hören.
@@joshtyraVielen Dank. Ich freue mich, dein Video entdeckt zu haben. Ich bin mit Afrikaans als Muttersprache aufgewachsen, kann deswegen Niederlaendisch lesen und verstehen, habe natuerlich Englisch gelernt und Deutsch. Ich glaube, wir vergessen die Geschichte, die von unseren germanische Sprachen geteilt wird, ganz zu oft. Weil ich jetzt mit Middle English der Schriften vonChaucer beschaeftigt bin, habe ich auch eine Interesse in Altenglisch entwickelt. Ihr Video fand ich als ich nach Texten forschte, die auf Altenglisch geschrieben sind. Jetzt ist meine Interesse bestimmt erweckt worden, die Sprache kennenzulernen. Leider kann ich, wie ich jetzt sehe, gut tippen mit dem Handy.
Loved it! Thanks for doing this. As a recent student of Old English (self taught, using Peter Baker's text) I truly enjoyed hearing this and following along. Great video.
Thank you for uploading this. The pronunciation is much better than a lot of others in TH-cam
It is our indigenous language, free from colonial mindset and still to this day in my opinion the closest link we have to our proto-Germanic paganism.
I think it is worth a revival ten times over.
But the video is about Christmas?
@@Sawrattan aaaand what was Christmas before it was hi-jacked by Christianity? :P
@@DatGloriaVires It was Christmas? Always had been Christmas.
@@road-eo6911 Not so. It was Yule-tide, a pagan celebration that sprang forth from medieval to bronze age Europe. Each reindeer of Santa's (Ođinn's) sleigh represents one of 8 legs of Sleipnir, his mystical horse. Christmas Eve is also the night of the Wild Hunt. Any cursory knowledge if history would reveal the simple knowledge that our modern day Christmas has pagan roots and was superceded by images of the Christ god. But alas it's not my responsibility to bring anyone out of ignorance. Remain there if it works for you mate.
@@DatGloriaVires sol invictus
I didn't know this channel... now I'm desperately in love with it 😍💙
Thank you for this I'm learning Anglo-Saxon, this helped a lot and introduced me to some words that I have not heard before, again thank you!!
I'd absolutely love to hear all of the text of Beowulf like this. The voice AND the glossed original,
You could make yourself understood in Iceland with that Christmas greeting!
Oh the days of glory when that island jewel of angels heeded true religion. In the land of angels, in the time of it's youth, faithful to the Petrine line, glory abounded in England in that age.
I wish English was still like this. For any non-native English speakers, I apologize sincerely for modern English being unhelpful at best and contradictory at worst.
Very helpful. God's word created and preserved English.
No.
this kind of looks like old swedish or middle-high german. amazing
Try low German. Old English literally is low German. English people are germans
So beautiful !!!. Thank you. My fore fathres spoke that language ----- Awesome !!!!
It sounds like german, spanish, welsh, icelandic, latin mixed in a salad bowl.
Almost is
Actually modern English is Exactly what you just described.
You forgot french
Spanish?
Add in some Semitic languages, like Hebrew, and French, and you're spot-on.
Thanks, this sounds very natural
Ok, I am Flemish and it is very similar to my language that came from the Franks(West-Germanic tribes who came from the North and North-East for the rich farming lands in the North of Belgium and mixed with the Belgian Celts). The Franks, Saxons and North sea West-Germanic tribes are family tribes. Flemish is old Frankonish and didn't change much. It is a very very old languages. The verbs are extremily similar to Flemish and Dutch(Frisian). Dagas is dagen(days), waes geworden is in Flemish: was geworden etc.... I gives me a home feeling. Ge is not pronounced as ye but realy as a Flemish G. Not a Dutch one.
This is so beautiful to listen to. And it is actually very exciting that I could understand every three words or so.
sounds beautiful
Fascinating and very beautiful. Thank you!
I understood 60 percent of it as a Dutchman
That was beautiful. Thank you very much for making it available. I really enjoyed that.
This sounds beautiful, I don't know if it's the narrator or the language itself but I would love to learn it and speak it with somebody!
I would love to speak it with somebody, too!
We should learn it together and form a little group that speaks it, although that would take lots of work to learn since nobody speaks it anymore :)
That is the best pronunciation I have ever heard
Make more, please!
It’s good, yes, but I’m just curious - if I may be as bold - to ask about the pronunciation here of , which sounds to be more like the in ‘best’ or a Danish or a German or Swedish , whereas I thought it was generally believed that ‘ash’/‘æsc’ in Old English was more like the in ‘cat’ or a Finnish , both short and long (merely with extra length). Thus, the pronunciation in this recording of , for instance, seems a little weird, or have I genuinely misunderstood how it’s normally thought to have been pronounced? I don’t wish to take anything away from the quality of the recording - I’m simply curious. Thanks.
Beautiful. Reminds me of Rohan in Lord of the Rings.
I really enjoyed listening to this.
English is such an amazing language! I really wished that its Germanic origins weren't overshadowed by the foreign influence... I also have a question: do students in England learn Old English, like we learn Ancient Greek in Greece?
Απόστολος Τουλούπας No. At least not here in America. it is an optional language can study at some universities though.
No. In English-speaking countries, Old English is a thing you study if you take on English as a course of study at the university level, and even then it's a specialized subject. OE doesn't have the same 'usefulness' that Ancient Greek does and there's not as much literature or important material written in it. OE texts are mostly just Beowulf, Early Bible Translations, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles detailing the history of England from ~500 AD to the Norman conquest.
Being in another English speaking country, I haven’t started learning old English yet
No
No, we don’t learn old English in school. The oldest we study would be Shakespeare unless you choose to study old English at university