
Letter of Recommendation: Old English - antigizmo
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-old-english.html
======
combatentropy
I'm an amateur student of language, particularly English. This article taught
me about kennings, or compound words in Old English poetry.

At first I thought that the writer, Josephine Livingston, was saying that
these were the main words --- like, the Old English word for sea is hronrad,
"whale road." But no, if you look up "sea," that is Old English too. People
normally said "sea," but sometimes if you were writing a poem you would make
up these colorful alternatives. I think that's what she meant. It just took me
a second reading.

At the end, she says this isn't possible in modern English. "We who speak
contemporary English are so reliant on word order that we are no longer as
able[...]. We just can’t do the same things with our vocabulary." She gives as
an example that she wants to make a new kenning out of "poignant" and
"solitude," but it won't work because today's readers would interpret
"poignant solitude" as just an adjective modifying a noun, with no special
poetical air. That's because she did it wrong.

At the beginning she defines a kenning as two nouns, but "poignant" isn't a
noun, it's an adjective. She would need two nouns. And solitude, while a noun,
is abstract. She would be better off with two concrete nouns, like the old
kennings. The best I can come up with right now is "teardrop cloister." A more
modern style, though, would be "cloister of tears."

I see no reason why you couldn't write a poem today with custom-made compound
words like "whale-road" and "bone-house." The reader would have to rely on the
context to figure out that you're using metaphors for the sea and the body,
just like then. Maybe it would be a little more jarring these days. It sounds
like back then that poets did it all the time. It was a meme. But modern
poetry has this kind of wordplay here and there. And like I said, instead of
doing it with compound words, they do it more by joining them with the word
"of", like: "cloister of tears," "the road of the whales," "this house of
bones." I could totally see any of those in modern poems.

~~~
gerdesj
_I see no reason why you couldn 't write a poem today with custom-made
compound words like "whale-road" and "bone-house."_

I agree with you - I suspect that modern english has far more in common with
its predecessors than we might think at first. I'm pretty sure I have seen
poetry and prose that riffs like that - bolting together nouns in a way that
would invite inspection for meaning, some of which might become expected
(formulaic) in a way that might be an in-joke or a shared experience or
perhaps a description that can be considered a shared pseudo experience ("I
know what you mean")

 _Maybe it would be a little more jarring these days. "_

We might consider ourselves more sophisticated in some way and yet the term
"bone house" does still resonate in some way for me but not in the context of
"general term for a body/person". It does work rather well in the context of
war/battle/conflict.

Kennings - seems to me to be cognate with "ken" (know). They seem to be
designed for inventing nouns for context - a bit like the reverse of the
effect of some adjectives. You include the adjective(s) within the agglomerate
noun in some way, either explicitly or via convention (think of the imagery
around: "bone house")

I love language.

~~~
combatentropy
> Kennings - seems to me to be cognate with "ken" (know).

Yes, I think you're right,
[https://www.etymonline.com/word/kenning](https://www.etymonline.com/word/kenning)

------
3pt14159
The grammar of modern English is its strength. Its spelling is its curse.

When I first started learning Russian I couldn't believe how easy it was. Once
I could hear and pronounce the differences between ы / и and ш / щ / ж I could
guess how to spell or pronounce a word and I'd be right like 90% of the time.
I don't even hit that with English words I know, but rarely use.

But the ridiculous spelling situation in English is caused by the same thing
that lead to it becoming an analytical language with all these helper words in
the first place: It's a disastrous mismash of at least 4 different languages.

Our grammar couldn't grow to handle the complexity. In a Bayesian free energy
sense, the complexity got pushed into the language instead. But this actually
makes English much easier to use for commerce because partial speakers can
stumble word to word without having to think it all out first. It's a smoother
learning curve.

With Russian it's the opposite. The grammar is how the words all apply to each
other, so the word order is very flexible. Instead it's used to indicate
emphasis, which is why Russians can sound kinda displeased when they talk.
Well, one of the reasons why, anyway. It's why their literature is so great.
We have to do all these gymnastics to avoid using italics to indicate
emphasis, whereas it just falls out naturally.[0]

Longterm life goal is to get to at least a strong B1 / weak B2 with Russian
and to read the classics slowly. Right now I'm stuck with side-by-side
English-Russian short stories.

[0] Though our language does have the advantage of a huge vocabulary, so
though our literature might not be quite as good as Russian it's still pretty
great.

------
gumby
> ð (interchangeable with þ)

I suspect this was still a dialectic distinction by the time of the Norman
conquest; I suspect the distinction survived much longer in more
linguistically conservative regions like what is now Yorkshire (which was also
more heavily influenced by the danish.

I believe they can still have distinct pronunciations in Icelandic.

~~~
dunham
Yeah, I thought ð was voiced in old english, but it's been a very long time
since I tried to learn it.

I do recall that ð was voiced in the old norse that I was taught in college.
It probably doesn't matter too much since you don't have an old englishman to
speak to.

~~~
waserwill
Both used to refer to the same sound (the first sound of thing), which mutated
into what we have today (as in the), in part due to surrounding sounds (note,
for example, that words ending in th are soft/unvoiced).

The presence of two different characters has something to do with the
integration of Latin and runic alphabets, but the choice of which was used
isn't clear to me.

~~~
gerdesj
"th" can still have several different sounds depending on accent and word. The
more obvious are t' ie the northern english eg t' mill (its quite hard to
write down for those unacquainted with it). Then, of course we have t'ing for
thing in some areas. Often the th in that becomes closer in sound to f when
compared to the th in this. I personally have a slightly varied accent that
generally homes in on RP and I can make "th" sound quite distinct in different
words and contexts from a hard ending to "the" to something sounding similar
to "fee" (also "the").

The above variations are in a tiny subset of en_ and across a probably tiny
piece of time. Nowadays we have phones and TV etc which I think probably works
towards homogenising our vocalisations.

I suspect that Old English was a bit more complex than is generally thought,
if care is not taken.

~~~
gumby
Well, it's a language that existed for quite a while (probably at least as
long as Shakespeare->us) with a small amount of surviving written literature
so we really only have glimpses of it.

I remember realizing at one point that I had read everything in Old French in
the university library, and thinking that that probably meant I had probably
read _everything_ surviving in Old French.

~~~
gerdesj
The term "Old French" is probably as daft as "Old English" 8)

I recall my sister in law studied Occitan. Oh:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_French](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_French)
\- another rabbit hole to bookmark for spelunking.

------
scottlocklin
I taught myself OE grammar and some vocab a few years back; it was easy and
one of the best things I ever did for myself. Did it as my parents both
learned it in high school to the point they could read Beowulf (they also
learned Latin). I figured it was a defect in my education not knowing it.

Noticed last year that Icelandic is kind of similar, so it may eventually
prove useful beyond aesthetics.

------
UncleSlacky
There's a list of kennings here, part of the "Skaldic Project" (an
international project to edit the corpus of medieval Norse-Icelandic skaldic
poetry):
[https://skaldic.abdn.ac.uk/db.php?if=default&table=kenning](https://skaldic.abdn.ac.uk/db.php?if=default&table=kenning)

------
gerdesj
_There are ways of expressing feeling in the Old English kennings that do not
exist in the formal English of today._

An accusation that might be levied against any language vs another. Funnily
enough I found Ms Livingstone's final para a rather good example of the sheer
power of modern english to concisely link several concepts when wielded with
precision.

That said, I rather like the sound of the freedom that is implied in her
description of these kennings constructs. At the moment things like "banhaus"
sound more like a slang term to me. Did OE (at some stage) have a separate
word word for "body" or was bone-house it?

~~~
Rebelgecko
I think that many Old English works such as Beowulf had specific meters and
patterns in how they used alliteration. I would guess that at least some of
the more metaphorical kennings were created to fulfill those constraints in a
poetic way.

