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i can make an effort post about yogh and ash and thorn etc etc if that would be useful (unless it's in the op somewhere)
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Dec 5, 2017 04:50
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 14:33 |
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it has been ages since my last linguistics course and i was pretty bad at phonology/paleography even when it wasn't, so feel free to correct my stupid brain. echoing the op, the way the poem sounds is important and cool and also mostly lost in the translations. so it is worth your while to try to look over the poem in the original. however, even if you've cut your teeth with chaucer, it's gonna be tough. but it's very cool to at least get the rhythm and the phonology of the poems, and you can always consult the facing pages or what have you for the meaning. if you do so, you will have noticed some strange characters. a lot of these are derived from the old runic alphabet, and mostly didn't make it into modern english. they have survived in modern icelandic, although with some key phonetic differences, but i don't know and don't care to learn. Þ (think "th") the first is my boy "thorn", Þ (uppercase) or þ (lowercase). if those show up as squares to you, then imagine something that looks like a "p" but with the tail going up further. it has been replaced in modern english by the "th" digraph. it is pronounced in many of the same ways that you'd pronounce "th" in modern english words, for instance as the th in "father" or, well, the th in "the." in old english you'd sometimes see an eth ("ð") in places where you'd expect a "þ," and vice versa. in many scripts, thorn looked a lot like a script "y" and, with print culture picking up speed as þ's usage was declining, you'd often see a "y" type block used in place of a "þ." this means that "ye olde shoppe" should really be pronounced "the old shop," the same as in modern english. this is something you can "well, actually" about at a renaissance fair, if you're the kind of fundamentally broken person who goes to renaissance fairs and goes on about historical accuracy at them. some examples from the poem: "þis" -> "this" "þat" -> "that" "oþer" -> "other" Ȝ (think "gh") next up is "yogh", Ȝ,ȝ. It looks like a radical looking "3", or a "z" with a tail on it. It has been mostly replaced in modern english by the "gh" digraph, but with a lot of exceptions. a lot of consonants were denoted by Ȝ, so that weirdness is reflected in the dramatically different ways "gh" sounds in "though" and "rough" and "night." It can also sound like a "j" or "y," so be careful. For instance, in "If ȝe wyl lysten," "ȝe" is the 2nd person plural pronoun "ye," as in "hear ye, hear ye." examples: "knyȝtez" -> "knights" "hyȝest" -> "highest" "Ȝer" -> "year" Æ (think "e") last up is "ash", Æ, æ. This is in modern english still I guess, so I won't spend too much time on it. nowadays, it's normally written with an ae digraph instead of a ligature, or the spellings have been modernized to remove it entirely (like "æther" -> "ether"), especially in American English (US "encyclopedia" vs UK "encyclopædia"). Don't freak out when you see it and over-pronounce the "a": in Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials, the "dæmons" are pronounced like "demons," not "day-mons." Let's put this to the test with a few lines from the first part of the poem, just the earliest ones I could find with both Þ and Ȝ in them that don't have too much other word weirdness going on. I couldn't actually find any ashes in the online version of the text, but I could've sworn there are some. Anyway: quote:Hit watz Ennias þe athel, and his highe kynde, I'd personally modernize to something like: quote:It was Aeneas the noble*, and his high kind, Where: "athel" is from the Old English "æðele," meaning noble (as in your pal and mine, Æthelred the unready, a compound word meaning "noble [æðele] council [ræd]." "siþen" denotes elapsed time, close to "soon" i'd say. "subsequently" or "afterwards" also work. "depreced" would gloss to "subdued" rather than the literal "depressed" here, since the connotations have shifted a bit.
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Dec 5, 2017 07:02
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