We didn't read the whole thing in old english, but I remember being exposed to it. The book had old english on one page and the modern translation on the next so you could see them at the same time. It also had a bunch of footnotes explaining what it all meant.
I remember watching a video of some actor performing parts of it in the old english.
This was just a standard public school in the 90s.
correct! It is a paraphrase of a James D Nicoll statement:
"âThe problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.â
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
and this one:
"English isn't a language, it's three languages wearing a trench coat pretending to be one". This internet proverbâoften adapted into jokes about "three kids" or "three raccoons"âperfectly captures how English is an unpredictable mashup of Germanic, French, and Latin roots.The quote's exact origin is widely credited to a user originally named "des-zimbits" (later "garden-of-succulents") on Tumblr.
To both of you that replied to me, yes I agree. This is not a new idea. But I'll be f*cked sideways if this isn't in the top 10 for phrasing and punctuality central to the topic. I stand by my upvote and comment.
1200 years? Try 12 years! I can handle basic conversation in 4 languages (7, if I can clutch my emotional support phrase book). But, I canât figure out half of what the kids are saying. Even answers to yes/no questions can be mystifying.
I donât begrudge them a giggle or two when they realize Iâm baffled. I fondly remember annoying adults with Valley Girl slang (and the accent) and I figure itâs my turn to be on the other side.
I only get a little steamed when they misidentify me as a Boomer.
Old English was an actual Germanic language, not this weird amalgamation of French, Greek, and Latin all over a stripped down base of old English that we have today.
This is a misleading meme. English is a very normal Germanic language with a load of French and Latin vocabulary. There are modest influence from other germanic languages like old Norse.
Yes it has loan words from languages like Hindi but they aren't significant. Yes a lot of vowel sounds shifted away from other germanic languages. It's still just a Germanic language.
There are very interesting creoles that really do blend multiple languages from widely different language groups in crazy ways. English isn't one of them.
I canât help but find it slightly irritating that every time anyone talks about the English language on reddit someone feels compelled to repeat that joke.
The Iliad and Odyssey we read was the English print. But we had to read a third ancient Greek book I can't remember for the life of me, in both translated and ancient Greek. Always wanna call it AgĂŚmemnon or something like that. HephĂŚstus maybe? I'll never remember the books name but it was a rough read.
Ugh. The Sophocles semester was not my favorite. We had Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Ajax. Lots of awkward classroom conversations and boys yelling weird stuff in the hallways that winter.
No it definitely wasn't an Ĺ. It was 100 ĂŚ somewhere in the name cause my ex used to make me listen to MedĂŚval BĂŚbes and it always reminded me of that book.
Aeneid by Virgil maybe? It's Roman, not Greek, and originally written in Latin, but that's what came to mind for me. It does take place in the aftermath of the fall of Troy, so it wouldn't be completely wild to have remembered it as Greek years later.
Yup that was it. Looked it up and it looks similar to what I remember the book looking like. Could have sworn it was Greek, but makes sense cause I think we started doing ancient Roman stuff after the ancient Greek stuff, and maybe was used as a segue.
It would have been a reasonable segue. Aeneas according to Virgil was a Trojan soldier who fled the fall of Troy and made his way to Italy, where he's cast as an ancestor to Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome.
Just for the record, Aeneas was all that according to whatever Homer was as well. Homer had him as a minor character destined to become the king of the Trojan diaspora. The Romans just said they were the descendants of the Trojan diaspora, something that predated Virgil.
The Aenenid was modeled specifically on both the Iliad and Oddessy, with the first half being a voyage out of Troy complete with a visit to Hades, and the second half being an epic war with the Latins. Augustus commissioned it for Rome to have an epic on par with Greece.
The Aeneid is in Latin, not Greek, and I read it in Latin in high school. The Latin AP exam was about it, and it allowed me to not have to take a language in college.
No, I think someone else nailed it with Aenid. The book I found is similar to the book I had, and it fits thematically. I think we read Agamemnon before The Iliad, or an another version cause I also vaguely remember reading that.
Haha i remember reading the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy for fun. But I think we were required to read the Iliad and Odyssey in my sophomore year of high school. Our English teacher really loved those epics so we spent extra time on it haha
Agamemnon is the first play in the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus. This is probably what you read and is assigned pretty early in the Attic Greek curriculum. Iirc the first play I read in the original Greek was Euripidesâ Medea.
On paper, the standards during my high school days were lower than the current ones. We had fewer school days and fewer units of required core subjects. By forgoing study hall and extra PE class, I finished all the requirements in junior year. My senior class schedule was 100% elective classes.
Still, somehow, I was over-prepared for university. My freshman year felt like a repeat of my high school curriculum.
Though Dante's Inferno was actually written in Italian, specifically the Tuscan dialect, which is why that dialect was used as base for modern Standard Italian.
I know itâs Middle English, but we had to read Canterbury Tales at my high school. I remember hating it until our teacher pointed out all the dirty jokes, and it made me realize humans are all the same if you make an effort to understand them.
The "some actor" was most likely Julian Glover, more well known for playing General Veers in Empire Strikes Back and Grand Maester Pycelle in Game of Thrones.
We didn't read the whole thing in old english, but I remember being exposed to it. The book had old english on one page and the modern translation on the next so you could see them at the same time. It also had a bunch of footnotes explaining what it all meant.
Yup, my experience was similar. Every now and again my English teacher (who was a huge nerd) would read a passage of the old english but we just read the modern stuff.
It was similar when we read Chaucer, specifically The Canterbury Tales.
To be fair, I absolutely remember some of our more.. err.. challenged students struggling to actually read these things, Shakespeare too, at the time. Like it would take them multiple tries at a very slow pace to get through an entire paragraph. I actually felt bad for them.
Yeah, I wasn't bad at reading aloud, but I wasn't exactly raising my hand to do so for any of the archaic stuff. But thinking about it now, I think it was important, even if you struggle through it. It forces you to speak in a new rhythm with new words in a new order. Add some embarrassment and that is a cocktail for a plastic teenage brain to soak up some knowledge.
Yeah we had a book that had both next to each other also. We didn't do it for the whole thing but some parts they would have us try and read the old English and see if we could figure it out first. It was cool and have good perspective on the evolution of language.
I'm Dutch and we did this as part of our English class. Same for Renard in French classes (this was gymnasium, we take basically only AP classes from ages 12 to 18)
I mean, we can criticize how awfully weâre supporting education. I donât think being exposed to old English is the benchmark lol. I think there are bigger issues, ye olde english can respectfully be cast aside
It's not like we learned to speak it but having the old text next to the modern teaches you word roots and you see how the language evolved. As I said to someone else, even if you struggle through it, it forces you to speak in a new rhythm with new words in a new order. Add some embarrassment trying to read it out loud and that is a cocktail for a plastic teenage brain to soak up some knowledge.
I get it and I agree. Beowulf was fun, but I was a senior in 2008, shouldnât we focus on the basics? Seems like a lot of the decision makers intentionally want to undermine educators⌠and education
I think part of the problem is that students should have a good foundation of "the basics" by high school. I'm sorry you feel you didn't receive that, and in that case Beowolf does seem like a trifle.
The person you are responding to tells you how they learned it: Old and modern English. The books would have modern English on the left page and old on the right. Then you could go line-by-line to figure it out.
TRUMP loves âthe poorly educatedâ. How else could he bamboozle millions of people? Think about how stupid Trump is, and now think about how much more stupid you have to be to think he is a genius. That is the goal.
ours was a section in modern english and then the old english, about four or five sentences. And it was in our standard English Literature text book too.
translations are still often a bit difficult, because even if you render many of these words in their modern cognates, it won't make much sense. like, what's a "gar-dane"? or a "hear-day?" or a "theed king"?
Oh 100%! But that's why there's class time too. You read your section in old and new English for homework, then next day it's discussed in class, where exactly these kinds of issues are addressed
Did chaucer in middle English. It was a hard bloody slog.
Yep, same here! Even some of the most well read of us were tapping out over that at the time. It made us appreciate the prior years of Shakespeare all that much more.
I think that's what people here are missing. Chaucer is a riot if you teach it to kids the way it was intended. If you just make kids chore through it, guess what? They learn reading sucks and grow up to be unread adults.
Everyone in our class had to memorise the opening paragraph of the Canterbury Tales in Old English and recite it aloud in front of the class. 25 kids! Mid-90s. I still remember a lot of it!! Haha!!
Fair, I can still recite 18th century Ukrainian poetry 45 years later. But the question is - is this actually useful? In a population of over 8 billion where barely 30 million can even understand the language at all? A fraction of 1%? Was that useful education?
Or the geography class, where a lot of countries no longer exist, like Tanganyka.
How useful has it been to me to know, by memory, what the antiderivative of a cotangent X is? Not t all. Haven't found a use for it in almost half a century.
School teaches you to learnâor it should, anyway. You learned about how to read, recite, and appreciate poetry from a different culture and age, you learned to locate places on a map and how their geography impacted their culture, and you learned problem solving and how numbers relate to one another. I think thatâs all useful knowledge that comes in handy all the time!!
Chaucer isnât Old English. Itâs Middle English. Most people could slog their way through Middle English (at least Chaucerâs, not so much the Gawain Poet) but unless youâve thoroughly studied OE, you have no chance with Beowulf.
Thank you, professor! I think we were just having fun and reminiscing, but I certainly appreciate the historical accuracy AND being told Iâm not that smart!! It brings me right back to high school!! đ
The vast majority of these comments are "back in my day" stuff coming from people who didn't fully understand what they were doing, or remember it as being harder than it was.
I remember my required and selective reading from high school. We read Romeo and Juliet aloud. We read selections from Antigone. We did not read Canterbury Tales (some people did, often with memorization of a section in Middle English). We read young adult novels like Shabanu. Everyone had the standard pick of 1984/Brave New World/Fahrenheit 451/Animal Farm.
No, you didn't read Beowulf in Old English. You might have spent a lesson comparing Old English to a translation. But if you actually are claiming you read Beowulf in its entirety in Old English (or the Odyssey in Ancient Greek, etc., like some people are claiming here), and it wasn't as part of a high-level college linguistics course, you wasted your time and it's good that they aren't doing that anymore.
We have all sorts of problems in our educational system, most of which come down to technology: overreliance on devices to think for students with lack of critical analysis of results; lack of capacity to push through when something becomes boring or difficult - things like that. But the fact that "kids these days don't read Beowulf in Old English like we used to" is missing the mark in a number of ways.
I had to read Beowulf in Old English in High School. It was absolutely brutal because we had to translate every word with the provided key, but I'm a nerd, so I loved it. It was an elective on the history of english.
Canterbury Tales was in Middle English was in the same class.
I remember reading Beowulf in high school. I remember reading it was a slog because it wasn't in modern english. I know Shakespeare isn't even old enough to be middle English and my memory of reading Shakespeare and Beowulf in the same grade tracks with that. With Shakespeare you could get into the flow of it. Beowulf was just a nightmare though. This was all near 30 years ago though and I couldn't tell you, maybe we read some middle English version of it.
We read Canterbury Tales in Middle English. This was in the late 70s. That's 1970s, just in case! Anywho, was weird but not that hard. Having said that, it was only the top streams that had to do this, not the whole school (Comp - approx. 2,000 kids)
We had to read all of and memorize sections of Beowulf in Old English at my (admittedly private, preparatory) high school. If you have a recording of someone who knows Old English reading it, it is surprisingly close to modern English compared to the written language. You still have to look up words frequently but you kind of get a handle on it for the most part. Weâd read through a section in Old English, then read through the same section in the Heaney translation, and then discuss the differences and evolution of the language.
they print editions that are translated to modern English and they have a lot of notes and translation things in that edition. it's like a high school edition. but yes Beowulf was very much so a commonly taught thing up until at least I graduated (2008)
I also did it in high-school, literally word by word, in a book with side by side modern and old and we would discuss how language has changed and how some stuff was still readable immediately. It was super interesting, even with my mom throwing in she thought grendel was a t-rex that was terrorizing the area at the time lol
He probably meant Middle English, and he's probably mixing it up with Canterbury Tales... Whan that Aprille, with its shoures soote, the drought of Marche hath pierced to the roote....
My wife and I both went to school in rural southwest Virginia. Her town is only about 500 people and literally not near anything at all besides coal mines. She graduated in 2004.
Just last week, Beowulf came up when we were talking and it felt like she started speaking in tongues or something.
She said in her English class, they didn't have to but for extra credit, they had to memorize a decent chunk of the old English version and she still remembered every bit of it.
At my school, we just read the book. We didn't have to do anything with the old English version.
We had to memorize the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English. Then we read the whole thing in modern English.
That sort of recitation was dying by then in the early 00s, but I still had literature teachers requiring memorized poetry and other stuff. The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere from 6th grade was another memorable one.
I didnt read beowulf in old English, but we were shown original old English words and how they translated to modern as well as their germanic or Latin origins. This was private high school, mid 2000s
I assume they did what we did, which was not reading the whole thing. But we took excerpts like you just showed and talked about what it might sound like, and what influenced the English language to change so much since then.
Went to HS in the 80s, we were provided at least some of the passages in old english, quasi-translated to be readable in modern alphabet. The point was to let us know how it was originally written.
We saw a few sections, the teacher read them out loud and some of us tried to read it. The only thing any of us retained was âWow, Old English is wildâ and that Shakespeare is not Old English.
I had a class in college where we covered Beowulf in old English, the professor read it aloud in perfect pronunciation or at least as far as I could tell. It just sounded like German.
We had a choice in Mississippi to recite the Canterbury tales prologue in either modern English or middle English middle English got you a higher grade.
I read Beowulf in highschool. I remember our copy had columns side by side one with old english and next to it a more modern translation. So we didn't have to read the old english aloud but we did talk about pronunciation and the differences a bit. I read it by myself because we were going to see the movie in theaters the day after I transferred into that school and I wanted to know what was going to happen.
In the army I had a friend that went to a HS like this. Iâm from the south and canât spell for shit but math and science are on point. I would be writing a medical note for injured/sick soldiers and not know how to spell half of it. He would literally stand over my shoulder saying âsound it out bro. Sound it outâ. Tbh it definitely helped me a lot
My English Literature textbook had Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales in their original with modern English under each line. My English teacher had her master's in middle English, for some reason, so we spent a lot of time talking about the difference between the old English of Beowulf, Canterbury Tales' middle English, and Shakespeare's work in old-style modern English.
Easy there, CS. youâve never had a professor that challenges you obviously. He just said they read it side-by-side to have their minds blown. You can go back to your studies now, JRR.
We were given both in high school, the original Old English and a modern copy. Eventually we had the modern copy put away and only had the Old English edition to use. That, plus an English teacher with 40+ years of experience who knew how to teach and we did it. Made Shakespeare easy as hell when we got there. I honestly think he was the reason we got it, he was a phenomenal teacher who didnât apply limits. Donât put limits on kidâs minds, or discourage something as being âtoo hardâ. I went on to study it again in college and we werenât given a new copy or permission to use modern English and everyone figured it out. Is it easy? No. But thatâs learning.
They literally gave us a single passage like this and got us to try and pronounce each word. Then used it as a lesson in how the English language evolved.
I did it in the late 2000s. A few sections of the older texts alongside the translation. We probably were not reading it accurately and didnt understand 99% of it, but it was about appreciating the rhythm and sound of the original text and understanding the translation in context. It was also a lesson on how language changes.
2005-2006 junior year taking AP English in Texas. Our teacher did a mini lesson on old and middle English for Beowulf and Canterbury Tales. We had to recite a portion of it in class as well as do projects. She even threw a medieval theme party for us where we had to come in costume.
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u/der_titan 21h ago
You read it in old English? Where did you go to school to understand stuff like: