How to learn Old English from scratch (and why you should!) 

It is insane how ... recognizable the Old English Lord's Prayer is, like yes, "Fæðer Ūre" is obviously "Our Father", or how "hlāf" could obviously be "loaf", or "gehālgod" is obviously "ge-hallowed", it feels easy to read most of þeir uuords as still intelligbly modern Ænglish but with a heavy accent

The more I read and read about the history of English and which languages have come in contact with each other, the more I feel like I’m reading old Norse/Icelandic (not the runic type). Language is FASCINATING

I'm from East Anglia, Suffolk, Gippeswic(Ipswich), and extremely proud of my local history and culture and I really do wish we learned Anglo-Saxon at primary school and we based it as our first language

This is a good way to approach Old English, by reading something familiar.

Oh my God !! Thank you so much, it's much more comprehensible now ❤

12:30 I think 'rīce' does actually have a descendant in modern English, which is reach. German 'Reich' itself simply means reach as well, though it's used as a noun

Thank you for this. I got interested in Old English after learning Anglish for some time, and I've found it to be very hard to get into. There are resources, but they're very academic.

Thanks. I took a class on the history of the English language and the daily prayer was the first thing we had to translate lmaooo. but its easier when you know German, we were able to comprehend a whole lot more than a native English speaker.

As someone learning Gàidhlig (Scots Gaelic) I think everyone should learn their ancestors language. I'm a Hiberno-Norse/Anglo-Scot American, and once I learn Gàidhlig and Irish, I'm moving to Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and then Welsh, Cornish and Breton. We need to do our best to keep these old languages alive.

Old English should be taught in schools.

30:28 The irony is that in Welsh ac = 'and' & ond = but whereas in Old English ac = but and ond = and.😆👍👏👏👏👏👏

Sir thank you so much 🙏 old English is my favorite language and by far the most beautiful. You are a god send

Thank you Colin this is the best lesson you are a great teacher thank you so much

Great video Colin. 👍

"Some small inerest,"? Simply put, YES! Count me in! Subscribed.

Came here to stay that. I just started reading Beowulf first before coming here to get some help on better understanding it 😅

old englisch ist very close to german. indeed more closer to frisian. the compatibility range is like this: proto-germanic -> german -> dutch -> frisian & old-english. frisian an old-english are so close, you could mean, both are dialects to each other. as a native german speaker, i understood really much of it. if i here some dutch or frisian i also understand very much of what they say. it is possible, if these language-speakers are slowly, to communicate in a very good way. but english today, its also very close to the germanic languages, but the vocabulary is a bit the problem. lots of daily words are very close like nearly the same. a german is able to understand english, also the person doesn't know any english, because of very similar words like: do, you, and, in, on, to, into, onto, make, feel, say, read, speak, speach, light, white, blue, green, orange, come, go, will, stay, see, sea, wonder, street, heaven, hell, day, night, year, minute, second, word, wild, wind, hot, warm, warn, address, sight, land, lay, lie, sit, seat, best, old, new, shine, fine, book, way, live, have, had, must, can, could, shell, should, yes, no, not, mouth, world, room, thing, think, drink, bring, sing, sink, loud, wave, help, hold, house, household, hand, finger, mouse, kiss, love, friend, young, mother, father, brother, sister, grandfather, grandmother, mom, heal, health, good, god, satan, wood, stone, steal, board, glas, gas, wide, ship, heart, hard, allow, follow, borrow, fox, horse, cow, fish, happy, here, hair, there, that, the, this, these, those, dozen, dozens, what, water, cable, soldier, park, hundred, ton, number, name, pair, all, such, stick, lips, long, wate, round, rise, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, he, she, it, him, her, we, us, they, them, nature, and so on... the most words ending with "ness", like: wildness, happiness the most words ending this "ship", like: friendship, relationship, readership there also lot of latin & greek word, entered all the germanic languages that help us to understand each other: the most words ending with "logy" like technology, biology, geology, cosmology, archeology and ending with "dy" like tragedy, comedy, trendy or words ending with "ture" like adventure, architecture, gesture, tresure, lecture or words ending with "ion" like installation, communication, vision, abstraction, attension, television, collection, connection, ... or words ending with "ve" like relative, archive, collective lot of combined words like: household, busstop, airplane, water-melone and lot of common known very close sounding words like: family, team, company, star, abstract, planet, meteor, astroid, line, online, internet, continent, tropic, economy, university, travel, trip, energy, country, shop, store, computer, mobile, air, nice, beautiful, liter, meter, gram, zone, location, debate, and so on ... The english "ing" is in a similar way available in german as "ung" and means a nominative. but for us german speakers, it helps to understand a bit of what an english cognate says. german to english: bildung -> education beschäftigung -> business, work, doing someting endung -> ending, the end, the end of something trennung -> separation betrachtung -> consideration übenachtung -> overnight stay übersetzung -> translation english to german: ending -> Endung, das Ende, Abschluss, Schluss educating -> to educate considering -> all in one, actually working -> to work translating -> to translate in short: a german can understand tons of english, when the person communicates slowly or read an english text. but not all, because there are lot of words to, germans not using. but a dutch speaker is able to understand twice or tripple more than a german speaker. and a frisian speaker will understand also twice or more than a dutch speaker. related to old english, a german or a dutch, and of course frisian, will understand definitely more than understanding modern english. i think its more complicated for modern english speakers to learn old english and or dutch, frisian and or german. i think, english speakers have it harder than us. for us german speakers, the modern english sounds more like a creole language that lost lost of its grammer and nature. its more like a puzzle-block language. it is understandable, but not really flexible to describe something like in the germanic languages. It's like a modular language that works more with templates rather than offering linguistic flexibility. Many things cannot be described well in English. You have to form more long sentences or use a lot of foreign words. and even then English is often imprecise and you can understand it either way.

This is awesome I think I really learned a lot! Thanks!!

Really love these sessions on RU-vid. Wish I could afford to join your course.

Amazing video, thanks

You started off with the Lord’s Prayer and mentioned Beowulf, I’m having fun!

I watch this video almost daily and a few more of your videos. They are so helpful. I'm wanting to save up some $$ to take you course. I'm learning all of this by myself. I feel like I'm in an echo chamber and want correction.

Thanks!

Cognates of "Costnunge" survive in the modern and literary words "Accost" and "Costen"

Hi Colin! Great video! Where can I buy a copy of your lingua anglica antiqua per se illustrata?

Aggravation point: the word "rīċe" does survive into modern English. It's the direct ancestor of "rich," as in "wealthy." This is evident in phrases such as "a king's riches." "Riches" would be land in those days, which would be the kingdom. It's also related to Latin "rex" through a common root in PIE, though it appears both Latin and Germanic languages got it from proto-Celtic *rixs

Wes hāl, Colin!

i did a dna test that told me (im british by the way) im 98.5 % English decent my direct ancestors would have been speaking this old english so now im super interested to learn ! lol if not just to screw with my american friends when i say im speaking English lol

Yay dramatic reading!

Reach is cognate with riche. Reach, meaning, distant land, as in The Reach, in Skyrim.

I LOVE it! I'm super interested in this, and just a bit further modern. It sounds quite a bit Germanic. Good day -- survived into Australian. I'm doing this with the spelling of Wycliffe right now. Currently trying to get what "hilid aboute" is from Revelation 4:4. Of course I get about.

My native tongue is modern English; I studied Spanish, German and Latin. The latter two added to the first help me considerably in understanding Old English, though the orthography will require significant effort. When I was in graduate school we had to demonstrate a comprehension of written Chemical German, and the people who tried to do it from a dictionary alone were very much at sea--- in large part because the dictionary entry would often be a different inflection than the word used in a sentence. Not being able to recognize the root of the word used in a sentence and what part of speech it was (verb, noun, adjective etc.) one couldn't find it in a dictionary. One interesting source of latinate words in modern English are those that were brought from Europe by the Anglo-Saxons, who borrowed them there before spreading to Britain. Ones that occur to me at the moment are "pillow," "chest" (the wooden storage box), and "street," but there are others as well. It is interesting that the Old English pronunciation of the digraph nowadays written as "wh" despite being pronounced "hw" persists in most of North America but is now in much of England pronounced as "w." Thus "Which witch did whine about the wine" sounds very much like "Wich wich did wine about the wine." People who study such things assure us that natives in the area where I have lived the past forty-odd years use the same sound for the "i" in "pin" and the "e" in "pen," but I have never perceived that; presumably the context informs my perception. I have been at some pains in recent years to un-merge the vowel sounds in "Mary," "marry," and "merry," which in my native speech are all pronounced as "merry." Good fun, that, even though it seems to pass unremarked by those with whom I speak. I wish there were an Old English textbook based largely on things other than Christianity and highly evolved poetry, i.e. "Beowulf." Maybe there is--- histories would be a good source of material. I can read Middle English (e.g. Chaucer) fairly well if I just don't worry about the orthography and let the pronunciation do as it will. The US president Andrew Jackson is quoted as saying "It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."

bishopric is the only word I can think of with vestiges of the word "rice" left in it - as in "bishop's domain"

Having studied modern German for several years back in the day I easily spot the influence of Old High German from which English is allegedly derived. Word spellings and pronunciations get slurred over time but when you see and hear a word you can get a sense of what it changed from or into. Some of the German influences I see are: use of the prefix ge which usually is attached to a verb to show it's used as a past participle. We use this in modern English as the verb prefix "a" as in affirm, afix, alight. Simple words like English us is uns in German and our is unser. Rice was pointed out to mean reich or rule (as in domain or kingdom). Gewerpe may be from werden (become) with ge attached. Evil is teuflisch which comes from Teufel (devil, which has evil in its name). I also see some Latin as with suffixes um and dum (from dom). In Latin um is the neuter gender suffix for nouns and dom is generally a state of existence as in domain, dominion or kingdom.

As a German who learns this in Uni I have 3 weeks to catch up 😂

I love reading english literature, but most of the time dont understand the dialogues enhanced between characters due to complex slangs and grammar. So most of the time I end up giving up before I even start. Can someone help😢

Do you have any suggestions of good dictionaries of Old English?

Any recommendation on where i could learn this via zoom call as i learn much better once shown. Than i do from a price of paper

Is there much material surviving in Mercian?

Is the version of weorthan in the past subjunctive with an ash and not a dental consonant something dialectic? I wouldve expected weorthan to be conjugated as wurde and not wurthe.

Wiktionary gives "rich" as being from "rice" (and French borrowed the same from Frankish, so it kind of merged)

What is there that can be read in Old English? I’d love a reference to a list of Old English material. Also, does there exist material that one can buy in paper format? I imagine it’s very limited. Can you even buy Beowulf printed in Old English, or is it all really just online?

If I wanted to learn all variations of English. As in learning from Modern English to Old English. Would you recommend I start with old English? Or work my way backwards from modern english

Why is it not "thin naman" considering nama is a weak declension and should be naman in the accusative singular? Is it because in subjunctive sentences the object is kept nominative?

10:45 sounds like the letter, "ы" in Russian. Also, Russian has accusative/cases setup that remind me of Old English.

I’m Finnish so I had to learn Swedish and I’ve also studied German & lived in Germany. Weirdly knowing English, Swedish amd German I get something out of Old English 😂

All I know about old English so far is the age of empires villagers always say something like “yaru te work” or “workende” lol I didn’t realize it was a totally different language until I played this game I thought they spoke like Shakespeare

Rice...what about "realm" as a cognate?

Why the might we not speak like such amazing sophisticated

Wes þu hal Colin! Gif þu me hwæt secgean meaht þanne gladie ic. Ic swa swa em-Engliscsprecend and -tæcend hæbbe swa swa þu hæfst þone willan, þæt Englisc syg eaþe to leornienne.

I don't understand part about lack of books for learning Old English. There are many resource available (grammars, primers, readers), some are around 100 years old and most of them can be found dirt cheap in good condition.

I never caught the "why" part... Don't get me wrong I'm interested, just wondered what reason he'd give

Connection between "alies" and "allay?"

´´swa swa´´ Made me breakdance :Þ

Old English sounds way better than modern English

Yes, I am from the future. How did he know?

If this is old English, can you tell me what the 1560 Geneva Bible is written in? Thank you in advance.

Anyone know of a good and affordable old english dictionary?

Old-english also has Hindi & Arabic fragments Old norse is Actually ancient Russian........ Yes that's true

Gesawe ic seo Sunne.

The easiest way to learn Old English is first learn Low German or Dutch. Then its much easier

I really want someone to forgeef me my guilties too

North East England South Scotland

Duolingo sucks. They started using stars for each lesson. I ran out of stars and can’t continue . So I cancelled my account.

Im a fangil of Collin ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡ he is just so cool and awesome ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡ i should start a fan page haha jk jk jk

I came here trying to figure out what the hell my villagers were saying in Age of Empires IV… plz help

I have a southern accent that I can't shake at the present. Is the accent that is important? I'm STRUGGLING rolling my stupid Rs, too. Ughhh!! Lol

rīc̊e, and by extension, Reich, are cognate to riches.

Tha shud goa an listen to broad Yorkshire folk spayk, I reckon at you'd be fayr capped . You should go listen to the Yorkshire people speak, I think that you would be confused.

old english sounds elvish

Old English=gehalgod Modern German=geheiligt Circumfixation and the great vowel shift.

No again PU You Thou .. th is runic letter for Thor. So progression was Thi'ew.. thow... thou

Came here from eldenring

Byddaf yn dinistrio'r Ddraig Wen hon.🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 v 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🐉😄

wyrþe þanc

As someone relives past lives in my dreams, The old English is being pronounced too much in a Roman way. Ure/OUR is not oo-ray sounded more like "ore". Most Angle/Saxon were gruff, Pagan and germanic. If you talked like that in a time machine they cut your head off for being a Latin spy. Also no disrespect just academic curiosity

Can we not have English speaking 'old English'? It's all Yanks!!! It does not compute