Dreamt I was translating a post (something along the lines ‘old age is awesome’???) but posted it…

oldenglishtextposts:

oldenglishtextposts:

Dreamt I was translating a post (something along the lines ‘old age is awesome’???) but posted it too early so I just wrote the modern english again (not something I do when actually translating) and @cryptotheism reblogged it before I could edit it to do the actual translation. People in the tags assumed it was because the old english was exactly the same as the modern. I was so embarrassed

ALT

oh wait this is a fun question

thanks to the great vowel shift i think you would be hard pressed to find many words that are pronounced exactly the same (there probably are some, just not many) but there are enough that are spelled the same to make a couple sentences. so. here is a preliminary list of words spelled exactly the same in modern and old english:

old/modern english words

i know i’m missing a lot of words, especially nouns and adjectives, and i will keep adding. feel free to suggest favorites

some caveats:

• old english didn’t have especially consistent spelling, but if i can find at least one example of a word being spelled the standard modern way, i think that should count. the ancestor of the modern word well (the adverb) is almost always spelled wel, but there is an example sentence in the dictionary where it’s spelled , so i’ll count it.
• old english has a lot more morphology (suffixes, essentially) than modern english, so a lot of words will only work in very specific situations. for example we is the same in both, but oe verbs with we as the subject have endings that will make them very different from the modern forms. so we is the same in modern and old english, but you would be hard pressed to actually use it in a sentence
• because of that, I’m only going to include verbs that work for 3rd person indicative. first and second require pronouns in modern english and there aren’t any that would look the same. also there are some that have subjunctives that look modern but modern subjunctives work differently enough that i’m going to ignore them. i suppose there are some imperatives that would work that i’m not including. but ah well.
• be mindful of case. nouns will only be spelled the same in both languages in certain contexts, which i’ve put in the grammar notes. i’m not going to explain how case works here because that would take way too long, but you can look it up
• adjectives look different based on the nouns they’re modifying. make sure to keep case and gender in mind. i didn’t include any weak forms because i’m guessing there are very few that look like modern english, and you probably won’t need them anyways. just don’t put any adjectives after posessive adjectives or genitive noun phrases
• i’m ignoring vowel length because i’m sticking to just spelling, not pronunciation

anyways. send me your best short fiction that’s grammatical in old and modern english