What's the Difference between Old English, Middle English and Modern English?

Comments · 1K

• WI

  @wilhelmschmidt7240 · 1 year ago

  "Life win" is a great phrase to bring back.

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• JI

  @jiros00 · 1 year ago (edited)

  This is fascinating. It's amazing how English has changed (often I can only make any sense of Old English using my Norwegian and German).  Put in perspective, modern Greek (say) is much closer to the Greek that was spoken 3,000 years ago than modern English is to English spoken 1,000 years ago. That is despite English people being much more closely aligned DNAwise to their ancestors in England.

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• CA

  @CarolaSiegel · 1 year ago (edited)

  "Wherefore" is nice. There is the German word "Wofür" which in modern language translates as "for what", which is exactly the same as "für was" in Southern German dialects. Fascinating how languages evolved in all directions and regions.

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• JO

  @jordanwhite352 · 1 year ago

  I love how translating Lif Whind as "Life Win" made it automatically sound like Gen Z slang.

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• NE

  @Nekrataal777 · 10 months ago

  I was not erst fain of the historie of the English tongue, yet now am I full willing.

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• RT

  @rtothec1234 · 11 months ago (edited)

  I hear ye old English every day at 2am at the pub.

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• LU

  @lucindagrow1888 · 9 months ago

  great video, interesting that although only around 15% of Old English words made it into our modern English vocabulary, that 15% forms the base of our everyday conversation, making up around 60% of words we actually say and hear.

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• RE

  @rebeccawinter472 · 1 year ago

  It’s always so striking how Brittonic was dominant on Great Britain, even after centuries of Roman rule. And yet was displaced relatively quickly by Germanic languages, which would become Old English (Anglo-Saxon). It raises so many questions - why did Latin not get adopted, but Old English did? What influence did Brittonic have on Old English)

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• RF

  @rfvtgbzhn · 1 year ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8FbXqaOt5g&amp;t=1094">18:14</a> as a native German speaker I have less problems with the pronounciation. It seems that sometimes the vowels in Middle English are pronounced more similar to German than in modern English.

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• PA

  @pandorabryn · 1 year ago

  Old English and Middle English were two of my favorite undergrad classes!❤

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• LE

  @Leodojo16 · 1 year ago

  For anyone wondering about &quot;wherefore&quot; and the others, these are the fossils from old english&apos;s more dynamic pronominal adverbs. German and Dutch still use them dynamically and the nordic languages still use the original words but not dynamically. <br><br>Basically speaking, the rule is: you cannot use What, That and It in conjunction with prepositions. Instead you have to use Where for What, There for That and Here for It.<br><br>What are you afraid of? Here we have What and Of. So by the old rule standard, we must replace What for Where and unite them. -&gt; Whereof are you afraid?<br><br><br>So &quot;Romeo wherefore art thou Romeo&quot;? Would translate to &quot;Romeo, what are you Romeo for?&quot;<br><br><br>Other examples with other prepositions:<br><br>&quot;I&apos;ll take care of that.&quot; -&gt; &quot;I&apos;ll take care thereof.&quot;<br><br>&quot;Think about it, will you?&quot; -&gt; &quot;Think hereabout, will you?&quot;<br><br>&quot;What did you get away with?&quot; -&gt; &quot;Wherewith did you get away?&quot;<br><br>By the way, this last phrase shows that this change must not occur with compound verbs, only with indirect prepositions. So verbs like Wake up, Go down and such, stay the same.

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• AN

  @andreh4eva · 1 year ago (edited)

  As a native portuguese speaker, I was amazed that middle english sounded like a portuguese speaker who doesn&apos;t speak the language but trying to speak it 😂

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