Old English from Kyoto

 Old English is NOT the language of Shakespeare

When you look beyond the "thee" and "thou," Shakespeare's English is actually quite similar to ours Old English is much older—by 1,000 years or more Compare Shakespeare's English with the Old English of King Alfred:

If you go by the sheer quantity of words, most of modern English comes from Latin, mainly through French.

These words are elegant and sophisticated:

-Conflict -Paternal -Veracity The words that come from Old English are simple and direct: -Fight -Father

-Truth

Understanding Old English helps make modern English make more sense:

Are “old wives’ tales” exclusively told by married women?

No. In Old English, the word “wīf” simply meant woman—so old wives’ tales are really tales of old women.

But then something strange happened…

Eventually the word «wife» changed to mean «married woman»

Which is why Old English had to create a new term for «woman» in the general sense

It added the word for «person» («mann») to the end of wīf:

wīf + mann = wīfmann, or, woman.

Old English had many of the strange sounds for which English is known:

-The sound of “th” in “thin”

-The sound of “w” in “water” In fact, modern English is one of the few European languages that preserves the old sound of “w”

In the others, it disappeared or turned into a “v” sound (like the German “w”)

When the Anglo-Saxons adopted the Latin alphabet, there were no symbols for these sounds, since Latin didn't have them.

But the Anglo-Saxon monks had an ingenious solution: they used the ancient runic symbols for the sounds.

For example, the sound we write as “th” was written as “þ”.

The spelling of “th” as “þ” continued until the era of the printing press

English printers used letter types imported from the continent — where “þ” was unknown

The closest letter they had was “y” So “the” was written “ye” — as in “ye olde shoppe”

But it was still pronounced “th”!

The structure of sentences in Old English was different from Modern English — but we still see fossils of it

For example, you can say “I have never done that"

Or you can move the verb “have” to the 2nd position and say: “Never have I done that"

This is exactly how it worked in Old English

Kyoto