I've said this a few times, but I feel compelled to say this again. I think if you're going to mess with the orthography of Old English to make it easier to read - writing standardized old English, substituting w for wynn, expanding the crossed thorn and other short forms, replacing the tironian nota with 'and/ond', indicating vowel length with macrons - you might as well use the eth and thorn according to the Modern Icelandic practice in order to aid the reader/learner with the postulated pronunciation. Otherwise, why not just print the text in Beowulf font with the 'accents' where the manuscript has them.

reiðr var þa Ving þor er han vaknaði
ok um sins hamars of saknaði

Wessex Woman, perhaps I wasn't clear. I was a bit rushed and pre-occupied as I was typing my post. I wasn't saying that the hunter gatherers couldn't count, I was saying that they didn't and didn't have number systems to represent numbers. Also, this is still up in the air. Some linguists have taken issue with the chap who has studied the Piraha, and languages which previously had been described as only having numbers up to three are being looked at again. Ability to learn to count does not necessarily mean that one does count. I recently taught a student in his 40s who had learnt to read over the two years prior to taking my course.


As interesting and compelling as animals counting and doing addition and subtraction is, (and it is fascinating, as is research around chimps and parrots learning language) I think there is far better evidence that people from hunter gatherer societies can count, and that is that people from other societies can count, and the fact that many people who've been assimilated from hunter gatherer societies into other societies use number systems. In fact, unless I'm mistaken, I believe there are languages that take their number systems from colonial languages: Portuguese, Spanish, English.


Technically, this discussion is off topic but I raised it because I believe it makes some important points pertinent to the discussion of whether proto-literate English had a written number system.


All people can read and write, whether that be pictographs, ideographs, syllaberies or alphabets, or a mixture of two or more of them. It's just that for most of human existence, no one did. Whether people write or not and, in this case, whether people have a written number system is a question answered by whether or not these things have a utility. Did the proto literate English need to visually represent numbers? A bit of wandering around the net has dug up a source that says that the Norse writing in runes mainly represented numbers by either writing out the whole word, or by representing it by the first letter of the number word, which is similar to what the ancient Greeks did. I would imagine that the proto literate AS did similar, but I cannot find anything that supports this guess. A further guess is that I would imagine if there was a native written number system, we'd know about it. The New Age people would have been all over that stuff.

I think I have seen this semicommunication in action. I went to the Roskilde rock festival in '99, and in speaking to Danes one of my friends spoke Swedish slightly slower and more clearly than he normally would and used some archaic words and some Swedish dialectal words. Likewise the Danes spoke slightly slower and more clearly than they normally would.


I think a possible problem here, certainly a problem for me, is one of terminology and nomenclature. It's easy to decide to believe that a pre-conquest Englishman could talk to a Frisian, or an Old Low Franconian speaker, even an OHG speaker, but with a Norse or proto norse speaker it's harder to believe as linguists have defined the languages in question as belonging to different sub families.


I got the Heliand a while back, and after a while trying to get used to the whacked out spelling, was able to read it fairly easily with just my knowledge of OE. I can read only the simplest ON. The decision to start learning ON, however, was prompted not by visions of Kirk Douglas in a horned hat, but by the knowledge that I'd already done over half the work of learning the language by learning OE.

Woh! Don't get me wrong. I wasn't saying that I think English is a Scandinavian language. I just like that the considerable Norse influence is being recognized, in typical style these days, by saying something outrageous. The Frisian dialect still spoken in Denmark is apparently showing very Danish features.

Here is an article that counters the statement that English is a Scandinavian language - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4351

(I can't do hyperlinks apparently).

Huzza!
I really liked Sigurd and Gudrun, and I liked the Alliterative Morte D'arthur. I also have a fondness for Tennyson's Idylls of the King. So this is up my street shouting in my letterbox. It'll be nice to read this poem.  It's also quite fun that it's the story of Arthur written in the metre and the language used by his enemies.

Thanks Iohannes. I "did" Beowulf at university (in 1997). I found it very gnarly in Old English and quite strange in translation, perhaps because Modern English positively reeks of the Augustan poets, Shakespeare, and the King James bible. Maybe it's the thrill of being able to read it comfortably in Old English, but it rocks in Old English. It would seem that Old English poetry loses an awful lot in translation. I've always got that impression.

Another interesting thing to do after a long period of Old English study is to revisit middle English. I recently read Gawain and the Green Knight. I found it very difficult at University, after hitting the Old English particularly hard, it was quite easy all apart from the hunting scenes, and I couldn't make them out in the translation.

Another "Old English cheat" is reading early middle English. It's old English vocabulary without much of the declensions.

"Thou" as a signifier of social relationship can be fairly confusing, but thou descends from old English 'þú' which signified one person being addressed rather than a cocktail of social status and intimacy. Swedish had a similar problem with the words 'er' (gé) and 'du' (þú). Instead of getting rid of 'du' they brought it back to its original meaning of 2nd person singular. I believe this was heavily influenced by use within the social democratic movement. Anyway, we now have no way of distinguishing whether 'you' refers to singular or plural other than context. Speaking a variant of English that doesn't have thee or thou, I don't particularly miss it, but a part of me would like to have it and 'git' back. I seem to remember reading that some variants of English are constructing forms to differentiate you plural from singular - 'youse' and 'y'all' being examples of relatively new 2nd person plural forms.