Would anyone like to guess what this is?
Ǽġhwá heafst engel, helm se ús weardaþ. Wé ne cnáwen wæstm þæt híe ġetácnaþ. án dæġ, eald wer. Æfterra dæġ, lýtle mǽden.
Ac ne lǽten híwas ne beswiċen þé. Híe mæġe swá grimm swá æniġ draca. Ġíet hér híe ne sindon éower beadan
ġefeohtan, ac of éower heortan hwisprian.
Reccan þæt hit is ús. Ǽlċ ús se lá ríċe þǽm
woruldas þá wé scieppaþ.
I am a simple soul and like straightforward talking.
I read what Bowerthane wrote and wondered what he is going on about. My best guess was religion.
I read Linden's reply and became even more confused.
I went onto Linden's link and decided I must be going completely mad.
Can someone explain it all to me in very simple language?
Thank you Linden.
I basically agree with your translation.
The rest is outside my experience.
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an automated translation ... would not call it a translation
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I’d rather posters showed me the mistakes than told me, Linden. Seeing it with fresh eyes here on the Gegaderung, I thought you meant I’d goofed by not realising that anything ending in -hwá can only be an interrogative pronoun in Old English. But now I get my finger out to check properly, in my Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer not contradicted in my Old English Grammar by Joseph and Elizabeth Wright, the Pronouns section of the former says here under Indefinite, “The interrogatives hwá, hwelċ, &c, are used also in the sense ‘any(one)’, any(thing)’.” Which also explains what I thought I was doing by ‘analysing’, as Steven Pinker puts it, ǽġhwá as a singular ( defined as “each one, every one” by my The Student’s Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon by Henry Sweet, too) and therefore declining habban in the singular.
But I don’t pretend to be infallible and I’d be glad to learn the normative way of saying “Everyone verbs” if I’ve succeeded only in blinding myself. I do remember giving up in exasperation when poring through my many and various samples of original Old English, failing to find an exemplar, and falling back on syntactic dead-reckoning in just this manner.
There was certinaly nothing automated about my translation. Its faults will be those of limited time and patience, bearing in mind I have a living I’m supposed to be earning.
By the way, my machine won’t let me put macrons over æ and y, so I plump for acute accents here only for consistency’s sake.
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The moral right of the author to be identified as a crude racial stereotype of a Fenlander has been asserted.