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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.
