Old texts in vernacular Old and Middle English have long fascinated me. Written in a language that has long disappeared, they transport us back in time and allow us to glimpse at what common people might have sounded like. There are many translations of such texts, some excellent, some lacking. But few translations translate those texts from spoken, informal Old and Middle English to spoken, informal Modern English; so out of curiosity I decided to do just that.
Translating to informal Modern English turned out to be challenging in the sense that some sentences had to be rearranged making a word-for-word translation impractical. I took some liberties rearranging said sentences, but I think the result conveys the same meaning the original intended to. Note that this was an unaided translation. I decided to post this under Old English because the Peterborough Chronicle is a document that shows the transformation of the language from Old to Middle English. It is a fascinating document invaluable to the study of the English Language.
I begin this experiment with the first page of the Peterborough Chronicle (the Anglo-Saxon chronicle) written in the Old and early Middle English period. The manuscript, Laud Misc. 636 is located in the Bodleian Library in the University of Oxford. The scanned copy that I used is currently under Public Domain.
Translating to informal Modern English turned out to be challenging in the sense that some sentences had to be rearranged making a word-for-word translation impractical. I took some liberties rearranging said sentences, but I think the result conveys the same meaning the original intended to. Note that this was an unaided translation. I decided to post this under Old English because the Peterborough Chronicle is a document that shows the transformation of the language from Old to Middle English. It is a fascinating document invaluable to the study of the English Language.
I begin this experiment with the first page of the Peterborough Chronicle (the Anglo-Saxon chronicle) written in the Old and early Middle English period. The manuscript, Laud Misc. 636 is located in the Bodleian Library in the University of Oxford. The scanned copy that I used is currently under Public Domain.
The island of Britain is 800 miles long, and 200 wide. There are on this island five kinds of people: The English, the Britons, the Welsh, the Scots, the Picts, and the Latin. The first guys were the Britons who came from Armenia, and set themselves up towards the south of Britain. And then it happened that the Picts came from south Scythia with long ships, but not a lot. First they got to Northern Ireland, and there they told the Scots that they were gonna settle there no matter what. But the Scots weren’t gonna take any of that, so they said: “that ain’t gonna happen, but we can give you some tips. There’s another island east from here, you can set yourselves up there if you feel like it. And if someone comes over and starts some beef we’ll give you a hand.” So the Picts took off and joined this land northward. Southward was owned by the Britons, like we’ve said. And the Picts took some Briton wives, on the condition that they picked their king from the women, like they’d been doing forever. And then it happened that as years went by some Scots went from Ireland to Britain under their leader, a guy named Roda. From then on, they got the name Dalriada.