Comment by LAC-Tech
2 days ago
I dont think reading will be much easier. A modern English speaker - assuming he is well read, will know things like "sooth", "quoth", "art thou", "ere", "sayeth"... I feel knowing this stuff helps me a lot more than cognates of high german "schön" or "wohnen".
Actually knowing Tolkien well has been helpful because the way he writes is very anglo-saxon, not so even his word choices but just the rhythm or syntax.
But yeah I went into Old English thinking it would be more like German, but really it is much more like English than people think IMO.
> Actually knowing Tolkien well has been helpful because the way he writes is very anglo-saxon, not so even his word choices but just the rhythm or syntax.
In English class at school in Norway, I went through a phase after reading LOTR in Eglish for the first time, where I'd frustrate my teacher by using words that were archaic enough that my teacher had to look them up.
> Old English thinking it would be more like German, but really it is much more like English than people think IMO.
Compare it to Old Norse, and Old Dutch, though, and there are many similarities that stand out. My Norwegian lessons very brief foray into Old Norse definitely made it easier for me to dechipher parts of Old English and Old Dutch (the latter also helped a lot by my halting German). I think a lot of the similarities comes down to learning to recognise a few of the key sound and ortography shifts, at which point they start to look a lot more similar than it looks at first glance.