Ye knowe ek that in forme of speche is chaunge
Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so…
(Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde Book II, ll. 22-25)
Pedagogically, the beginning lessons of our primer emphasize short sentences with straightforward meaning and vocabulary, and uncomplicated grammar: for example, simple predicate nominatives, intransitive verbs, and direct actions. This is comparable to the beginning lessons found in curricula such as the Cambridge Latin Course. However, something which the study of Old English uniquely offers for Modern English speakers, in a way that is not quite true of Latin (or at least, not quite true in the same way), is direct cognates of the most common, everyday lexical items in the language. Latin does, of course, provide the English-speaking student with a vast number of etymological cognates. However, these are often words which are less “basic,” words of a relatively higher or rarer linguistic register (which of course is its own virtue) – Modern English “regal” from rex, regis as opposed to Modern English “king” from cyning illustrates this point nicely.
Our early lessons therefore take advantage of this relative transparency between Old and Modern English words. By starting out with vocabulary such as cyning, cwen, nama, or god which are (once the student has learned the meaning, if not before) more-or-less opaque in their relationship to Modern English, we aim to encourage prospective students who may not have much (or any) formal grammar-based or language-learning educational backgrounds. We want, in short, to not “scare off” interested learners of Old English. In our ultimate conception of this digital primer, learners will, by the final lessons, be reading actual Old English poetry and prose, but the primer will take them there step-by-step; the heavy reliance on obvious cognates at an early stage offers us a unique “edge” in this regard.
Besides the utilitarian function outlined above, it should also be mentioned that one of the charms of learning Old English for an Anglophone lies in the interplay or juxtaposition of the old and the new, and the faintly recognizable link between the two. In fact I would say that it is often so compelling as to be one of the very impulses that leads curious students to Old English. From even casual conversations held with other individuals, and from discussions observed on various Internet forums, it seems apparent that there is quite considerable interest in (and questions about) the origins and history of English, and in old forms of common English words. And as the oldest recorded form of the language, Old English seems especially enticing to many.
Again, in my experience, what often intrigues and motivates people is this tension between the native and familiar on the one hand, and something similar yet strange on the other. There is something oddly exciting, perhaps even uncanny, about observing pairs of Old and Modern English words which are clearly “the same” on some level, but also utterly different. (Evidently Jakob Grimm recalled a similar sensation upon first witnessing medieval German, when he was a young student studying law – though not for much longer after that!) At some level, the study of Old English is intriguing because it involves a process of defamiliarization, taking a vernacular which is common and completely taken-for-granted in its usage, and suddenly putting it into a new light. The early emphasis in our primer on sentences with recognizable vocabulary elements – He is god cyning or Se cnif is scearp – speaks also, I believe, to this aspect of Old English study which so many find attractive and compelling.
Of course, when speaking of verbal developments of Old to Modern English, one neglects the matter of semantics at one’s peril, and there is the old, familiar problem of etymological “false friends” – those semantically misleading items such as dom, cræft, wann, and all the rest. In my next post I’ll discuss some of the ways our digital primer intends, structurally, to deal with these for the novice student, and ways in which the digital medium is especially advantageous and well-suited for this procedure. I’ll also discuss ideas about how the digital medium might allow us to build in further etymological information regarding words with not-so-obvious, or fossilized, cognates (e.g. OE wer, ModE “werewolf”), and how the medium allows ways which interact with the lessons but also remain distinct from them, facilitating greater learner autonomy.