Can Modern English Speakers Understand Old English? | Language Challenge | Feat. Eadwine

It would be nice if you could see a complete translation of the descriptions

As a Low German speaker this was actually pretty easy. I got so many words that neither a High German speaker nor especially an English speaker would have caught onto.

I don't think I've ever heard Old English spoken. It sounds like a completely different language. I wonder if our current modern English will sound just as foreign to those 1000 years from now.

My sis was taking a literature class for college. She was reading something in old English and was struggling, having to sound out the words. She got stuck and kept repeating two over and over. My son, two years old, looked at her, listening. He went up and pointed at his eye and said, “Me oy.” He was right, lol.

Absolutely hilarious that the New Yorker heard "thousands of them in the night sky" and thought airplanes instead of stars. Hard to think of a city that has worse light pollution than the one with giant lightup billboards going 24/7

As a Dutch speaker who also speaks Low German, this is actually quite easy. I had the first one without help from the text.

Now the real question is can Old English speakers understand Modern English?

For a language that is 1573 years old, parts of it are surprisingly comprehensible!

i'd like to see how a Danish, Norwegian or Icelandic speaker would do - old english is far closer to these than modern english

Eadwine here! Thank you Norbert for having me on your channel, I had a lot of fun!

Lol…thousands of things in the sky at night geez could it possibly be stars?! I’m sitting here screaming STARS!!

This was a pleasant surprise from the Youtube algorithm! I wish Eadwine would create a Duolingo course for Old English.

Being German this sounds a lot like Plattdeutsch or even Dutch, both being Friesian languages/dialects. Some of what you spoke I heard as a child in the 50's in Barrow in Furness, they had a broad Lancashire dialect and used words that were unknown in London, even the pronounciations were different. Just love listening to the odl dialects, am now 72, but you never stop learning.

Fun fact : "Kaiser" is in fact related to the word "Caesar" (same for "caser" in Old English). The name "Caesar" was used by pretty much all Roman emperors, in honor of the first emperor, Augustus Caesar (who got his name from Julius Caesar), and thus, in some languages, became the word for "emperor". In Classical Latin, the "C" was pronounced hard like a "K", so it was a lot closer to the modern German pronunciation. Interestingly, "Caesar" also became the words for "emperor" in the Slavic languages (Russian "царь", which "tsar" comes from, or Polish "cesarz").

Old English sounds so good! I love the rolling of the "r".

It's amazing how English developed to become a universal language used or understood by almost everyone!

The word blēo strikes again! I remember seeing it in one of the previous OE videos on this channel. It has no cognates in any of the most widely spoken Germanic languages today. Also, it's fascinating how the first challenge was the most difficult for me…really goes to show that once your ears become attuned to the sound correspondences, it becomes MUCH easier to follow along.

I was impressed how much I could 'guess' with my smattering of Swedish. This is fun!

I teach English for children here in Brazil, and once, we had to present some work about Middle Age churches in England. They found a text in old English, but I couldn't help them with its reading. Hehehe We had fun, but it was a hard work for all of us. Great channel! Congratulations!

As a (Swiss) german speaker who also knows English and some Swedish and Norwegian I did understand some things. I had almost no chance understanding it by just listening, but with reading I could work with my German and English knowledge to guess what it is. Swedish & Norwegian weren‘t that helpful, but German helped a lot.