#medieval languages

[medievalistsnet]

Old High German Workshop - November 8th

Old High German Workshop

This one-day workshop is devoted to exploring the diverse texts and genres that make up the vibrant yet circumscribed body of Old High Germa

[baudouinette]

“Vos veez, il n'apartient à nul d'entre nos de choisir sa fin”

“Un roi puet déplacer un home,”

had to make that first gif bc he’s just too absolutely adorable God bless his little heart

(this text is transliterated into Old French, so don’t mind the slightly strange spelling)

[margaritiques]

The King [Henry VII], the Queen [Elizabeth of York], and the Prince of Wales [Arthur], are all well, and occupied with nothing else except putting all things in order for the Princess of Wales [Katharine of Aragon]. They have great pleasure in hearing that the Princess Katharine is beginning to speak French. The Queen especially rejoices at the progress the Princess is making in the French language.

On the preparations for Katharine of Aragon's arrival in England, and the pleasure the English Royal Family — Henry VII, Elizabeth of York, and Arthur, Prince of Wales — had in hearing about Katharine of Aragon's progress in learning French, which Katharine had earlier been asked by the English royals to practice with her sister-in-law, Marguerite of Austria (a native French speaker), as to have a language in common with Elizabeth of York and Lady Margaret Beaufort when she arrived in England.

Excerpt from a summary of a letter, written in 1501 by a secretary to Henry VII, to his nephew, who was a clergyman in Spain.

From Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 1, 1485-1509, edited by G. A. Bergenroth, published 1862.

[a-normal-swan]

Wikipedia's front page today is featuring an entry on Old English terms for gender-nonconforming people.

Bæddel[i] and bædling[ii] are Old English[a] terms referring to non-normative sexual or gender categories. They occur in only five med

We have always existed.

[justadram]

Realistically would the nobility have differing accents in each kingdom of westros? Or would the nobility, having been educated by maesters, pronounce and speak similar, and it be the peasantry that accents differ? If not, which kingdom accents do you see as similar to real life ones we have today? I have seen debates over westerlands being German or English but not much on Stormlands or dorne.

To answer the second half of your question first, I have no idea whether a fictional region sharing cultural features with a real life location would also share an accent. Do they speak like the Scottish in the North? Dunno. I'm not a linguist and I dare say we haven't been given quite enough textual evidence. GRRM isn't exactly Tolkien, when it comes to languages. ;) Someone else might know better than me though!

I can speak to Western Europe in the Middle Ages, where we not only have different accents within kingdoms, we have multiple dialects or language groups. And then, yes, you'd also have a difference between peasants and nobility in terms of how they expressed themselves in their regional or city dialect.

England for a big chunk of the Middle Ages had 2 languages--English and Norman French (spoken by the nobility)--due to conquest! Plus, within the English language you had several regional dialects. By the late medieval period, Norman French was being replaced by English amongst the nobility, but you still had dialect diversity. For an example of that diversity, Chaucer wrote in the East Midlands dialect, but he also knew the Northern dialect and some characters speak it within Canterbury Tales. There were 5 dialects in Middle English, 4 in Old English. These dialects were shaped by which Germanic group conquered those areas. Kentish--Jutes & Frisians; West Saxon--Saxon; Mercian--Southern Angles; Northumbrian--Angles. In Middle English, those influences are still holding on, but there are other differences as well. For example, the Northern dialect probably was shaped more so by Norse. Invasion and settlement left a strong linguistic fingerprint.

In the medieval Italian city-states and kingdoms, linguistic development was a little different. Modern Italian is a descendant of a regional dialect: Florentine. You can thank the humanists for that, like Dante, who wrote in Tuscan, and Boccaccio, who wrote the Decameron in Florentine, which is a subset of Tuscan. I think there are somewhere around a dozen sub-dialects within just Tuscan. Throughout Italy, you would have found a multitude of dialects evolved from Latin. There are lots of dialects in Italy!

France had 2 major medieval language subgroups: langue d'oil and langue d'oc. Where these languages were spoken you'd find a pretty significant cultural difference and they were politically not united. Within those 2 groups you then had several dialects. Additionally, you also would find Breton (Celtic) and Germanic dialects.

Langue d'oc dialects are also spoken in certain regions of Spain. "France" and "Spain" didn't exist geographically with the borders we recognize today of course, which explains this. Medieval Spanish kingdoms had a variety of dialects and languages, most of which were Romance languages. There was also Basque and its dialects, which interestingly is pre-Indo European. Today's Castilian (or Spanish) comes from the language of the kingdom of Castile, much like today's Italian comes from Florentine.

Why all this proliferation? Printing standardizes language and Europe was a patchwork of cultures and kingdoms formed by conquering groups, who all contributed to linguistic diversity layered over Latin in most cases. To what degree depended on lots of factors.

With Westeros being pre-printing press, I'd expect variety not just in the pronunciation of language, but also the vocabulary and grammatical structure, which we don't find really. They all speak the Common Tongue. On the other hand, in Westeros, we have waves of invaders, but they more uniformly affect the island, save Dorne, which has a rather unique history and culture as a result. Dorne is the place where I would 100% expect to find a different language or at the very least dialect. Instead, they still speak the Common Tongue with a more pronounced "drawl" or accent.

GRRM can get away with presenting more uniformity in language perhaps with a different kind of history underpinning the kingdoms, but I still would think in a "medieval" world where travel is challenging, leaving populations more in isolation than in the modern era, and pre-printing press, we'd expect to find multiple dialects, never mind different accents, which is still very much the case in the modern world.

As for educated maesters--I don't think they'd bestow unity of speech. Teachers (so, maesters and septas) don't particularly shape our accents. Our parents do. Monks and priests were the teachers of medieval Europe, tutoring the nobility and future kings, and they all (hopefully) knew Latin, and yet, regional languages and dialects persisted.

[willowgast]

Hi, i couldn’t find anything on ur blog about this but sorry if you’ve already answered something similar to it

I love that you’re taking medieval language studies, it’s so unique! I’d love to take courses about that too in the future because it seems really interesting. I’ve never seen anyone study such a niche discipline before—maybe medieval studies for fictional literature, but not specifically medieval languages. May I ask what you plan to do post-university? Like what can you even do/what jobs can you have with that kind of degree?

Have a great day!! :)

Heya, thank you so much for this ask!

It is a very niche field, but my degree/course/whatnot isn’t limited to medieval languages - it’s interdisciplinary and covers a range of aspects of medieval studies. So, I am taking papers in Old Norse (language & literature), Old English (language & lit), Medieval Irish (also both language and lit in combo), Scandinavian History (specifically Viking Age), Old English History (pre-Norman Conquest), and Palaeography & Codicology (studying old manuscripts, handwriting, how they were made, etc.). So it isn’t quite restricted to just medieval languages, but they form a sizeable part of the course and the field is still very niche.

The interdisciplinary aspect does however provide a better foundation for postgraduate options than I think just medieval languages would. People have graduated from my course going into museum work, schools, politics, libraries, even switching fields entirely to do their MA in STEM subjects! Many work in the arts, too, especially theatre and writing (one recent grad works as a playwright and drag king, another is rumoured to use their degree to write gay Odin fanfiction that I’m desperate to track down and see with my own eyes). Studying medieval literature attracts a lot of creative types, so that isn’t too surprising! A few others have gone into archaeology (in my course, we can borrow a paper from the university’s archaeology department in our second year), and some more have switched to modern languages for MA and gone into translation and interpretation work. One of my friends has plans to get into the publishing industry, and another is interested in journalism! The biggest field for alumni, though, is to just stay in academia - my department is tiny, so all the undergrads, master’s students, PhDs, and lecturers are on close-knit terms with one another, and a great many of the older department members just stuck around after finishing their undergrad course here. Four of my lecturers are graduates of this particular course/department, three of whom were all in the same cohort together and two of them now married to each other, and loads of the PhD students did either their undergrad, MA, or both here. Personally, my main plan is to just remain in academia, probably specialising in something to do with Old Norse literature or Scandinavian history. There’s a really great two-year MA course in Iceland that I’ve considered applying for (although I’m still only in my first year, I have a fair bit of time to go yet before I settle on a plan!), but that’s open to change, and academia definitely isn’t the only thing I’m interested in. Journalism and work in a library or museum have both appealed to me in the past and I may yet decide to go into one of them instead!

I hope that this has helped somewhat to give an idea of what kind of work is available with a degree in this field - it’s mostly confined to work in the arts, academia, education, and culture & heritage, but those are all fields that appeal to me, so I’m quite content with my future prospects even if I don’t currently know quite what I’m going to do. Finally, here is a link to the careers page on my department’s website, which has some links to profiles of past students and a list of past PhD graduates & what they’ve been getting up to in the academic world.

Hope you’re having a great day!

[alfredthesomewhatmediocre]

22/07/20 - Long Vac - Week [?/?]

Old Norse is hard but at least the textbooks are aesthetic?? (that the quad is gorgeous goes without saying)

[baudouinette]

@aurianavaloria and I talking abt Old French

old French playlist