Because Old English is basically like a foreign language for modern English speakers in all aspects of it, most notably in the grammar structures and vocabulary, if modern English speakers wanted to understand Old English they’d have to study it independently from the beginning and if besides they have some knowledge of German they’d help them to understand it better.
German speakers on the contrary would have much easier to understand Old English without certain help, given that as I previously commented Old English resembled more to modern German on terms of grammar and vocabulary, once I watched a video of Beowulf poem being read and on the comment section I saw that several German speakers have understood part of most part of the poem without so much difficulty.
Proto- Germanic definitely would be completely unintelligible for both modern English speakers and German speakers not even for the rest of modern Germanic languages’ speakers given that Proto- Germanic is actually a reconstructed language given that it didn't have written records originally and if it had been the case where it would have had originally written sources, it would be incomprehensible for all the speakers of contemporary Germanic languages without translation, given that Proto- Germanic was much more conservative in all their structures and core of it, very few modern Germanic languages have preserved heavily the grammar and structures of Proto- Germanic, being the most notable Icelandic.
No comments:
Post a Comment