Omniglot - the blog

Language quiz

Simon on 28 Apr 2007

Language and Quiz questions | Comments (11)

11 Responses to “Language quiz”

1. Stephen on 28 Apr 2007 at 6:55 pm #

   Some Germanic language…Frisian? Faroese? I recognize the th’s, so maybe it’s somewhere near Icelandic…?

2. Davedave on 28 Apr 2007 at 7:20 pm #

   Sounds to me like Old English.

3. Rmss on 28 Apr 2007 at 10:24 pm #

   @1
   It’s not Frisian…

4. Jiuh Baoluo on 28 Apr 2007 at 10:46 pm #

   I also think, that it’s Old English.

5. Colm on 28 Apr 2007 at 10:54 pm #

   Yup I also go for Anglo-Saxon / Old-English.

6. Ben L. on 29 Apr 2007 at 2:18 am #

   Sounds like the 23′rd Psalm.

7. Simon on 29 Apr 2007 at 10:09 am #

   The answer is Anglo-Saxon / Old English. The recording comes from:

   Anglo-Saxon Aloud - A daily reading of the entire Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, which includes all poems written in Old English. By Michael D. C. Drout, Prentice Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College, Norton, MA.

8. Minstrel Ayreon on 29 Apr 2007 at 3:05 pm #

   VERY cool…it doesn’t sound exactly like Icelandic, but there is something reminiscent of it. Thanks for the site, Simon–it’s been bookmarked. :-)

9. d.m.falk on 29 Apr 2007 at 10:25 pm #

   Considering there’s a region in northern Germany called Saxony, it should give a clue as to where the Angles & Saxons of what is now England really originated- Old English was indeed a Scandinavian language, eventually to be influenced successively by Latin and later, Norman French. English would lose its Germanic flavour by the 15th or 16th Centuries- Sometime between Chaucer and the advent of Elizabethan English, probably the earliest for intelligibility with modern English. (Chaucer’s (Middle) English is readable, in spite odd spelling, but it followed Germanic pronunciation, thus as spoken, wouldn’t be intelligible with modern listeners.)

   So English as we know it is really only about 500 years old. :)

   d.m.f.

10. BG on 30 Apr 2007 at 5:35 am #

    @d.m.falk: I don’t think Old English was quite a Scandinavian language. English is a West Germanic language (along with German, Dutch, Frisian, etc.), while the Scandinavian languages are North Germanic languages. When the vikings came to England, Old Norse influenced the vocabulary of the English of the time (late Old Englsih, I’m guessing), but this does not make English a Scandinavian language. Just a note.

11. James on 01 May 2007 at 2:20 pm #

    without looking at the other posts:

    germanic, sounds a lot like one of the scandinavian ones, but it´s not Swedish, Norwegian, Danish or faroese (I know speakers of all these languages and the intonation patterns and sounds are different).

    I suspect that the speaker is not a native, and that it´s a dead language. I have a feeling it´s old english.

    J