Words to do with light are so subtle between German and English. Like Kraftwerk tells me neon lights are "schimmerndes" in German, which I will take their word on, but they also say they are "shimmering" in English which is definitely not true.

scyn/schön/sheen are a different root from schein/shine, for what its worth.

Also I realise now "forlet" is very archaic in modern english whereas "verlassen" is very common in modern german, which would have helped.

What I just learned is that OE scīnan, to shine, gives OE scimrian, "to shine fitfully" [1]. Fascinating: Gothic skeima - torch, lantern.

[1] Eric Partridge: _Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. sᴄᴇɴᴇ paragraphs 8,9.

Also fascinating: "prob from Old Norse skaerr" "is English sheer, bright, hence pure, hence sole, hence also transparent, perpendicular" under paragraph 10.

and further down the rabbit-hole, OHG filu-berht, full bright. Name of St. Philibert, "whose day falls on August 22 early in the nutting season". Norman French noix de filbert.

You are not a true LISP unless you use M-Expressions like the LISP 1.5 manual from the 1960s says. S-Expressions are inauthentic.

I always feel a little jealous of religious people when they do these things.

I guess us secularised, atomised people should just make our own.

I strongly suspect it is just “obviously alive” things that have any sort of subjective experience. But we can’t really prove a negative, so we can thank our coffee machine spirits as a ritual, if we want.

We'll soon have AI as our God replacement, we can then pray to it.

Remember any unexplainable technology in which we blindly trust might as-well be God.

My friend from the UK bought it and it got sent from somewhere locakly. I am in NZ and mine was sent from AU. So I think you should be covered.

The "locakly" typo is perfectly placed in the comment thread of this article!

SPOILERS: if you give the last section, from 1000 AD, some more modern orthography, and applying a few modern sound changes, it may start to look more understandable.

___

The original:

And þæt heo sægde wæs eall soþ. Ic ƿifode on hire, and heo ƿæs ful scyne ƿif, ƿis ond ƿælfæst. Ne gemette ic næfre ær sƿylce ƿifman. Heo ƿæs on gefeohte sƿa beald swa ænig mann, and þeah hƿæþere hire andƿlite wæs ƿynsum and fæger.

Ac ƿe naƿiht freo ne sindon, for þy þe ƿe næfre ne mihton fram Ƿulfesfleote geƿitan, nefne ƿe þone Hlaford finden and hine ofslean. Se Hlaford hæfþ þisne stede mid searocræftum gebunden, þæt nan man ne mæg hine forlætan. Ƿe sindon her sƿa fuglas on nette, swa fixas on ƿere.

And ƿe hine secaþ git, begen ætsomne, ƿer ond ƿif, þurh þa deorcan stræta þisses grimman stedes. Hƿæþere God us gefultumige!

___

Applying the following changes mechanically (which I often do in my head when I see a un-familiar word in old english)

ģ = y, ċ = ch, sw = s, ƿ = w, p = th, x = sk,

we get:

And thæt heo sæyde wæs eall soth. Ich wifode on hire, and heo wæs ful shyne wif, wis ond wælfæst. Ne yemette ich næfer ær sylche wifman. Heo wæs on gefeoghte sa beald sa æniy mann, and theah wæthere hire andlite wæs wynsum and fæyer.

Ac we nawight freo ne sindon, for thy the we næfer ne mighton fram Wulfesfleote yewitan, nefen we thone Laford finden and hine ofslean. Se Laford hæfth thisne stede mid searocræftum gebunden, thæt nan man ne mæy hine forlætan. We sindon her sa fuglas on nette, sa fiskas on were.

And we hine sechath yit, beyen ætsomne, wer ond wif, thurgh tha deorcan stræta thisses grimman stedes. Wæthere God us yefultumige!

__

My translation attempt:

And that which she said was all true. I made her my wife, she was a very beautiful woman, wise and steadfast when dealing death[0]. I had never met such a woman before. She was as brave in a fight as any person, yet her appearance was winsome and fair.

But we were no longer free, because we could neaver leave Wulfleet, even though we found the lord and slew him. The lord had bound this town with sorcery, such that no one could leave it. We were trapped like birds on a net, like fishes are by a man.

And we searched yet, being together, man and wife, through the dark streets of this grim town. God help us!

___

[0] my best attempt at translating "ƿælfæst"; it's like slaughter + firm/fast/stable. I guess it means she is calm while killing people :))

co-sign this. Oswald the Bear is an amazing book and taught me how to read Old English remarkably quickly.

The first chapter is like a book for toddlers in Old English (with questions and loads of repeated vocab), and each chapter gets a bit harder. Half way in its like a Young Adults Novel level of difficulty. But each step up is relatively small.

The actual story is great too. Æthelstān Mūs is my spirit animal.

Really? I read German (not at a very high level anymore admittedly), and I find that while Old English is closer to German than modern English is, I would still say a deep knowledge of Modern English helps me more, and that most things have be learned frlm scratch.

Like does Dutch have anything like "cƿæð"? Or "Hlaford"? Or "soð"? "þeah þe"?

I know Dutch should be a little closer to Old English than German, but if you truly can pick up words like that leaning on Dutch, maybe I should learn to read it. (I can read the 1000 Old English sentence pretty well).

As a native English speaker who also knows some German and has studied some Anglo-Saxon... I'd say the High German sound shift can really mess up hearing Anglo-Saxon for German speakers but reading it is easier than it might be for a modern English speaker...

The orthography of Anglo-Saxon can make it look easier to read for a modern German or Dutch speaker, but to actually hear it could be confusing. Specifically around the words written with the past tense marker "ge" -- or other words using "ge", which is pronounced like modern English "ye" (hence English 'yester[day]' instead of German 'gestern'), not hard "ge" like in modern high German.

And yes Dutch (or modern Low Saxon dialects or Frisian) could be closer but the orthography is very different and also Anglo-Saxon had a palette closer to the front of the mouth than the back like Dutch.

Also other West Germanic (and North) languages lost the dental fricatives ("thorn" (þ) and "eth" (ð)) while English (and Icelandic) kept it. And Anglo Saxon used them heavily. Old Franconian and Old Saxon had this sound, too, but lost it (hence "the" vs der/die/das etc)

I dont think reading will be much easier. A modern English speaker - assuming he is well read, will know things like "sooth", "quoth", "art thou", "ere", "sayeth"... I feel knowing this stuff helps me a lot more than cognates of high german "schön" or "wohnen".

Actually knowing Tolkien well has been helpful because the way he writes is very anglo-saxon, not so even his word choices but just the rhythm or syntax.

But yeah I went into Old English thinking it would be more like German, but really it is much more like English than people think IMO.

> Actually knowing Tolkien well has been helpful because the way he writes is very anglo-saxon, not so even his word choices but just the rhythm or syntax.

In English class at school in Norway, I went through a phase after reading LOTR in Eglish for the first time, where I'd frustrate my teacher by using words that were archaic enough that my teacher had to look them up.

> Old English thinking it would be more like German, but really it is much more like English than people think IMO.

Compare it to Old Norse, and Old Dutch, though, and there are many similarities that stand out. My Norwegian lessons very brief foray into Old Norse definitely made it easier for me to dechipher parts of Old English and Old Dutch (the latter also helped a lot by my halting German). I think a lot of the similarities comes down to learning to recognise a few of the key sound and ortography shifts, at which point they start to look a lot more similar than it looks at first glance.

I think if you come from a German context the concept of free speech is probably strange to you in general - because no one in living memory has ever had it. Not in Weimar, not in the Nazi period, not in East Germany and not in the Federal Republic.

Unless you understand concepts like "Natural Rights" the idea of a government not being able to curtail what you say will remain completely foreign to you.

That isn't really what we perceive (at least if educated). We see that Free Speech is not an absolute right, but is secondary to the most important right which for Germans is Human Dignity. It might be foreign to you because your constitution and history doesn't put the same value on it than our history taught us.

I'm not American but I similarly don't care for the meek subservience to the government which characterizes European attitude on this.

Human dignity is not foreign to me at all, I just don't believe a life where the state protects your feelings from words, and that dictates what you may and may not talk about is not a dignified one.

It is often easy to assume this position if you are majority, white, employed, etc.

Your argument is similar to saying that we shouldn't have rules when driving cars. "Why life cannot be dignified if I have to observe stop signs."

In every are of life there are balances to be struck. I am sure your country has rules for slandering individuals (because most have). What's the difference to also having rules against slandering entire people?

> It is often easy to assume this position if you are majority, white, employed, etc.

What is your evidence to that claim?

I think it is actually not easy to assume that position, as evidenced by vast numbers of Europeans who do not assume that position. I think that it is in fact far easier (as a majority, white, employed, etc.), to go through life believing your government will solve everything and protect your feelings from being hurt by hearing what other people think. I just think it is an undignified existence.

> Your argument is similar to saying that we shouldn't have rules when driving cars. "Why life cannot be dignified if I have to observe stop signs."

I can see how bewildering this is for you, but my "argument" is also quite different in important ways.

> In every are of life there are balances to be struck. I am sure your country has rules for slandering individuals (because most have).

Adjudicating disputes between private parties is clearly one of the real roles of government.

> What's the difference to also having rules against slandering entire people?

I'm not sure if you are being rhetorical and actually want me to list the differences because you are unaware of them? Civil actions brought by private parties are different from government censorship and criminalization of speech. And I can be sued in civil court for what I say, I never said or even hinted that this should be disallowed that seems to be a strawman you have made up.

I don't think it should be easy to be found liable for damage if you tell the truth or give your opinion though.

What about you? Do you think calling AfD voters in general racists or extremists or selfish or xenophobic should be censored and criminalized by your government?

A little less hyperbole would maybe help your arguments, but trying to argue that one of the most liberal democracies in the world is comparable to one of the most repressive regimes is hurting your argument (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/liberal-democracy-index).

Nobody is perfect, but Germans have learned a lot in the last century and a half. One of the things is that Freedom of Speech doesn't deserve the pedestal that primarily US Americans put it on. It has boundaries and one of those is calling for the displacement of an entire nation.

You make it sound like that Germany is just a puppet without its own mind, but in reality it is just some 80m people all with their own mind, history and education. The reality is that Germans are more aware of their history and the impact seemingly small decisions can have on the life of millions. That's why I talk about the German-ness, because many other countries can't or don't want to understand the weight of responsibility which arises from being the perpetrator of two world wars and the holocaust.

This is a textbook case of German Schuldstolz - you feel having been militaristic and having mass human right abuses entitles you to lecture others.

All you learned in the last centuries and a half is that you dont have the logistics to fight massive wars. You did not abandon anything due to your own enlightenment, you abandoned it because of massive foreign military interventions, where every single one of your newspaper, radio and television stations were replaced by your military occupiers.

The worst part about your Schuldstolz is that... the regime who did the most to end yours was even less moral and killed even more people than your own. Meaning you aren't even the best at being awful.

So no, I do not care what you have to see about freedom "as a German". You were militarily, ideologically and mentally conquered. Lecturing Anglos is this is just reflecing back our own beliefs but distorted with a German mindset that has no history or tradition of freedom of speech.

> Schuldstolz

Never heard that word before. And I don't think I am lecturing you about something you should do. I was just talking about why Germans in their own free country are choosing to make decisions about their own laws.

If you feel like we are missing something about freedom of speech, that's fair enough. You are entitled to your opinion. What is strange to me is that Americans (and you as somebody from NZ) are starting to lecture us on that we are being censored by our government. Which in itself is ridiculous and even when explaining why we are preferring the rules we have, we get attacked for it.

Germans aren't mentally conquered, this is just bullshit. We have the same freedom to think what we want as all other Europeans. Things are also evolving, the second world war is so long ago, that very few Europeans were first hand involved. What we considered American values (I don't think the Anglo sphere is very united in these) has also rapidly changed. Americans no longer believe in multi-lateralism and shared values, so not sure what reflection you are alluding to.

Your views on the war are also not very informed. West Germany and East Germany were vastly differently handled by the occupation forces. While for East Germany your talking points of a total replacement it true, in West Germany many of the old elites had to be put back in power to aid the western allies in propping up Germany against the Russians. It took a lot of counter culture to fight those brown remains.

Last, I don't know where you take the energy and insights to say that we have no history of XYZ, but it just isn't true.

Better than the alternative where they don't, I suppose. Kind of like how for some political things you have to use yandex to search because US search companies suppress the results.

This argument has always struck me as ridiculous. You think if only the Weimar Republic had had Hate Speech laws everything would have been fine?

Right, I guess the people there just magically all woke up one day hating the jews and voting in Hitler. Crazy how that happens. Why do political factions even spend money on campaigning? Those silly geese.

Wait, your operating theory on why the NSDAP became popular is because they... tricked everyone into hating jews?

You are not only entirely misunderstanding why the NSDAP appealed to people, you're also completely misunderstanding what post WWI Germany was - a republic hastily brought about with little care so that Woodrow Wilson would offer Germany peace based on his 14 points (he didn't). It was doomed to fail from the very beginning. If not the NSDAP it would have been some other extremists.

The idea that freedom of speech was what led to its downfall does not stand up to even the smallest scrutiny. Or the idea that an aged, pacified 2026 Germany would immediately return to 1930s Nazism if they had free speech is even more ludicrous.

> If not the NSDAP it would have been some other extremists.

Oh okay, all good then...

> Or the idea that an aged, pacified 2026 Germany would immediately return to 1930s Nazism if they had free speech is even more ludicrous.

Can you think in even more absolute, even more reality-divorced terms? I was trying to mock this with my previous comment, but clearly that angle did not reach you.

"Oy vey, the insane ideas I craft, that people aren't actually saying, are insane." Yes, they do be. Congratulations.

people are sheep mate... in 2026 with the social media at politicians disposal you can convince most people of just about anything you want. current politics in the US is basically cultism. if trump says that Russians are now great guys, 99% of people who grew up during the cold war that are "maga" now are going "oh, what a turnaround, love them Russians now."

same goes the other way, Germany can return to 1930s in the time one political campaign starts and ends given the state of society at the moment.

I am not advocating for limits on free speech, I am a free speech absolutist. and with that come the consequences we see not just in the united states but around the world. but to think that allowing anyone to say anything cannot lead to absolute catastrophies/hatred/... in the year of our lord 2026 is very misguided...

Well they kinda did,long before the Nazis and der Sturmer put a torch on it.