Benjamin Thorpe translated almost all Old English texts (2016)

https://thijsporck.com/2016/04/08/benjamin-thorpe-the-man-who-translated-almost-all-old-english-texts/

by stareatgoats • 2 years ago

132 69 2 years ago

kazinator• 2 years ago

So productive, we could call him Octathorpe.

ggm• 2 years ago

So, little to no major works of anglo-saxon or old english were found after his lifetime? I'm surprised that there are no palimpsests or binding materials yielding new writing.

boddu• 2 years ago

He did this translation as a part of his job or out of passion?

usrnm4• 2 years ago

Apparently aided by his talented stepdaughter, Thorpe started to earn his living as a translator of, mostly, Anglo-Saxon texts...

mandibeet4• 2 years ago

Maybe, I think, it's both: professional duty and personal enthusiasm

usrnm4• 2 years ago

In 1826, at the age of forty-four, Thorpe studied early English antiquities at the University of Copenhagen

And here I am, in my late 30s, thinking that my productive age is far behind me

brcmthrowaway• 2 years ago

i bet this person was an aristocrat with a bunch of servants to rear their children.

kwhitefoot2• 2 years ago

Most likely. But what was your point? It's surely well known that free time is what you need to get anything done.

Angostura• 2 years ago

According to Wikipedia he started off as a banker, before switching to scholarship.

He was then granted a ‘civil list pension’ - basically a government annual grant in recognition of his valuable but unpaid work

ZaoLahma2• 2 years ago

I guess if money wasn't such a limiting factor, more of us would be productive in different ways later in life. Instead of implementing already invented ideas, we could invent now that we are at the peak of our knowledge and mental capabilities.

It's really hard to justify the financial loss required to (full time) pursue novel ideas when you're middle aged. It's much easier to just put in the 8 hours per day and collect the paycheck.

dr_dshiv2• 2 years ago

Money is rarely a limiting factor as much as the desire for more money.

mandibeet4• 2 years ago

I think, age is truly just a number when it comes to pursuing passions and achieving goals.

szundi• 2 years ago

Nice achievement while being a SPOF in this field is interesting.

cm21872• 2 years ago

It's amusing that his translations might need their own translations to modern english in a century or two, like he uses forms that already aren't really used anymore (like ye).

XVIII century French for instance, while probably being the peak of the language in term of sophistication and elegance, is hard to read without a lot of footnotes. So many words disappeared, changed meaning, or the grammar itself changed.

netdevnet• 2 years ago

Makes you wonder what future generations will call our English. "Old" is taken and "modern" is always the English of the living

kwhitefoot2• 2 years ago

Modern English is the English that followed the Great Vowel Shift that occurred between the late 14th century and the 17th century. So not necessarily modern in the colloquial sense.

That is, Modern is also taken :-)

usrnm4• 2 years ago

That's assuming that the language will still be called English anything. It might as well split into American, Australian, British, etc. We don't call French or Spanish modern Latin, do we?

Macha• 2 years ago

Art and architecture have had this problem already. Linguistics still has post-modern to use.

anal_reactor• 2 years ago

Controversial opinon: linguistic evolution is slowing down considerably.

1. Ever wondered why English spelling is so stupid? It's because it's based on an older version of language, but we never decided to update the spelling, so we just roll with it. How is that supposed to change in the future if it hasn't changed so far?

2. At first, text used to be a representation of spoken language. Nowadays communication is mostly via text, so it's more like "speech is acoustic representation of written language" and written language, as per example of Modern English, is not likely to naturally evolve once it's rules have been set, at least not as likely as spoken language, which can strongly vary from generation to generation.

3. Smaller languages, which potentially could be a source of new words and grammar, are quickly dying out due to popularity of English. Icelandic didn't evolve much through last thousand of years because its speakers had little contact with speakers of other languages. English will do the same by simply eliminating other languages.

I don't think we're there yet, but at some point in the future English will reach its "final form" and from there on, only minor changes here and there will happen. Just like the entire world has almost collectively decided to use arabic numerals, or the metric system, and we don't expect any revolutionary changes there anymore.

ted_bunny• 2 years ago

Maybe something like Singlish. There are already more english speakers in China than the US.

stainablesteel• 2 years ago

nothing to wonder about, they already call it boomer english

pessimizer2• 2 years ago

"ye" is just "the." The "y" is being used to represent the letter thorn.

fsckboy• 2 years ago

oh ye of such little faith... was GP referring to you and what have ye?

cm21872• 2 years ago

My understanding is that it is rather "you".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_(pronoun)

euroderf3• 2 years ago

FWIW I note that Google Translate offers no Old English, or even Middle English.

jhbadger• 2 years ago

There may not be a big enough corpus for adequate training. The problem with both is that the main people writing would either prefer Latin (or later, French). The number of people who could write and used the vernacular to do so, were small.

euroderf3• 2 years ago

Point taken. Altho I'm sure an AI could take a stab at building a corpus. Accuracy maybe better than 90% ?

nestorD• 2 years ago

Most LLMs do well at Middle English (it is not that difficult of a task). Old English is significantly harder but I have found Claude Opus to give good results.

kogus2• 2 years ago

English today is a delightful, expressive train wreck of grammar and spelling madness. But Old English really was not. It was a much more earthy, simple, and consistent language. Old English had a total of about 40,000 words. Today's English has almost half a million.

I'll take the opportunity to plug a fantastic podcast on the history of English, creatively named "The History of English Podcast".

https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/

mandibeet4• 2 years ago

The language was largely phonetic, meaning words were spelled the way they sounded. This fact is my fav

kogus2• 2 years ago

I love that too. English was spelled phonetically all the way up until the late 1400s, I believe. One fun by-product of purely phonetic spelling is that you could tell the accent of the author by the way they spelled words.

Benjamin Thorpe translated almost all Old English texts (2016)

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