English

I'm reading "The Wake" by Paul Kingsnorth.  It's set a thousand years ago,in England.  It has gotten a lot of hype because it's written in a made-up language.  There are some Old English words used as themselves, but most of the speech is modern English using Old English phonetics.  Except that the modern English words are exclusively the ones descended from the originals - there are almost no words used that have Romance language (especially the invading French) roots.  After a couple of pages, I got so that I could read it without too much trouble, but I already could sound out OE and know some vocabulary and grammar.  I am interested in that time and place.  Also, deep down, despite the fact that I think that the world has thousands of wonderful languages, I think English is the best, so I like knowing variations of it, and its history.  That doesn't mean that it isn't a hard language for non-native speakers to learn.  The grammar is weird, the vocabulary has been changed from the borrowed versions (but not enough), and despite the claims about TV homogenizing things, there are a gizillion different accents.  I am spending a LOT of time with my parents, who have a variety of paid caregivers (in shifts).  Some of them are from
various African countries, and while I don't have much trouble understanding their accents, my parents do.  On the other hand, even if they are native speakers of English, they don't necessarily know US idioms.  One of them helped my father find something that was quite close to where he was sitting.  He thanked her, and said "If it was a snake, it would have bitten me."  She was startled that the conversation suddenly was about snakes, until my parents explained the idiom.
I'm not thrilled with Kingsnorth's claims about how much language and thinking are connected  "To put 21st century sentences into the mouths of eleventh century characters would be the equivalent of giving them iPads and cappuccinos: just wrong."    Yeah, but...  When I was taking the OE lit class at UML (six years ago!), one of the readings was "The Wife's Lament" (not to be confused with the 19th century Housewife's Lament or the Peggy Seegar song).  I disagree with a lot of the wikipedia stuff about it, but there is an entry. I can't find the original text to insert, oddly.  At any rate, after we went around the circle translating, people looked at the professor, who looked back at us.  I said "I think she's saying that wherever
he*   is, she hopes he's as miserable as she is."  Everybody smiled, because of course that is what she would hope.
People may have changed a lot in a thousand years, but maybe not as much as we'd like to think.
*  her jerk husband, who abandoned her far from her birthland and family.