Calling all cultured aspies

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Have a listen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JcsXzBoqQg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvgYLAKpU5g
This sounds identical to the Yorkie accent my neighbour has when speaking English, particularly the second video

I used to work with a Frisian man from Holland and he claimed that speakers of old Frisian and old English were indigenous to the north west Europe and were germanised over centuries. The process was completed by Charlamegne who forcibly converted the Frisians to christianity.

An interesting fact is the Frisians distinguish themselves from Germans who are described as Dutch or "Deutsch" or Germanic speakers.

I've lived in Yorkshire for 30+ years. My wife is from Yorkshire. You're trying to tell me that that sounds Yorkshire? Bacause your neighbour is a "Yorkie"? A Yorkie is a dog... or a chocolate bar.
Sounds more like German or Scandinavian to me, Kraftie is right.
I won't be wasting any more time on this nonsense.

This is the truth:

If one speaks Old English, only one schooled in Old English will be able to understand more than about 5% of the words spoken. I'd be lucky to understand the 5%. A German person will be able to understand a bit more.

Middle English, written, is much more like modern English than when it (Middle English) is spoken. There's still lots of German-type pronunciation in Middle English.

A word like "knife" was pronounced with the "k" sound in Middle English. And, sometimes, the "e" was pronounced as well, though it was more like a "schwa," which is a very short-duration sound. The "i" was a short vowel; whereas, in Modern English, it is a long "i." "Knife" would sound very different coming from a Middle English speaker than a modern speaker.

Something called the "Great Vowel Shift" changed the pronunciation of vowels in the transition from Middle to Early Modern English. In effect, this "Great Vowel Shift" "de-Germanized" English.

One of the reasons that Sir Thomas Wyatt is my mega-obsession is that he was one of the very first poets in early modern English (him and the Earl of Surrey, mostly). Although Wyatt spoke a number of languages (including Latin) and travelled widely across Europe, he chose to make the most of modern English. He translated (and rewrote) many of the sonnets of Petrarch and was thus responsible for helping to bring the sonnet form into English literature. But most of what he wrote was for circulation around the royal court and for private consumption... which could be a dangerous occupation in the court of Henry VIII...

"Stand whoso list on the slipper top of courts' estates"

... and it's all in the vowels.

He was a clever one----and was always in trouble with Henry VIII. I believe he died in prison.

"Whoso List to Hunt" is clever court poetry.

He was clever with the couplets, too.

Whoso list to hunt.. is one of the best... noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am. Dangerous stuff.
He almost died in the Tower, the second time he was incarcerated there. He was preparing an astonishing written defence, using all his rhetorical and linguistic powers when he was released by an act of clemency.
He died from a fever after riding his horse all night on an errand for the king... but obviously being locked up in the Tower didn't benefit your health much. He was about 39 when he died.

Not sure whether this is correct or not, because I cant figure out what you are saying. It sounds a little off.

The Roman Empire stopped at the Rhine. Everything beyond it (including modern Frisland) was already considered "Germania" (the realm of the Germanic speaking barbarians) long before Charlemagne.

During the collapse of the Western Roman Empire the barbarians on the coast of Germania migrated across the water and seized the southeast corner of Britain, and became the Anglo Saxon English. The invaders came from the same stock as the modern Dutch, Frisians, and north Germans. So all four languages: English, Fris, Dutch, and German, are related, and are all considered "Germanic" languages. So I don't understand how the Fris would consider themselves to be other than "Germanic" themselves. Germanic in the larger sense. Though they probably are fiercely proud of being "not Dutch", and "not German", and probably do lump their neighbors to the east together under the same "Dutch/Deutsche" label ( we English speakers also have a history of mixing up those two similar D words).

Fries is the language spoken in Frisland which is a small region on the northwest coast of the Netherlands. In the rest of the Netherlands they speak dialects of Dutch. And then over the eastern border of the Netherlands is northern Germany where they speak German, but with a dialect that's more like Dutch (and like English) than standard Berlitz German (which is based on southern German dialects). In standard German the verb "to consume food" is "essen", but in northwest Germany its "etten".


The kinship of the languages coincides with the geographic location of the languages: the Dutch Netherlands is between Germany and England, and its two languages both resemble hybrids of English and German. With Fris (on the coast across the water from England) being more like English, and Dutch (inland, and bordering Germany) being more like German.


"Good milk and good cheese is good English, and good Fris" - that doggerel is pronounced the same in both English and in Fris. English and Fris would be even more alike today if England hadn't been conquered by the Normans in 1066 who imposed French influences on English. But English retained some Germanic grammar that survived even until Shakespeare's time. In modern Fris they say "doth" and "dost" (as in "methinks that the lady doth protest too much") echoing the English of Shakespeare.

DO you know Geoffrey Boycott

I think what my colleague was trying to convey is the Frisians have a sense of separate culture but what came as a surprise is their belief they have of having lived in the region from the ice age and becoming Germanised. Their original homeland stretched from modern Denmark south to modern Belgium and northern France. The Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain no doubt spoke a Scandinavian/north Germanic language but the people who settled Britain were Frisians who spoke a completely different language which forms the basis of the language we are speaking (or trying to speak) write now.

Seem to me "life is a tragedy" was the main point of romanticism.


Many non-believers made/make great works of art: such as Hayao Miyazaki, Anatole France, Roger Waters, Terry Pratchett, Dana Simpson, Douglas Adam, Umberto Eco and so on.


While Tolkien most certainly would have been able to write in Middle English, his books would then never have been published.
As George R. R. Martin, he probably can't.


At the opposite, in Quebec, the elites were for a long time the English speaking peoples, while the French speaking ones were the underclass.

I think what my colleague was trying to convey is the Frisians have a sense of separate culture but what came as a surprise is their belief they have of having lived in the region from the ice age and becoming Germanised. Their original homeland stretched from modern Denmark south to modern Belgium and northern France. The Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain no doubt spoke a Scandinavian/north Germanic language but the people who settled Britain were Frisians who spoke a completely different language which forms the basis of the language we are writing now.

I am thinking more if Mel Gibson would be interested in a script for a move called "1066" marking the last year of King Harold's reign.

The pathos of tragedy is particularly amenable to the hyperbole of Romanticism, but it's an immature, Byronic sort of tragedy that never goes beyond mere ego.

There are some merely good artists who were/are nonbelievers, but no great ones, to my mind. None of the names listed begin to compare to Bach, Palestrina, da Vinci, Rubens, Michelangelo, Christopher Wren, Blake, Dante, Omar Khayyam, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and any number of others. Europe lost its soul with Christianity.

It's getting tiring to list all the famous artists, poets, writers we all like...

I think it would be nice to pick a book we have all read and dissect it in detail like an online book club?

That’s a good idea except with the varying tastes we might have trouble agreeing on one.