ID:277454
 Apr 3 2007, 2:21 pm
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I know this seems weird, but does anyone know like a online engine that might take modern English and convert it to Old-English?
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Apr 3 2007, 2:56 pm
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FretFulGun
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Whatcha talkin' bout Willis?
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If you want to learn Englisc, I recommend (as with any other language) that you start with some related alphabet, and then start studying like a madman.
I don't imagine that there are any tools online to directly translate text beyond mere words and simple phrases into your intended language, especially considering the large variations that can be implied from the same words in different contexts, but if there were any such tools I would imagine them as being highly inaccurate. The best method would be to simply (or perhaps not so "simply") learn the language and translate for yourself. Hiead | |
Do you mean old English, or archaic-looking English? If you mean, "Yea, verily, thou hast forsaken thy bodkin for a jerkin!"-type stuff, that's not old English. That's like pseudo-Elizabethan English, which is archaic-looking to us but is actually a form of modern English, in the sense that it's the language we speak today.
Old English is the Anglo-Saxon language, which looks like this: "Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon."... which literally means, "Hey! You Spear-Danes in bondage gear and swimming suits, yes you, I told you keep off my lawn." At least, I think that's what it means. My Old English is a little rusty. Either way, I don't know of an online coverter for either case... just pointing out a small clarification, in case one exists, so you can find what you're looking for. If you really are looking for Old Enlgish, you'd need a full-fledged translation program, not a simple converter. | |
Ok thanks everyone, I was looking for the "Thou hast.." kind of Old English crap. I wanted to use it as a theme for a BYOND game, but I don't want to go into that much work for it.
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no, what u need 2 do is hire some1. In the BYOND community, there are probably 100s of ppl willing to work on a game that know how to speak "old-English" well
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Devin148 wrote:
no, what u need 2 do is hire some1. In the BYOND community, there are probably 100s of ppl willing to work on a game that know how to speak "old-English" well Yeah sure, I am sure they know Old English as well as you known normal English. | |
The rules of forsooth speaking aren't actually that tough. You need to learn two things:
1) The difference between "thou", the subject pronoun; "thee", the object pronoun; and "thy", the possessive adjective (which becomes "thine" before a vowel). "Thou art a knave!", "I look at thee!", or "Thy mother is a hamster!" Also note that "you" existed in forsooth as well, but it was used to refer to a social better or as a formal point of address for a social equal. (This is why we always use "you" these days -- "thou" implies disdain or at least informality. People assume that the political-correctness movement started in the 20th century, when in fact it started in Victorian times.) 2) Verb conjugation. We gave up on forsooth speaking in New English because verb conjugations beyond "jump" and "jumps" didn't tend to serve any useful purpose, and because we adopted the formal "you" as a point of etiquette so we didn't need the special conjugations of "thou". However, there are conjugations for all of the words. The most important ones are: to have->"hast" to be->(present)"art",(past)"wast" or "wert", depending on who you ask most others->"-eth" or "-th" if it ends in an E already A look on Google for "forsooth speaking" should give you everything you need to convert manually. I don't believe there is anything out there which could convert automatically, as forsooth-speaking Modern English has complex sentence structures and would require complicated algorithms to recognise to which subjects the various verbs in a sentence belong. | |