Talk:Law of Æthelberht

Disputed: "oldest document in English"

I added a factually-disputed tag because, from a linguistic perspective, this is almost certainly not the oldest document in English. It may be dated to the early 7th century in some general sense that the words of the document correspond fairly accurately to the words of the original document that was (presumably) composed in the early 7th century, but the document as preserved does not accurately reflect the language itself. The language itself appears to be standard Old English of the 10th century. It's as if someone took the Canterbury Tales, e.g.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote

And bathed every veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour

And rewrote it as

When April with his showers sweet

The drought of March has pierced to the root

And bathed every vein in such liquor

Of which virtue engendered is the flower

This is no longer Middle English, but somewhat strange-sounding Modern English with archaic syntax and word usage.

The actually oldest English document AFAIK, is an Abecedarium (a vocabulary) from the late 7th century.

Benwing (talk) 10:08, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

You aren't presenting any evidence for your dispute of this claim, which is made by leading historians of Old English literature. Your assertion that the language of the document is 10th century would be revolutionary if true, but you may wish to look at the language sections in Oliver's Beginnings of English Law where a long list of archaic features are discussed. Deacon of Pndapetzim (Talk) 10:29, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

You've missed the point. I have studied Old English in detail and I know what Old English of c. 600 AD looks like. Phonologically, the original document looks more or less like 10th century Kentish and not much like what early 6th century Old English looked like phonologically. Syntactically it retains archaic features because it was essentially "translated" at some point from an early 7th century original into the native language of a later, probably Kentish author, in a fashion exactly comparable to what I exemplified above -- that's why I quoted that section. This kind of translation from one dialect to another was extremely common in the past. The same thing probably happened multiple times, for example, to Beowulf. The upshot is that a statement such as "the oldest English document" needs to be very much qualified since the document as we have it is not anything close to a verbatim copy of early 7th century English. In case you doubt me, I should note that none of the sources on Old English mention this document in their description of the oldest Old English documents. Just because there are archaic syntactic and vocabulary features doesn't falsify what I say here -- notice how exactly such features appear in my "translation" of Chaucer into modern English. Unless Oliver is actually a linguist, it's unlikely he understands these issues very clearly. Lots of humanities scholars who write plenty "reliable" sources make all sorts of elementary mistakes when it comes to linguistics; I have seen this again and again.

If you don't believe me, go ask on Talk:Old English or a similar site about this issue and I'm sure you'll get a similar answer.

I notice that none of the regular contributors on linguistics articles in Wikipedia have contributed to this article. (In general, IMO, a stub article like this should not go on the front page of Wikipedia because of the possibility for mistakes to occur as a result of insufficient review.) Benwing (talk) 01:57, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

I understood the point you were trying to make, but your are unpersuasive. You seem to be indicating that you believe there is a great body of 7th century literature with which you can compare the language with that of the 10th century. That is simply not the case. 10th century Old English is usually itself more archaic than the form spoken anyway. But you need to provide citations showing that this text is later or has been rewritten or altered; this is not claimed in any source used for the article and the view in these sources is that the text is unaltered! Wormald was a professor at Oxford and makes the claim you are disputing (as do many others); Oliver is another expert in Old English. You offer no evidence or citations in favour of your claim ... you do need to do this. For Wikipedia it doesn't matter if you are right unless you can verify it. Your own opinion of this matter or claims to have access to the secrets of some linguistic magic unavailable to previous Old English scholars are of no significance in themselves. :) Citations please! To me it is a bad sign that you don't seem to have awareness of the main literature on this topic, but scepticism is of course always healthy and I have added some wording to appease it. Deacon of Pndapetzim (Talk) 02:41, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

This argument is not just a question of who is right. As Wikipedia editors, it is not always our job to decide that. What really matter is whether there is a consensus, or at least a near-consensus, among scholars who have actually looked into it. If there is not even a near-consensus, then the claim is disputed, in which case "thought to be" is not a sufficiently strong qualifier. Zyxwv99 (talk) 16:50, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Minor ambiguity

The passage " . . . as a respectable "civilised" [Wormald] people." might be read as meaning that "Wormald" was the Anglo-Saxon word for "civilized", as it is the first reference to the authority Patrick Wormald in the article. Perhaps a minor rewording? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.197.66.111 (talk) 10:55, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Singular of Plural?

Why is this article entitled Law of Æthelberht? A search on Google Books for "Law of Æthelberht" yields 9 results, while "Laws of Æthelberht" yields 2250 results. Assuming that whoever wrote this article is something of a scholar, maybe an explanation could be provided in the article, as other readers are likely to have the same question. Zyxwv99 (talk) 16:44, 4 December 2011 (UTC)