Leofan men, gecnawað þæt soð is …

Oh, I beg your pardon! On this Sunday we have guests from the far away seat of the bishopric Basilea. Although I myself did never have the opportunity to leave my country, I heard of many miraculous stories about your famous city.

Oh, again I must beg for indulgence, did I introduce myself? My name is Aelfric, abbot of Eynsham. Eventually, I will be known as one of the most prominent authors of my time. Well, I wrote a modest collection of homilies (sermons) and some pastoral letters wherein by chance my name appeared.

Authorship in our times is irrelevant. Those able to write regard themselves as God’s servants where names are of no importance. And as we, the monks, are the sole producers of written records in this country, hardly no trace of our identity was ever left.

I myself however, consider the gift of writing as being essential to motivate and guide my dear and often entangled brothers in these times of turbulence and decreasing morality. During the last decades, since the death of our great and kind king Edgar – God rest his soul – our people are harassed almost every year by marauding and raiding Danes. Even now, our not so glorious king Ethelred tries to keep these heathen brigands away from our shores by paying them huge amounts of silver ransom, Danegeld we call it.

But, alas, the times are filled with terrifying fore-signs and as my dear friend, Archbishop Wulfstan put it in his splendid Address to the English people:

"Here there are manslayers and slayers of their kinsmen, and slayers of priests and persecutors of monasteries, and here there are perjurers and murderers, and here there are harlots and infanticides and many foul adulterous fornicators, and here there are wizards and sorceresses, and here there are plunderers and robbers and spoliators, and, in short, a countless number of all crimes and misdeeds."

So it was quite obvious, that only in writing I could reach my brothers, all spread over this country. My comforting words offer guidance and promote the Benedictine reform in our monastries.

Of course all these written parchments were full of vernacular words. You, my dear friends from the far South, you are all able to read the Holy Gospels in Latin. But here in this country Latin is almost unknown amongst the priesthood. I tried to overcome this deficiency by writing a fancy Latin grammar, but again, success was not forthcoming. Therefore my writings are held in English and as most of our writing monastries are located in the Southern part of the country, we easily can write in our everyday tongue, which is – like you call it – West-Saxon.

Talking about our language, I think, that you will master it without any difficulty. Your language and ours have so much coincidences. Look at all those sophisticated inflections in your mother tongue. We almost have about the same. Let me try to demonstrate this fact by translating my initial salutation Leofan men, gecnawað þæt soð is.

Leof-an is called dear in this monosyllabic croaking, that you now name English. But compare it to German lieb-e and you still find two morphemes, a free one lieb- followed by an inflectional, bound one, e. This inflection varies, depending on gender and number in your language as well as in mine. Furthermore we have the same distinction of weak and strong declensions, weak and strong verbs (strong verbs, with alterning vowels) and much more.

Now look at men, the second word of my address. You would think about translating it with Männer, are you? Wrong! This men just means some unspecified people, it is generic. Our female sisters are all called wifmen which can be literally translated by female beings. Again our descendants will corrupt this wonderful word to women and some will even claim, that the initial wo- derives from womb – completely nonsense, as I say!

Lets now turn to the verb ge-cnaw-að. Again we find some morphemes. The first one, bound, is a verbal prefix that is optional in our language. You find the same prefix in your verbs where it appears compulsory in the past participle. With gecnawað we have an imperative mood and you surely will recognize the stem know- in -cnaw-. The last morpheme again is inflectional and almost identical to your German wiss-et.

The rest of my sentence is quite obvious, as long as you know that soð means true. This word will only survive inside of the adverb derivation forsooth.

Now have a look at the syntax. Our grandchildren would have their hair standing on end if they had to listen to something like dear people, know what true is!. We, however, use a rather flexible syntax. Much stylistic variation is possible and still everybody gets the point – thanks to all the inflections! This is the reason why scholars will specify our language as being a synthetic language, i.e. most of its grammatical features (number, gender, case, mood etc.) are realized by bound morphemes. The language you call English is supposed to be analytical. Almost all of these features are expressed by isolated words - free morphemes - or through rigid syntax rules.

Well so much for a very short description of our vernacular. You probably now want to listen to what it actually sounds like.

In great foresight I was send a complicated machina, that will support your study of our sounds. Just give it try and you will see how easy the pronunciation of our language is. Please note, that eo in leofan, a in -cnaw- and o in soð are all pronounced as long vowels. Now go ahead and find out the pronunciation of my salutation.

All right, let me now listen to the result of your study!
….hmm, not really native, but to some extend comprehensible. Well then, now that you know the basics of our language, I may at least proceed with my Sunday lesson. Today we are listening to the first verse of Genesis. Listen carefully to my words and do the following exercise: