Yeah, Old English is pretty difficult to understand for a modern speaker and not something you could just pick up quickly. Like here’s the opening of Beowulf: " Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorlas."
There’s maybe a word or two there you can understand, but it’s almost all gibberish to me. I’d have an easier time parsing German, to be honest. I’d have guessed Dr. Paprika was confusing it with Middle English, which takes modest effort, but at least is familiar to Modern English speakers, but Beowulf was mentioned, not Canterbury Tales. I guess it all hinges on how you define “super hard.”
You would think, but the programs we use have built-in symbols for math. They have to be able to access them for online tests since a lot of the tests require them to show their work in math. So, yeah, again, that’s covered with the programs we use.
Huh. The lecturers who I see post their content to YouTube seem to either still use markerboards or chalkboards, or have switched to writing on a (digital) drawing tablet of some sort (which function like the modern version the old overhead projectors with the rolling sheet that all my math teachers used). I’ve not seen any of them typing out math.
The version of Beowulf we read involved several archaic letters, but each page had a list of definitions and footnotes to make it easier. It was a doable challenge for smarter students. It was not comparable to not having any guidance - there was a lot of supplemental help. We did not need to read long parts of it out loud, though we did have to understand how to read short excerpts.
On review, I think it was comparable to what @pulykamell listed. Incomprehensible at first. By the hundredth page a lot of the words had been repeated and pattern recognition became a thing. And there was a lot of help on every page. Probably some efforts had also been made to further simplify it.
My father can do it along with Middle English. I guarantee he would never have seen the point in making a bunch of high schoolers actually try to read the original and even the copy we had lying around the house was the facing-page original/translation type. Besides, the alliteration with minimal rhyme or meter used in Beowulf actually makes it easier to do a modern English translation while staying faithful to the spirit of the original, unlike many other translations of poetry where both rhyme and meter are important.
He also wouldn’t have seen much of a point of making high schoolers read Chaucer in the original either. Sure, it’s more accessible, but the point in high school isn’t to sit there and deal with 600 year old spelling and vocabulary. Especially since I doubt that any teacher demanding that would also demand on getting the pronunciation correct.
We did Beowulf in high school, but it was a Modern English translation. There may have been an excerpt in the original language, but we certainly did not go through the Old English words and how the language worked. Old English is much more inflected than Modern English (which doesn’t have that many inflected forms), and I’m sure we didn’t go over any of that. Its grammar is a good bit different than Modern English and would require at least a few weeks for students not familiar with the case system, noun classes, and the such.
For Canterbury Tales, it was in a college Chaucer class that we read it in the Middle English with a Modern English gloss along the side. Even there, we weren’t really taught too much in-depth about Middle English, but we did learn points of pronunciation, how the vowel sounds differed from Modern English (especially the long vowels pre-Great Vowel Shift, pronouncing "e"s at the end of words, sounds like “kn” being pronounced as two letters, “gh” as a velar fricative “h” type of sound, etc.), and various other details as they came along. Middle English, though, was easy enough to figure out on one’s own, as sentence structure and grammatical forms were much more familiar. The system of inflection is much reduced from Old English and requires less experience/knowledge to get used to it.
I think in high school, we only read a Modern English translation of Canterbury Tales. Similar to Beowulf, we were given a fragment or perhaps the whole General Prologue in Middle English to show the progression of Old English to Middle English and its similarities to Modern English, but whatever tales it was we read in class were in Modern English.
I have read a modern version of Chaucer but we did not study this in school. The teacher who taught Beowulf had a personal interest in language - memory is hazy but I think we spent a week or so on language and a month or so on the book. The point of it? Dunno.
Same teacher, a bright guy, also taught a basic Latin course on lunch hours, out of his own interest, since Latin was not formally or officially taught as an option at our public school. The point of it? Dunno.
Reading one thing with ample notes is not the same as truly learning to write and speak a language; reading one thing does not help you read everything. Every student reads Shakespeare with the tougher parts explained. No one writes Shakespeare.
I do not remember that much of old-middle English - not having used it often for some reason. I remember a lot of Latin stems and being glad few other languages emphasize declensions.
There is, of course, value in knowing the history of a dominant language. Much of what is taught is not useful to most people on a daily basis.
I understand the emphasis on practical education. This is reflected in my choices. However, part of the “value of teaching cursive” lies outside the fact it is used rarely. How does one learn to learn? They say part of the trick to keeping Alzheimer’s away is learning how to dance, to think in another language, to do crosswords. None of these things will help your stock exchange listing. Not everything should.
Oh, there’s lots of modern languages that have a case system, sometimes quite extensive. The Romance langauges have gotten rid of it, mostly, but the Germanic ones and the Slavic ones still largely retain it. Then you have Finno-Ugric languages (like Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian), the Baltic languages, Sanskrit, Hindi, Turkic, Japanese languages, etc., that have a case system (some easier to learn than others.) It can get quite complex.
Same point as the point of learning anything one finds interesting, I would think. Learning interesting things is fun,
Some would also find language studies useful; whether in terms of the particular language (both of those had obvious influence on modern English) or in terms of considerations of linguistics and/or of how the human mind works.
I’ve heard a great radio play, which I’ve later been unable to identify, written ‘in Shakespeare’. The conceit is that Shakespeare (who speaks Shakespearian), really wants to write dreary (worthy) BBC drama in what is (1960’s) ‘modern’ style (he breaks into modern language to illustrate what he wants to do), but was paid by his producers to write popular Shakespearian farce/drama instead.
The arguments against learning cursive are that no one really needs to use it and that that time could be devoted to something more practical, like typing. When I think about it, I think many of my old classrooms basically had the alphabet printed and written in cursive on a long thin strip taped to the wall above the chalkboards. How much do people learn by osmosis?
Maybe learning Latin is pretty useless. Maybe it is still more useful than Old English, which is more practical than learning Klingon.
My schooling was pretty good. Maybe better than most. A lot of practical things an adult should know were not formally taught. Not always a bad thing. You can put too much emphasis on pragmatism. There is a lot of time over many years to learn stuff. Is there benefit to showing kids a tax form, teaching them how to complain if they get ripped off, or how to cook and eat nutritious foods? A school is not in loco parentis.
Maybe you shouldn’t spent months learning how to write cursive. But you should definitely know it’s a thing. Why not spend a week seeing lots of calligraphic alphabets and fonts, which are kind of cool anyway?
I’ve noticed that if I take notes at meetings by writing them out by hand, I remember much more than if I type them on a laptop. I wish I’d learned some shorthand, but like most people I developed some abbreviations and wrote in semi-cursive and got the info down. When I type notes it seems like I focus on spelling words rather than thinking about the meaning, the bigger picture. I have to re-read them multiple times to get the info in my brain.
One of my nieces (a college prof) told me that a lot of college students these days like to (audio) record lectures. I guess theoretically they could go home and replay the lecture to glean every pearl of wisdom, but I think it’s more about “showing the prof that they care” or “intending to listen to it more carefully later but failing” or something like that. I think they would like a machine to do the work for them. My niece told me after the first test of the semester, at least one student will try to hand her a phone so she can talk to the failing student’s mom, who would like to argue the grade or otherwise plead.
Maybe instead of asking, “Will the student use it?” we should ask, “Could the student use it?” When I was in school I loved math, for instance. People say, “What will I ever use math for?” Umm…you know all those story problems in math? Those ARE the justification…they show how you could use it. That doesn’t mean you will, but you could. And those situations do arise.
Could a student use cursive? Screw the pretty handwriting, do you think the student might need to write things quickly, which is done more easily without lifting pen from paper? Or don’t screw the pretty handwriting—do you think some artistic students might enjoy lettering, creating fonts and so on?
But I imagine there’s a competition for time. How do you want the kids to be educated? How much time should be devoted to these things vs. an extra year of math or another elective? ISTR an article from 100 years ago or more that said pencil sharpeners were going to ruin education because how could a student succeed if they couldn’t use a knife to put a point on their writing implement etc.
I feel like I can take reasonable notes in a lecture or seminar, but do not know exactly how many words per minute that averages out to. I would not commit to being able to transcribe someone speaking continuously at 150 words per minute. If you want to be a court stenographer and write 250 wpm you surely need to employ some form of shorthand…
I assume a trained typist can also type faster than you can write, but, again, the question here is how many words per minute are absolutely necessary for normal classwork, and can one write that quickly by hand.
[apologies for straying off topic]
This boggles my mind. What kind of university is this? .
I know we’ve had threads about helicopter parents, some of whom even attend job interviews with their kids-- so there’s a lot of weirdness out there. But to consistently, after every test, have students who expect their mom to change their grades?
Does your niece teach at a university where getting accepted is competitive? Or is this a community college which accepts anybody? (i.e. basically the same as high school, with kids who don’t know why they are there.)
There’s a difference between being (say) a reporter and taking notes in a college class. Quoting someone vs getting the gist are different.
It’s interesting to me that we have two forms. Why is this screen in front of me using block letters instead of cursive? This being the Dope, someone will probably have an answer.
My fourth grader is being taught cursive. He said that they have been learning a few letters a day for the past few weeks at the end of the school year. Not a lot of focus on it, just another skill to learn. He says he enjoys it and he writes beautifully if I may brag a little.
I’d prefer that schools teach cursive. Kids already learn to read ‘print’ from computer and phone devices. Parents are giving two and three year olds devices that use printed fonts.
You can write cursive much faster. I learned that taking lecture hall notes.
Cursive writing is an important first step in hand/eye coordination. Learn to hold a pencil and control its movement.
What I see is a sans-serif typeface, and the guideline is or was that such a font is more legible on a low-to-medium-resolution display. Which I am still often forced to use. Something like a Didone or Modern serif font really does need an extremely high resolution of at least 1200 or 2400 pixels per inch to look good.
You seem to be asking why the style is “Roman” rather than “Italic”, which is closer to many styles of handwriting. You still have the resolution issue, but also the fact that purely italic text
(NB ligatures that join up adjacent letters) was more popular during the Renaissance, but by the 17th century italic was used to show emphasis.
Having glyphs in separate blocks is a natural side-effect of printing technology, and only (relatively) recently has computer typesetting technology been able to overcome this limitation. People are still used to the types of fonts commonly used in newspapers and books. It is much more of an issue in languages such as Urdu.
What are you hinting at here? I can construct block capitals at some painfully slow speed, and I never had occasion to write any non-“cursive” lower-case letters (except as the odd calligraphic exercise, but it is nothing I could do for you spontaneously). It is purely muscle memory which is a function of the style of handwriting they taught you in primary school. If “they” taught cursive then you would be complaining that you never got printing down. I just fill in such fields on forms using block capitals.
As for reading it, the discussion of on-screen fonts does remind me that in English, just as much as Russian, Greek, Hebrew, etc., everyone still has to learn to read a couple of different styles of the letters, at least Roman/Antiqua vs Italic.
