Yeah. The vowels definitely had more of a “continental” sound to them. Once you get used to that, it’s not too hard to understand, except for the words that are actually archaic and not used any more. But that was after most of the French words came into the language and many of the old A-S words fell out of use, which is why it seems so closer to Modern English (aside from it actually being closer in time). Plus, we lost many of the inflections that Old English had-- especially case endings for nouns.
That would be the language closest to English, so probably. I couldn’t tell the difference between Dutch and Frisian, to be honest.
Then Icelandic it is.
You’re some sort of Scandinavian, right? How well can you read Icelandic (assuming you don’t speak it)? Earlier, I made a comparison to an English speaker trying to read Old English, but I suspect it’s a bit easier since none of the Scandinavian languages had a huge influx of French (or some other language) like English did back in the Middle Ages.
…
Okay, that settles it. I’m grabbing my Chaucer text (hardback, size of DFW phone book) next time I go back to TX for Christmas. We took a quarter of Chaucer at university, and by the end of the quarter I could follow the text almost as fast as I normally read without having to stop to check the footnotes. That was fun.
I recognize the bit of Old English Beowulf that Diomedes posted, but couldn’t translate that for the life of me. Ooo, here’s a nice site at UNR that has more on Beowulf than you could shake a stick at. Translations, papers, history, what have you.
The diacritic marks on Vietnamese vowels come in two flavors: one for lip rounding and another for tone. Thus a vowel may have two diacritics.
I like Vietnamese because it brought me to Monterey to study the language for a year.
Not so difficult, since ðe order of ðe Old English alphabet was someþing like ðis:
a-æ-b-c-d-ð-e-f-g-h-i-k-l-m-n-o-p-q-r-s-t-u-w-x-y-þ, according to ðe website Omniglot.
Hwæt?! Ðey didn’t have a Z?
(No J and no V I can understand.)
It was a lisp problem. They had a “the” (long “e”, voiceless “th”).
I had to read that twice and think about it, because of course I pronounce it “zed”. 
Guilty as charged.
Not very well at all. I understand some individual words and some small pieces of the lyrics above (“Hugsum daginn minn” has something to do with remembering a day, “Í dag og i gær” means “today and yesterday”, “Bla nattfötin klæða mig i” involves dressing in something to do with night (possibly sleepwear), “mjuku sængina” means “soft bed” or “soft beds”, “Opna augun” means “open eyes” and so on) but nowhere near enough to do a full translation, which I could with Danish or Norwegian.
Spoken Icelandic is almost totally incomprehensible to me, except for the few words that are virtually identical with the Swedish words. Heavy, knife, table and bed are all very similar, for example.
Still, that’s much better than I could do armed only with my English. I can speak a little Norwegian and German, so that helps a lot.
Of course! Ðe long-abandoned letter ‘ðed’!
ðed’s dead, baby. ðed’s dead.