[SunkenCiv]

[SubMareener]

I used to look forward to your posts. The last two have been nonsense. What is going on?

[pierrem15]

Actually, the one change that contributed most to the collapse of the declension system in English was not the Norman invasion but the Viking one.

Old English had a large amount of mutual intelligibility with Old Norse, but the declensions in certain cases were different. So people stopped using them and replaced them with word order and prepositions. The same thing has occurred in Norway where certain dialects with slightly different declensions came to overlap and a common descendant formed with reduced declensional structure.

[BenLurkin]

Say good “knight” gracie.

[norwaypinesavage]

How can this be??? The French mispronounce their own language worse than any other language.

[dangus]

Kind of a dumb, sensationalist way to say that English has a lot of French loan words. We already knew that.

[Savage Beast]

Is French just badly pronounced Latin?

[AdmSmith]

A suitable text to see how Old English was written is to read Beowulf.

There is a column in Old English and a translation https://heorot.dk/beo-intro-rede.html
An attempt to read from line 791 in Old English is https://web.archive.org/web/20101119162419/http://beowulftranslations.net/beorefs/beowulf-audio-0791a-0819a-benslade.mp3 It is not easy to just listen to it and understand the text.

It is easier to understand the Lord's Prayer in Old English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Faederureaudio2.ogg

Probably the words were not pronounced in these ways and the language melody was probably different.