[Buddha-l] David Loy

[Jim Peavler]

On Oct 11, 2007, at 1:44 PM, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

>
> It's worse than that. One of the theories on Hebben olla vogala  
> (cited on
> the same Wikipedia page) is that it is an old form of English (old  
> Kentish),
> not Dutch. And this new oldest line (Gelobistu...) is -- like some  
> would say
> about modern Dutch -- just "misspelled" German.

I happened to know the little love song as the earliest Dutch because  
I studied Old English in my youth. One of the games we played was to  
look as examples of all the earliest Germanic languages to see how  
similar to each other they all were.  Everything I ever read in Old  
English seemed to be in a different dialect (and Middle English  
became even more heavily dialected) that it was not always  
absolutely  obvious where the lines between "languages" and  
'dialects". Kind of like the difference between "macro" and "micro"  
evolution. Depends on which species you belong to.

After a while I felt pretty comfortable reading early forms of nearly  
any of the Germanic languages. I also bluffed my way through the  
Princeton German exam largely on the basis of my knowledge of the  
Beowulf and other early sagalike materials.