To be honest, I mean dialects in two different ways. 1, as the actual different dialects they had back then having the same kind of accent differences as today in that individually, they're all minor, only adding up to create a new dialect, so I just give the broadest versions possible. 2, people have weird pronunciations for everything today (you'd be surprised just how many ways there are to pronounce the word 'marijuana' based on your parent's language/accent you grew up hearing, with your own being surprisingly irrelevant), and as such, I give the broadest terms possible to accommodate that, too. I mean, if nothing else, I know that it's largely Brits and Americans reading my post, and that's going to cause differences enough. Don't get me started on the variety of accents in Britain, and we can just forget the American diversity of accents and save ourselves the trouble, right there. @_@
I will be honest, half of what you just said in that paragraph about syllables? Didn't have a clue what you were talking about. *still in high school* All I can say is that again, I'm bypassing the details in that most people are only interested in OE enough to get decent spells for Merlin fics, and that because of people's accents today, each of them is probably going to pronounce them differently, anyway. I mean, think about a Boston accent (your LJ profile says you live in Massachusetts), Manhattan accent, Brooklyn accent, Texan accent, Los Angeles (where I live) accent, and Atlantic broadcast/uptown accent (which is largely what I have), all pronouncing the word "cardboard". And this is a word which actually has a definitive standard.
We don't actually know how Old English sounded, as the language didn't actually survive - it was only revived from texts later on. Languages like Latin actually managed to survive, if in dregs, so what we know about it is more accurate, as it's actually been passed down over the generations, mouth to ear to mouth again, rather than taking educated guesses from comparing it to another language we know (Old English's comparison is Latin, and while that gives us a damn good amount of accuracy, much of the details are still guesswork, especially with phonology that isn't actually in Latin).
As for word order - again, this post was for spells, which are usually done in simplistic, basic statements, and that uses SVO, which is a subclass of V2 if I'm not mistaken. And, I'm pretty sure French word order comes from it's Proto-Celtic influence, and they originally came in from Britain and that general area - so either way, our word Order still comes from, geographically, pretty much the same place, while linguistically, I don't think the word order was changed due to French entering the language so much as it was a byproduct that only came about to accommodate the vast new amount of French vocabulary in the English language. Languages tend to mix in weird ways - I live in one of the more diverse areas of Los Angeles, and the weird mixtures you get of mixed and broken English and Spanish is proof enough of what happens when languages mix together informally, and I give it a few decades before Spanglish is actually its own, legitimate language. :D
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I will be honest, half of what you just said in that paragraph about syllables? Didn't have a clue what you were talking about. *still in high school* All I can say is that again, I'm bypassing the details in that most people are only interested in OE enough to get decent spells for Merlin fics, and that because of people's accents today, each of them is probably going to pronounce them differently, anyway. I mean, think about a Boston accent (your LJ profile says you live in Massachusetts), Manhattan accent, Brooklyn accent, Texan accent, Los Angeles (where I live) accent, and Atlantic broadcast/uptown accent (which is largely what I have), all pronouncing the word "cardboard". And this is a word which actually has a definitive standard.
We don't actually know how Old English sounded, as the language didn't actually survive - it was only revived from texts later on. Languages like Latin actually managed to survive, if in dregs, so what we know about it is more accurate, as it's actually been passed down over the generations, mouth to ear to mouth again, rather than taking educated guesses from comparing it to another language we know (Old English's comparison is Latin, and while that gives us a damn good amount of accuracy, much of the details are still guesswork, especially with phonology that isn't actually in Latin).
As for word order - again, this post was for spells, which are usually done in simplistic, basic statements, and that uses SVO, which is a subclass of V2 if I'm not mistaken. And, I'm pretty sure French word order comes from it's Proto-Celtic influence, and they originally came in from Britain and that general area - so either way, our word Order still comes from, geographically, pretty much the same place, while linguistically, I don't think the word order was changed due to French entering the language so much as it was a byproduct that only came about to accommodate the vast new amount of French vocabulary in the English language. Languages tend to mix in weird ways - I live in one of the more diverse areas of Los Angeles, and the weird mixtures you get of mixed and broken English and Spanish is proof enough of what happens when languages mix together informally, and I give it a few decades before Spanglish is actually its own, legitimate language. :D
And please, feel free to geek all you want. ^_^