Language and Magic for Merlin

[nyxelestia]

I've been seeing a lot of people interested in translating spells into the Old English that is often used on BBC Merlin for their fics, but mostly relying on random, crappy Internet translators that ultimately don't do too much good in terms of translating.
 

So, the language geek in me clawed its way out and decided to help.

If you use this page to translate something, please credit and link back to it somewhere in your entry.

ETA: Many of the links below need JavaScript enabled in order to work. If you have it disabled, either temporarily re-enable it for the site individually, or switch to another browser to view these sites (or, for Firefox uses, utilizes the IE Tab plug-in that allows you to view pages in Internet Explorer in another Firefox tab.

Merlin uses Old English for their spells. The funny thing is that around the 6th century - the vague era of when the show would probably take place - the actual language would've been Old English, with the "old/ancient" language being Latin, Proto-Celtic, and Old Welsh. (As a general rule, I, myself, tend to just refer to the language as "the Old Tongue" in my fics to save myself the trouble of dealing with the historical realignment of languages).

This is basically just a little ditty on translation, really, taken straight from my post on Old English on my website. At the end, though, I've added in some extra stuff specifically for Merlin writers.

First off, let's start off with a brief history of Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon):

Englisc was a language spoken across England and parts of Scotland from about the 5th-12th centuries AD. It is a West Germanic language that had a very light influence from Celtic, and some heavier influences from Latin and Old Norse.

 

There were periods of sharp Latin influence due to Christian priests running around - especially since scholars and priests, who made up the most of the literate/educated population, were usually also well read in Latin - but the biggest influence was near the end of Old English's reign, wherein we see a slow change towards Middle English coming in with the heavy Latin influence of the time. Celtic influence is mostly just some loan words, and Old Norse has a bit of a grammatical influence along with a considerable amount of loan words. (Because as any linguist knows, English gets most of its own words by robbing other languages :P).

The actual history of the language is far more nuanced than that, but that would be the general gist of it.

Now - on to the main article!

So, to start with, quick basics of Old English:

 

It has declension - the changing of nouns to fit the role in the sentence.

 

It has conjugation of a weird sort - conjugation, meaning the changing of verbs based on tense and person.

 

Those two links above are useful for basic understanding of conjugation and declension in Old English. If you don't know what declension is at all, go here, and if you don't know what conjugation is at all, go here. However, these are, admittedly, best read with the above links, to give you an idea for how they work.

 

Got that?

 

A Few Quick Tips:

 

- þ/ð = th, for anglicizing purposes

 

- Old English is like Modern English we use, today, in terms of Word Order:

-In statements, it is SVO - Subject-Verb-Object. ("The cat is on the bed.")
-When it's a question, it's VSO - Verb-Subject-Object. ("Is the cat on the bed?" 
***Old English is a very complicated language. The word order does get much more complicated than that. But for basic statements - which most spells are usually in - then this word order will work.***

 

- And here's the IPA (Interntional Phonetic Alphabet). Helpful with some of the Wiki stuff below.

 

Now, that being said...

 

Links!

 

Old English Translator

 

My favorite translator. Simple, basic. It has two functions, Old English >> Modern English, and Modern English >> Old English. If you type in a word, then use ME >> OE, it will give you the nouns, the verbs, and the adjectives - in that order - that have your word in it.

 

And not just that, either!

 

For the nouns, it will give you the declension tables, for the singular and plural of each case. For the verbs, it will give you full conjugation tables - singular, plural, for 1st/2nd/3rd persons, for past and and present indicative, subjunctive, and participle modes, along with singular and plural imperative, and inflectived infinitive. For the adjectives, it will give you how to decline/conjugate the adjectives for singular and plural masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns.

 

In other words, it will it will give you a basic rundown of everything.

 

So, to be honest, you're almost completely set with this one...

 

...almost.

 

Before you get into that, you'll want to read into this:

 

Old English Pronouns - Wiki

 

Because obviously, this is how the verbs will come into play, in conjugation. Whatever word you typed into the translator, just compare the verbs you get with the pronoun chart, and you should be able to match what goes to where pretty quickly.

 

Old English Prepositions - Wiki

 

Because the translator above doesn't really do prepositions well. *shrugs* Go figure.

 

Aaaand...

 

Old English Made Easy Dictionary

 

It doesn't have much, as the site is unfinished, but what little there is, is quite useful as a back-up dictionary. Not something you need, but good to have on hand. Though still, the above translator linked at the top should cover it.

 

When you get to the dictionary, just click on the letter of the word you want to look up under "Modern English" and then use the Find funtion of your computer (Ctrl+F for Firefox and Internet Explorer, and you can usually find the Find function - and it's keyboard shortcut - under the "Edit" menu of your browser, if it has the function at all) to search a word on there. It's also useful if you want to double check a word's meaning. In addition, it has a "nouns" section which gives an explicitly in-depth explanation on Old English Declension, including irregular nouns and stuff, and expamples underneath. The other sections - verbs and whatnot - aren't done, so don't bother trying with those ones.

 

ETA:

Old English Lessons Online from the University of Calgary - thanks to waeter

 

If you have your browser configured to RealAudio, you can listen to pronunciations of the words and letters. And even if not, it's still an excellent and comprehensive course on Old English, including audio, and semi-professional and fully academic texts on the subject to read. It's like the class, for free! Being as comprehensive as it is, it's not that great for anyone who just wants their spells translated, and that's it - but for those fully interested in the language, this is the best place to go.

ETA 2: So, here are several more links courtesy of sineala.

Here (PDF) is an excellent one-page spread-sheet on the basics of Old English grammar. It's best used to after you've managed to get a good grip of the grammar from the Wiki's/other sites, as otherwise it makes no sense at all.

This is an electronic introduction to Old English - also much like having free lessons in the language, along with some accompanying exercises to get some good practice in the language if you're interested.

And here we have some texts written in Old English that, when you click on the word, will give you its meaning and case/tense and number and whatnot. Useful for getting the gist of the language as a whole, even if you don't understand it at all.

Now, writing!

 

Old English started out as being written in Elder Futhark, but then it switched over to half-uncial script midway through.

 

The Elder Futhark is a runic alphabet (early Germanic written language). It's the oldest form - hence the name - and used pretty much from the 2nd-8th centuries. Each rune also has it's own name, and many of these are day-to-day words, to which end some of the runes essentially have a definition as a "word"/'abstract concept' by their own right, to which end, when they are used in divination, their meanings are stretched dramatically.

For example, "othala" means estate, which has extended to inheritance, which has extended to possession, which has extended to property - and as such, in many rural areas of Europe, you'll still see it being used to mean "property", even though its name's meaning is "estate". But for the most part, it's used as an alphabet, rather than an abstract language. The system of meanings, and stretched meanings, is, for the most part, confined to runic divination. This is likely what the older magical texts in Merlin would be written in, and/or (depending on your personal preferences) what the very-magic-oriented Druids would likely use.

 

Half-uncial script is basically the Latin lettering we use today. What makes it special enough to be called what it is? Well, first off, you should know that uncial script is basically a type of Latin which uses all capital letters - proper nouns and sentence beginnings are distinguished by the first letters of the word being bigger than the rest, but the rest are still capital letters. Half-uncial script is basically a different form of it, wherein some of the letters more resemble their lowercase counterparts, but ultimately it's still largely capital letters. It was used from the 3rd-8th centuries, from where it then developed into insular script, which eventually evolved into the modern Latin alphabet we use, today. This is the script we see used in Merlin, and as the general time period of Merlin (~5th/6th century AD), this would be the most likely alphabet used for Old English, being the ending transition from Futhark to Latin.

So far, Merlin's spellbook is mostly written in generic medieval Latin script, half-uncial and similar. Some of Gaius's books also included Ogham. That, however, is an ancient Irish language, and so is historically irrelevant, but canonically useful.

 

Hope this helped!
 

 

Bonus Stuff For Merlin Writers

Tarahill's The Runic Journey is my favorite page for runes and magic. It not only gives a very brief but useful history of the language, it has the best definitions of the runes, especially for magic, showing each rune's divinatory meaning, magical use, and associated mythology, along with a nice analysis on each rune. She also includes a great resource list of links on runes. If you want to have one base site to work with, this is it.

Here is another page that gives details on the meanings of the runes. There're a bunch of paragraphs next to each rune. If you're skimming through, just read the last one-line paragraph at the bottom of each passage to make your way quickly through it. If you know what rune you're looking for, read the whole thing - the details are a bit dodgy, but the general idea is usually pretty good to work with in terms of magic and whatnot.

Also, a bunch of random rune charms. Mostly not useful, but quite fun. It includes charms for courage, justice, to quit smoking, to protect your computer, and a love charm from a man to a man.

The show makes frequent use of Ogham, the written language used for Primitive and Old Irish. Now, this could be used to indicate a stronger travel/bond/whatever with Ireland than is historically accurate for the general 6th century era Merlin largely takes place in. (Consider this a good thing: this gives you a much broader range of magic, mythology, and language to work with).

And, because of the complete lack of historical accuracy in the show (corn, anyone?), I also thought it would be a good idea to bring up Midieval runes. It's a descendent of futhark and acts as a bit of a bridge between the use of runes and Latin for writing in the English language, and has more characters that can be related to Latin alphabet and phonology.

And if those two alone aren't really that interesting, here's the article on runic alphabets in general, which gives you a brief rundown of all runic alphabets and links to the more detailed articles about them, as they suit your interest.

Utterly random: stav is a martial art in which the postures are often based on the runes. Might be of interest to some, especially those who like to have "Druid warriors" in their fics. There's also runic yoga in which the poses are based off the runes. (Hm...maybe this could eventually be stretched by Merlin to a midieval-English version of the Kama Sutra? ^_~)

I hope you all have enjoyed this post, and make frequent use of it. Please, if you do use this post, link back to it, or at least tell readers how to find it, so more people will be able to learn about Language and Magic for Merlin.

Last edited on March 3rd, 2011

Comments

[sineala.livejournal.com]

Nice of you to write this!

A couple comments: I'm positive that the sound ash makes is, well, [æ], as mentioned. Also I'm not really sure what you're getting at with þ/ð; as far as I know, OE uses the letters interchangeably for IPA [θ] and [ð], which like the rest of the fricatives have totally predictable allophony -- you get the voiced one between two voiced sounds, voiceless elsewhere.

I've only seen the acute accent used to indicate unpredictable (i.e., non-initial) stress; is that what you meant?

Also, OE word order is, uh, really not the same as ModE -- it is verb-second, like most of the rest of Germanic, and not straight SVO like ModE. So you definitely can't do word-for-word translation.

I'm not really a big fan of the online translator method for coming up with translations. I can't get the site you linked to load, but even if it does give you the full paradigms, I don't think that would help without knowing, say, what cases certain verbs require, or the word order. But, hey, it's at least as good as what the show comes up with, from what I can understand of it.

(I am teaching myself OE, very slowly, but I know way too much about linguistics anyway.)

[nyxelestia.livejournal.com]

Mm, I was mostly pointing out the specific pronunciation of þ, as it came up so often and could be quite confusing, and the þ/ð because for the most part, they're pretty much the same. The voiced/voiceless thing is something that a.) is somewhat accent/dialect based, and b.) tends to come up naturally based on the word, without necessarily being told the difference, as our voicebox adjusts to the phonology on its own.

As for Word Order - I'm just going by what half the sites have told me. Word order is more dynamic in OE than ME, yes, but at the basic-statement levels, they're pretty much the same.

And I'm not a big fan of translators, either - these sites are essentially dictionaries, to be honest, and I usually use that for just about any language - I get the inflected words and adjust them, myself. I don't trust online translators like BabelFish or GoogleTranslate.

:D Have any cool links on OE I can add to the post?

[sineala.livejournal.com]

Hmm. My favorite OE resource is the magic sheet (http://faculty.virginia.edu/OldEnglish/courses/handouts/magic.html), which is all the endings condensed into a nice one-page color-coded table. You can also read scans of the Bosworth-Toller (http://beowulf.engl.uky.edu/~kiernan/BT/Bosworth-Toller.htm) dictionary.

For more of the language-learning stuff, I really like The Electronic Introduction to Old English (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/), and its associated exercises (http://faculty.virginia.edu/OldEnglish/OEA/). They've also got a nice set of texts (http://www.iath.virginia.edu:8090/OEAerobics/index.html), the kind where clicking on any word gives you its case, number, etc etc.

(Actually, my favorite favorite resource is a copy of Sweet's Primer I found in a used bookstore, but that's kind of on the hardcore side. I also really like the Cambridge Old English Reader, and the Klaeber edition of Beowulf, which is the standard scholarly edition and has nice things like a glossary listing every word and what forms it appears in on which lines. And Teach Yourself Old English, which comes with CDs and is therefore awesome. If you were looking for books.)

[nyxelestia.livejournal.com]

The books sound awesome, actually. Sadly, I'm a poor high school student who still can't get a job, and I'm more focused on keeping up with Spanish in self-study, right now. :D Thank you for the links, though! I'm going to look through them, later - when it's not the middle of the night and I don't have an atrocious amount of homework due the next day - and I'll add the links appropriately to the post! ^_^

[sineala.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Yeah, you're right they use the letters interchangeably, for the same two sounds. Interesting idea about dialects -- the rule could very well be only in some dialects, but it's certainly present in the one they write all the books about (West Saxon, maybe?) and you can definitely see its reflexes in ModE; the voicing rule would be why we have plurals like wife/wives and leaf/leaves (the vowel used to be there to condition the voicing and later fell out; the plural morpheme gets pronounced /-z/ due to the usual ModE plural allomorphy rule.

I wouldn't say that it's necessarily predictable without being told about it, either -- sure, intervocalic voicing is ridiculously common cross-linguistically, but this is more than just intervocalic and it's also not a rule we actually have anymore in ModE. Just like I wouldn't expect a ModE speaker to naturally know how to pronounce pre-Great Vowel Shift words even though trisyllabic laxing (e.g., sane/sanity) preserves the pre-GVS vowels. Bits of lexicalized phonology don't mean much.

*takes off phonologist hat, puts on syntactician hat*

And I promise that OE word order, unmarked, is verb-second. Sure, there's flexibility, because it has some inflection, and in poetry more so, as well as in things like the NT that are likely to be directly translating, say, Greek, but really it's verb-second like a proper Germanic language, I promise:

soþlice hit wæs ofer stan getimbrode
forsooth it was over stone built

(sorry, I lost my dots and macrons) which is from, uh, somewhere in Matthew, and a decent example of something V2-like. Sure, with sentences with no auxiliaries are gonna look a lot like ModE, but as soon as you throw in auxiliaries you see you've got a very Germanic word order. (Current English word order is totally the fault of the French. Stupid Norman conquest.)

*takes off syntactician hat, runs to catch bus* I can geek more later if you like.

[nyxelestia.livejournal.com]

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

And please, feel free to geek all you want. ^_^

[nyxelestia.livejournal.com]

@_@

Holy fuck, that post got away from me...