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Old English Alphabet: Texts
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Old English is an early form of the English language that was spoken in England around 1000 years ago. It is sometimes called Anglo-Saxon as it was mainly derived from the tongue of the Saxons. The language spoken in England is considered Old English 450 AD until some time after the Norman invasion of England (around 1066 AD), when it becomes Middle English. Most Old English texts are now transliterated rather than being produced in period typefaces.
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Old English began to appear in writing during the early 8th century. Most texts were written in West Saxon, one of the four main dialects. The other dialects were Mercian, Northumbrian and Kentish.
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Old English lessons, including pronunciation, spelling, and grammar guide with sound files. Contains text based lessons on the Voyage of Ohthere, Abraham and Isaac, and the Story of Cynewulf and Cyneheard. From the University of Calgary.
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This translation follows the Old English translation of a lost Latin translation of the Greek text. The text is given superscript verse numbers to make it easy to compare the Modern to the Old English text. The Old English text, "Sancte Andrea," is from Bright's Old English Grammar and Reader, third edition. Verse numbers and side-by-side paragraphs are used instead of side-by-side verses to retain the modern convention of prose paragraphs.
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The DOE is based on a computerized Corpus comprising at least one copy of each text surviving in Old English. The total size is about six times the collected works of Shakespeare. The body of surviving Old English texts encompasses a rich diversity of records written on parchment, carved in stone and inscribed in jewelry. These texts fall into several categories: prose, poetry, glosses to Latin texts and inscriptions. In the prose in particular, there is a wide range of texts: saints' lives, sermons, biblical translations, penitential writings, laws, charters and wills, records (of manumissions, land grants, land sales, land surveys), chronicles, a set of tables for computing the moveable feasts of the Church calendar and for astrological calculations, medical texts, prognostics (the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the horoscope), charms (such as those for a toothache or for an easy labour), and even cryptograms.
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Everyone who writes makes mistakes, and it is probably safe to say that every Old English text of any length at all contains errors. Most manuscripts ... contain corrections, either by the scribe himself or by a later corrector. But the correction of texts was often inconsistently carried out, and may not have taken into account errors already present in the copy from which corrections were being entered. In general you should not assume that a corrected text retains no uncorrected errors.
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