There's something very charming about Middle English to me. Here's my overly etymological translation to point out the vocabulary correspondence to Modern English (minus the archaic -th endings):

"A frog is a small beast with four legs, which lives both in water and on land. It could be brown or green or yellow, or be it tropical, he may have diverse colors. It has lungs and gills both. It hatches from an egg and it then is a tadpole. It grows to be a frog, if it by then be not eaten."

If you like this kind of phrasing, try some German. German is English that is not molested by the French of the Normans, and one of the results of this is that the language is more consistent. (This is not exactly correct, but it’s a more humane way of saying German and English share some roots in Proto Indo-European.) That allows for a wide variety of phrasings or ‘turns of the word’ that are all dead in English since Norman words do not carry inflections German words do about their location in a sentence, which gives German its flexibility to jumble almost any combination of words into a valid sentence. As a mitigation, English instead calcified a few ways to structure a sentence and called it a day - one of the things that make it easier to learn, but also much more boring.

Here is a free course that only focuses on reading German, I found it quite fun to play with. https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/

> German is English that is not molested by the French of the Normans, and one of the results of this is that the language is more consistent.

There’s a constructed dialect called “Anglish” that attempts to be this more literally.

wasn't Tolkien trying to not use French roots in the Lord of the Rings?

> That allows for a wide variety of phrasings or ‘turns of the word’ that are all dead in English since Norman words do not carry inflections German words do about their location in a sentence, which gives German its flexibility to jumble almost any combination of words into a valid sentence.

There is this old joke where two students sit in a lesson and one asks the other, "What did the professor just say?" and the other student answers, "I don't know yet, let's wait for the verb".

Another consequence of this flexibility is that stylistic devices that depend on the word order, like the anastrophe, don't work that well in German.

Here's another one:

> Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

This actually is a Mark Twain quote. When I heard the story about the professor and the students it was attributed to Mark Twain too, but when I tried to look it up before posting I couldn't find a clue.

>As a mitigation, English instead calcified a few ways to structure a sentence and called it a day - one of the things that make it easier to learn, but also much more boring.

Isn't this because the language we're reading in OP and speak now is the pidgin that developed between Viking settlers and English incumbents? Doesn't that also explain why our pronouns are Scandinavian rather than the ones found in Old English or old Norman?

> Doesn't that also explain why our pronouns are Scandinavian rather than the ones found in Old English or old Norman?

I think only the third person plural (they/their/them) is of Old Norse origin (ON þeir supplanting OE hie). Interesting, we still use 'em which probably derives from the original English pronoun, not a shortening of "them" (we don't normally chop "th" off the beginning of a word).

Compare for example:

he: OE "he" / ON "hann"

your: OE "eower" / ON "yðar"

it: OE "hit" / ON "þat" (note: still "hit" in some modern dialects)

her: OE "hire" / ON "hennar/henni"

> Interesting, we still use 'em which probably derives from the original English pronoun, not a shortening of "them" (we don't normally chop "th" off the beginning of a word).

This is not a strong point; "them" is not a normal word. We freely reduce all the pronouns.

That is one idea but there are problems with it, such as the many irregular verbs in English. Doubtless both Old Norse and Norman French had a very significant influence on the language we speak today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothes...

According to Caxton there was a controversy between egges and "eyren".

egge being derived from Norse, while eye/eai/etc from Anglo-Saxon æg. The final g eventually came to be pronounced like a y in that environment, a development that apparently did not affect the Old Norse word -- probably due to being borrowed after the sound shift had already occurred, though the doubled gg could have prevented it anyways (not sure about this latter part).

From https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=egg:

"""

This Norse-derived northern word vied in Middle English with native cognates eye, eai, from Old English æg, until finally displacing the others after c. 1500. Caxton (15c.) writes of a merchant (probably a north-country man) in a public house on the Thames who asked for eggs:

And the goode wyf answerde, that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coude speke no frenshe, but wolde have hadde egges, and she understode hym not.

"""

Very interesting! The Dutch for eggs is "eiren" (plural of "ei" pronounced "ey")

Nitpicking, the plural is eieren, with three distinct syllables :) IIRC, there used to both words with -er and -en as plural, but over time the norm became -en so it was tacked onto the -er. Like kind/kinderen. In German Kinder and Eier are still the plural.

Regional differences.

Approximately, following the advice from the article:

_ A frog beeth a small beast with four legs, which liveth both in water and on land. It could be brown or green or yellow, or be it tropical, it may have diverse colors. It hath lungs and gills both. It hatcheth from an egg, and it then is a tadpole. It groweth to be a frog, if it then be not eaten._

Wouldn’t beaste be “deer” back then? Maybe it depended on distance from London?

Edit: I mean wouldn’t they have used “deer” rather than “beaste” for modern “animal”.

There's probably some semantic overlap between "beaste" and "dere" (various spellings) in the Middle English period. "dere" could refer to small animals (possibly frogs?) or specifically to deer in the modern sense (i.e. Cervidae).

Old English "deor" actually meant "beast/animal" in the broader sense (cognates include German "Tier") but began to specialize after being pushed out by Norman French "beste" (sp?) during the Middle English period.

The Dutch word for "animals" is "dieren". When I first heard of the Dutch animal rights/welfare focused political party Partij voor de Dieren, I wondered why there was a political party focused just on deer. (Some people might also find it strange to have a party focused on animal welfare, but it certainly makes more sense than if it were just focused on deer!)

Swedish cognate djur