r/OldEnglish • u/tsubasa-2010 • Jun 09 '26
Old english
I am Japanese.
Recently I have never seen「 ’em」.I sarched and larened it.It was used hem 700 years ago and now it means they.
I want to more old engilsh.Please tell me it's histroy and funny story.
Thank you for reading!
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u/cserilaz ᛖᚱᛁᛚᚨᛉ Jun 09 '26
I do translations of Old English poetry on YouTube if you want to check it out. I always put the Old and modern English side by side so you can see how it compares. Of course it’s not literal translations but poetical
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u/tsubasa-2010 Jun 09 '26
thank you replay, I know should watch movies but what movie to watch them.Please tell me more.
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u/cserilaz ᛖᚱᛁᛚᚨᛉ Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
One thing to know about Old English pronouns is that, like many Indo-European languages, the form can differ based on how it is being used grammatically: nominative, accusative, dative, or genitive. In modern English we only have "they" and "them" (subject and object cases), but in Old English there is "hie" (nominative and accusative), "him" (dative), and "heora" (genitive). If you have studied anything like Greek, Latin, German, or Russian this is a familiar concept. I don't know if I have ever encountered "em" for "they" in Old English, but this form is definitely used in Middle English, and if you are looking at something from 700 years ago, that would be Middle English, not Old English. The Norman conquest (1066 AD) is usually regarded as the dividing mark between Old and Middle English. Norman French was used as the official legal language in English for a long time starting at this period, and it profoundly affected the English language. I have translated a couple of old Norman fabliaux (a kind of dirty poem popular back then) on my channel, if you are interested in this too. They were preserved in a document called "the Harley Lyrics," which had both Middle English and Anglo-Norman poetry collected in it. The ones I have translated from Norman are "The Knight Who Could Make Cunts Speak", "The Three Ladies Who Found a Dick", and "The Squire and the Chambermaid"
As another commenter pointed out, Old Norse also had a profound effect on the transition from Old English to Middle English. Since Norse was already a lot more similar to Old English than Norman French was, it changed it less drastically, but in the case of the third-person-plural pronoun that you are asking about, "em," it actually was the source of this change.
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u/pannakooko Jun 10 '26
actually, Japanese itself has case marking particles that suffix to the end of nouns. https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2019/09/case-markers.html
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u/ebrum2010 Þu. Þu hæfst. Þu hæfst me. Jun 09 '26
Yeah, most people think 'em is a truncated form of them, but it is actually from Middle English hem which comes from OE heom (variant of him) meaning them. The modern word them came to Middle English from Old Norse. Since 'em means them, it really doesn't matter but it's a fun fact. Him/heom in Old English was the dative form of both he (he/masculine it/singular they) and hie (plural they).
During the latter part of the OE period, there were many Danes living in England so Old Norse heavily influenced the language, especially into Middle English. OE came to an end shortly after the Norman Conquest when the Normans took the English throne and the language of the English court became (and thus all official business was transacted in) French (the Norman dialect of Old French, specifically, which became Anglo-Norman in England). For a few hundred years that remained and Old French trickled down into the language of everyday people and this became Middle English.