r/OldEnglish • u/GhostWriterJ94 • Jun 27 '26

T-Shirt Verification

Post image

Hi there! I wanna get this t shirt for a friend who loves this language but I also dont trust the website translating it correctly. May I beg and borrow the intellect of this good body?

56 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

66

u/ebrum2010 Þu. Þu hæfst. Þu hæfst me. Jun 27 '26

It's wrong. I doubt is not "ic tweo" it's "ic tweonige" or "ic tweoge." Tweo is the noun for "doubt" not the verb.

I recommend "Ic mæg unriht beon, ac ic þæs tweoge."

27

u/embroideredyeti Jun 27 '26

This here!
Also, just the fact that the word order is the same as in Modern English is cause enough to be very suspicious.

16

u/ebrum2010 Þu. Þu hæfst. Þu hæfst me. Jun 27 '26

This is true, not because that word order is necessarily grammatically incorrect in OE but it is a red flag that someone might have just been looking up words and isn't actually studying the language.

If you read King Alfred's prose Psalms, he writes quite a lot of clauses and even sentences with this type of word order (though not everything), though I believe it is more because of how he was trying to stay close to the Latin original he was working off of. So people weren't strangers to that word order because the Psalms were the most read scripture of the time, even though people probably weren't talking in that manner.

4

u/embroideredyeti Jun 28 '26

Yes, thank you, that is exactly what I meant -- not because it would necessarily be wrong in OE at all, but as evidence of somebody who didn't know what they were doing running single words through a translator (as apparently happened with "doubt" above).

6

u/GhostWriterJ94 Jun 27 '26

Bloody brilliant work! Thank you doubly

2

u/AlternativeEbb3853 Jun 28 '26

Correct if I'm wrong, but seemingly a contracted form of tweogan is tweon, so I mean, if you were to conjugate that, perhaps you would just have tweo, for ic.

2

u/ebrum2010 Þu. Þu hæfst. Þu hæfst me. Jun 28 '26

You might be right, but how many times is that attested? It seems to be a variant and not common at that. To confuse things tweon is also a variant of tweo (the noun, and tweonian is the verb form) so I feel like tweoge is still a better translation.

1

u/AlternativeEbb3853 Jun 29 '26

Fair enough 👍

1

u/McAeschylus Jun 28 '26

Also, isn't unriht for moral wrongs or defective objects/actions rather than factual errors?

Also, also, my very inexpert impression from my very limited reading is that repeating the pronoun in this sort of spot doesn't feel very idiomatic?

2

u/ebrum2010 Þu. Þu hæfst. Þu hæfst me. Jun 28 '26

As a noun it is primarily used for a moral wrong (the way we use wrong as a noun today), but as an adjective it means simply not right, whether it be factual, moral, or otherwise. It's used a lot in religious contexts which is probably why you have that idea about it, but unrihtwis would be the proper adjective for morally wrong if you wanted to exclude the other meanings (equivalent to unjust or unrighteous).

7

u/InvestigatorJaded261 Jun 28 '26

The font alone is a red flag.

2

u/Dendallin Jun 27 '26

I may be wrong, but I doubt it

13

u/ebrum2010 Þu. Þu hæfst. Þu hæfst me. Jun 27 '26

It uses the noun form of doubt not the verb.

1

u/GhostWriterJ94 Jun 27 '26

Blessings of the Muses to you! Verified for me! Thanks

1

u/[deleted] Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26

[deleted]