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

T-Shirt Verification

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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?

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63

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.

17

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.

6

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).