Jordi Cano writes about his time on the Learn Old English project as a work experience student from Christleton High School, and what he learnt about the language, and this web resource.
I worked from the 2nd to the 5th July 2024 as a research assistant on the Learn Old English project at the University of Chester, under the direction of Dr Paul Flanagan and Dr Harry Parkin from the English Language team.
The Learn Old English project
The Learn Old English project team has developed a website which can assist in translating Old English to Modern English and Modern English to Old English; not only that, but it also gives a rough guide of the grammar and history behind Old English so you can self-teach to an extent. While it’s only in its early stages of development at the moment, it will not stop developing as there is a large list of ideas which could be incorporated into the website to make a highly functional resource which the general public can learn from. In its relatively early infancy, the Learn Old English website has developed rapidly from a single concept on a napkin not so long ago to a fully functional website in which you can learn the language that would have existed in Britain 1500 years ago. What makes this website different? Possibly you could think this concept has been created already, and you would be partly right, but this project builds on the latest conceptual iterations to deliver a more advanced platform, never seen before. In the future this website could have a more developed learning platform to help anyone learn Old English at any stage of their learning process.
Old English versus Late Modern English
Some of the images which might come to mind when you hear about Old English are often not actually Old English at all, but something closer to the English we know today. This can be seen in religious texts like the King James Bible, which used an archaic version of English, but not the Old English I’ve come to write about today; in this version of English from the 1600s, known as Early Modern English, you can see some elements that look like what we know as English today. But this is only a small snapshot of the complex history of the English language that developed from the interconnections of Germanic languages before the Anglo Saxons, more than 1500 years ago. You can see the differences between these two varieties of English below, almost a millennium apart.
Early Modern English:
Old English:
What is it like being a research assistant?
The job of a research assistant varies across different universities, organisations and projects, but in general it involves working with data to look for a solution or answer to a problem. Therefore, most research assistants would use some software, whether that is Excel or similar to work with large data sets. For example, one of the researchers on the Learn Old English project was involved in a different project that looked at the history of English surnames in the fourteenth century. In this case the dataset had over 200,000 rows in Excel, so you can imagine the magnitude of the data used in other projects such as the Learn Old English project. In this project, to date we have thousands of words that need to be investigated, some of which are shown below. As a result not only is the capacity to work with large amount of data important, it is also important to maintain a steady pace and a consistently good quality of work, so the project has the least delays and every ounce of work is equal to every ounce of output.
Furthermore, not only do you have to organise and sort the data, you also have to search sources for the data. In that case, your work expands into other areas that you might not have thought of before, like searching through large digital or physical archives to find accurate sources which can inform your work. Consequently, it is very important that the person involved in this line of work also has good judgement and analytical skills to deduce the reliability and accuracy of the data sources. In my case, I did not get involved in finding the sources to work with, but I did work with the sources of the data. In other fields like economic research and sociological research, this need for a data-driven answer is very important so the number of research assistants can increase substantially from a few to a dozen, depending on the project.
Another characteristic which is important to write about in the research assistant sector is the responsibilities that a research assistant may have. These responsibilities can vary depending on the research project but generally you will be given a great deal of responsibility, and as a result it might feel overwhelming at times, but once you get used to the pace of the work and the routine that is involved you will find that it becomes less so.
Applications of the project
The applications of this website for schools and other educational institutions like Museums are very promising as it encapsulates a large knowledge base and makes it available for the general public to exploit and use; it might serve as the foundational basis for further research or might inspire other people into producing new project ideas which build upon the current Learn Old English project. Additionally, it could kickstart careers in this field and increase government support for research on this topic, possibly expanding its outreach into other universities and schools. Right now, Old English is not taught widely at universities and schools because teachers and educators are hesitant of jumping into what is effectively a new language for many people that does not conform to most of the grammatical rules of Late Modern English. As a result this website is a useful tool that makes learning about this phase of the language much more accessible.
Above, you can see Dr Paul Flanagan introducing a sentence in Old English to an audience at Chester’s Festival of Ideas in July 2024. He is explaining how the Old English word for a farmer is ierϸling, which is an older form of the modern-day English word earthling (hence the image of an alien!). This older form of the word referred to someone working with soil (earth), rather than someone from the planet Earth. He also noted here that there is no Old English equivalent of the indefinite article a in this sentence. Old English didn’t have words like this, and English only started using them after the Normans invaded in the eleventh century. But that is a different story…