re: #13 Big Steve

So the story goes…that when Lincoln was writing the Gettysburg Address (there are several drafts and don’t believe the crap that he wrote it on the train)…he went through the speech and replaced all words in his draft that weren’t Anglo Saxon in origin to their Anglo Saxon equivalent. The arbiter of the times was the King James bible which was written in old English. In fact scholars say that the only words in the address that do not appear in the King James Bible were “civil” and “proposition”.

The KJ is actually written in early Modern English. Shakespeare too.

Chaucer wrote in Middle English. “Old English” is synonymous with “Anglo-Saxon” and refers to the language spoken in England before the Norman Conquest. Stuff like Beowulf:

Hwt. We Gardena in gear-dagum,
eodcyninga, rym gefrunon,
hu a elingas ellen fremedon.