The first recorded sentence in English

[lethargic_man]

Back when I posted my English-through-1500-years video, David Curwin of the Balashon blog recommended I send it to Kevin Stroud of the History of English podcast, who tweeted it to his followers.

Ever since, I've been playing catch-up on the podcast; I'm currently up to episode 30 (and have also listened to episodes 75 (I think) to 82 which were podcast since then). Stroud is an amateur linguist, and makes a few mistakes (particularly regarding historical pronunciation, and the Semitic languages), but what he lacks occasionally in depth he makes up for in breadth, and I'm thoroughly enjoying listening to his podcast. Some of the earlier episodes (he begins his history of English with the proto-Indo Europeans) didn't tell me much I didn't know already, but the further he goes, the more I'm learning.

Anyhow, the reason I'm blogging this is because I recently learned through this podcast of the existence of the fifth-century Undley bracteate (medallion), which contains the oldest Germanic inscription found in England, and hence can be argued to be the oldest sentence known in English.

It reads g͡æg͡og͡æ mægæ medu, which Stroud translated "This she-wolf [depicted on the bracteate] is a reward for my kinsmen"; Wikipedia demurs about the first word, deeming it a "magical invocation or battle cry"; so that leaves mægæ medu "meed for the kinsmen", which seems disappointingly opaque for an English sentence at first glance. (Translating medu into modern English "meed" doesn't particularly help if you're not familiar with this word.)

However, a closer inspection does actually shed a little light, particularly if you know German. Mæg (nominative of mægæ) had a female form, mægþ, upon which the diminutive suffix -en (as in "chick-en") was appended to give mæġden, or to wind the clock on 1500 years, "maiden" in modern English. And medu "reward", turns out to be cognate to modern German mieten, "to rent" or "hire".

So despite this first recorded English sentence looking at first sight completely opaque, it turns out on close examination to involve roots I am indeed familiar with. I thought this was cool.