Friday, December 08, 2023

Music on My Mind

 

the_miracle_aligner, "Running Up That Hill (Bardcore)". The language on this translated cover of Kate Bush's song is quite interesting; it's in many ways recognizable as a sort of Middle English, which is more or less Anglo-Saxon that had interacted with a lot of Old Norse in the Danelaw area of Britain, but it doesn't yet have much of the Normanized English in it that Chaucer's does, and thus is definitely farther from us than Chaucer is. The translator apparently used Orm as his primary model, which puts it in the twelfth century, compared to Chaucer's fourteenth century. (I suspect Orm was used because Orm invented a phonetic spelling system, and therefore the Ormulum gives a fairly accessible understanding of how the language was actually pronounced.)