Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Let me note three ways: the word breaks are wrong, the þ-th thing, and the c-k thing.

So let's try the opening of Beowulf again, slightly differently:

Hwæt! We gar-Dena in gear-dagum theod-kyninga thrym gefrunon.

What! We war-Danes in yore-days tribe-kings glory heard.

So, we Spear-Danes have heard of the tribe-kings’ glory in days of yore.

Hwæt, we gardena in geardagum þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon is unintelligible to a modern English reader. But—once you replace their "þ" with our "th", put the word breaks where they really are, and if you know that the initial c in "cyninga", kings, is hard—it is not true that "to the untrained eye, Beowulf might as well be... Turkish". Beowulf is just over but on the edge of intelligibility, in a way that:

Yani! Biz Mızrak-Danimarkalılar Eskiden günlerinde kabile-kral şan duymuş

which is Turkish—to the untrained and trained eye—Turkish, is not.

You might say: that is why McWhorter said "to the untrained eye". And I say: cards dealt from the bottom of the deck. Here is the end of McWhorter's article:

Here is Old Norse from the 900s CE, the first lines of a tale in the Poetic Edda called "The Lay of Thrym". The lines mean ‘Angry was Ving-Thor/he woke up,’ as in: he was mad when he woke up. In Old Norse it was:

Vreiðr vas Ving-Þórr / es vaknaði.

The same two lines in Old Norse as spoken in modern Icelandic today are:

Reiður var þá Vingþórr / er hann vaknaði.

You don’t need to know Icelandic to see that the language hasn’t changed much. ‘Angry’ was once vreiðr; today’s reiður is the same word with the initial v worn off and a slightly different way of spelling the end. In Old Norse you said vas for was; today you say var–small potatoes.

In Old English, however, ‘Ving-Thor was mad when he woke up’ would have been Wraþmod wæs Ving-Þórr/he áwæcnede. We can just about wrap our heads around this as ‘English’, but we’re clearly a lot further from Beowulf than today’s Reykjavikers are from Ving-Thor.

We are a lot further from Beowulf than Icelandic is fromm Old Norse. But let's not deal from the bottom of the deck. As Doug, one of Making Light's commenters, well, comments:

And from near the end:

In Old English, however, ‘Ving-Thor was mad when he woke up’ would have been Wraþmod wæs Ving-Þórr/he áwæcnede. We can just about wrap our heads around this as ‘English’, but we’re clearly a lot further from Beowulf than today’s Reykjavikers are from Ving-Thor...

On the other hand, "Wrathful was Ving-Thor/When he awakened."

Not a great example for McWhorter to pick, no? And if your hand-picked examples aren't great, should you really be saying you have a strong point?

Read MOAR. In fact, read the whole thing...