CBC Radio’s The Sunday Magazine is a lively, wide-ranging mix of topical long-form conversations, engaging ideas and more. Each week, host Piya Chattopadhyay takes time for deep exploration, but also makes space for surprise, delight and fun.
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Word Processing: The magic, mystery and legacy of Old English
11:14
For the latest installment of our ongoing language series Word Processing, we’re going way back in time to Old English – the often unrecognizable version of English spoken a thousand-plus years ago. When Toronto-based writer and medievalist Hana Videen started tweeting one word of Old English per day a decade ago, she found a surprisingly big audience for often mysterious and poetic ancient terms – like "weave-walker" for spider, "bone-locker" for body, and "day-candle" for the sun. She’s collected some of them in a book called The Wordhord. And she explains how these words illuminate not only everyday life in historical England, but also help explain some of the weirder bits of the English language today.