Mind your language
Mind your language
Wednesday, 29th August 2007
A company called Optimum has written drawing attention to a website it runs
which analyses passages of writing and highlights the words that come from Old English in blue.
A company called Optimum has written drawing attention to a website it runs which analyses passages of writing and highlights the words that come from Old English in blue. Very pretty. They have posted up some examples from famous writers free at www.optimumcomms.co.uk. ‘Surviving words from Old English have a special power to communicate,’ says their introductory blurb. ‘Great writers, especially poets, have always understood this.’
By Optimum’s analysis, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four takes 74.2 per cent of its words from Old English, only a nose ahead of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice at 74.1 per cent. The percentage for Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is 76.9, compared to 78.3 percent for Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and 78.4 per cent for a helping of T.S. Eliot’s poetry. But no one would reckon ‘Prufrock’ simpler than A Christmas Carol.
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