heritage

so here's a thing i've been working on: i've been  writing a little story for a geocache puzzle and at the risk of being all spoilery, i'm going to tell you that i've taken the puzzle and written it out in west saxon literary dialect, which is the version of old english that was being spoken in about the year 900.

while you can see in places its relationship to modern english, you can also see many many differences, starting with alphabet. many of the letters simply looked way different than they do now, and old english had letters that don't exist anymore.

additionally, old english was a case inflected language, like german or russian, or mostly case inflected, because already the instrumental case was mostly gone.

nearly nobody in my family thought to speak any english until they migrated to north america in the late 19th century but nonetheless i feel as if old english is part of my heritage.

and why not? i am a native english speaker; why should not the history of my language be my heritage as much as my blood lineage?

i'm not FROM vermont, but i consider vermont history to be my heritage as well, and also US history from before my ancestors arrived here.

so anyway.

i wrote out a little story that somehow contains coordinates and directions to the geocache in question, and here is what it looks like:

please note the image at the bottom of the second page.  spiffy, huh?

i giggle.

here's a recording of me reading it out loud: