"Abent omnes volucres nidos inceptos nisi eg et tu. Quid expectamus nunc?" is the Latin version of a famous probatio pennae found at the University of Oxford in 1932. What language was the original version in?

collect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebban_olla_vogala "Hebban olla vogala, sometimes spelt hebban olla uogala, are the first three words of an ancient fragment of Dutch. The fragment was discovered in 1932 in the margin of a Latin manuscript that was made in the abbey of Rochester, Kent and that is kept in Oxford. It has been dated to the 12th century, but it might be from even earlier." May 21 07, 5:20 AM

Sofie

Old Dutch, is the language ancestral to the Low Franconian languages, including Dutch itself. It was spoken between the 6th and 11th centuries, continuing the earlier Old Frankish language. The present Dutch standard language is derived from Old Dutch dialects spoken in the Low Countries that were first recorded in the Salic law, a Frankish document written around 510. From this document originated the oldest sentence that has been indentified as Dutch: "Maltho thi afrio lito" as sentence used to free a serf. Other old segments of Dutch are "Visc flot aftar themo uuatare" ("A fish was swimming in the water") and "Gelobistu in got alamehtigan fadaer" ("Do you believe in God the almighty father"). The latter fragment was written around 900. Arguable the most famous text containing "Old Dutch" is:"Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan, hinase hic enda tu, wat unbidan we nu" ("All birds have started making nests, except me and you, what are we waiting for"), dating around the year 1100, written by a Flemish monk in a convent in Rochester, England. For a long time this sentence was considered to be the earliest in Dutch, but some scholars now believe it to be Old English. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Dutch#Old_Dutch May 21 07, 5:21 AM

breeze51

Old Dutch: (copied from www.ned.univie.ac.at) It all begins with love - the "probatio pennae" In the Middle Ages, when pens were still made from feathers, scribes used to test their new quills on the pages of the book on which they were working at the time. In 1932 an English academic in an Oxford library found a loose piece of parchment which had been used to reinforce the binding of a book, and on which, alongside a Latin inscription, a verse in Old Dutch has been immortalised as the so-called "probatio pennae". This short text was written in around 1100 by a monk from West Flanders, living at that time in Rochester Abbey in the county of Kent in England. It would appear that he took up his new pen and wrote down the first thing that occurred to him. To make his text intelligible to others he wrote, word for word, the Latin translation above it: hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan hinase hi(c) (e)nda thu uu(at) unbida(n) (uu)e nu "All the birds have started their nests except me and you. What are we waiting for now?" May 21 07, 5:21 AM

Flem-ish

Since 1932 it had always been called Old Dutch, but researchers seem to have changed their views. I still wonder what made them reconsider their opinion. May 22 07, 9:38 AM