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| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML How far back in time can you understand English?
fatnoah wrote 1 hour 27 min ago:
I don't know where my car keys are, but I still remember a significant
portion of the "Our Father" that I had to memorize in Old English in
the early 1990's.
treebeard901 wrote 1 day ago:
2026: Emojis, Reaction Gifs, and AI
pavlov wrote 1 day ago:
1300 was a breeze but then I got stuck. (What did the strong and stiff
wife do in 1200? Iâll never know⦠Edit - on second reading, Iâm
getting the picture, seems like medieval Tarantino.)
I thought my Swedish and basic knowledge of Icelandic spelling would
have been more helpful than it was. From 1300 on it feels like the
influence of French is making the language more familiar.
clbrmbr wrote 1 day ago:
AmaZing job. My 6 and 8 yo could understand back to 1400.
ogogmad wrote 1 day ago:
Never learnt much Dutch or German, however I understand virtually 100%
of everything down to and including "1200". On 1100, my understanding
collapses suddenly to 30%.
abc123abc123 wrote 1 day ago:
Ah, finally!
"If youâve ever seen a pub called âYe Oldeâ anything, that ye is
actually þe, an attempt by early printers to write a thorn without
having to make an expensive new letter".
Now I know.
caro_kann wrote 1 day ago:
As a non-native and I could understand only down to 1500s. And it
sounded (read?) like scottish for me.
Johnyjohnson123 wrote 1 day ago:
Could barely understand the 1900 one
Tor3 wrote 1 day ago:
Interesting. Down through 1300 was pretty straight forward. 1200 slowed
me down a lot. 1100 I could only get a couple of sentences from, at
first straight read-through, but it looks like I should be able to read
it by going carefully through it.
Background: Fully understands Scandinavian languages (native), can read
a bit of German and Dutch, proficient in English, and can read a fair
bit of Icelandic. All of this seems to help.
MrScruff wrote 1 day ago:
Seems like some of the initial changes are reflecting more than just
the evolving language. Heâs comparing someone using informal slang
ânot gonna lieâ against someone writing extremely formally
âHunger, that great leveller, makes philosophers of us all, and
renders even the meanest dish agreeable.â which Iâm not sure makes
sense.
jcul wrote 1 day ago:
This struck me too, the fact that this task is so impossible.
Language changes in the time axis but also in the location and social
axes. The best we can probably hope for is one snapshot in time.
However this is meant to be a blogger, journalist, writer etc.,
through time this may have been the expected style for writing of
this sort.
Especially in medieval times, I understand it may have been
impossible to understand people a few towns away as the dialect could
change so dramatically.
Disclaimer, I'm no expert, but I find linguistics fascinating.
Still, I really enjoyed this and I commend the effort!
predkambrij wrote 1 day ago:
I must admit that I didn't read the article in full.
prmoustache wrote 1 day ago:
Too bad because all the explanations are in the end.
mmumo wrote 1 day ago:
my girlfriend isn't ready for the mansplanning coming up tomorrow
during dinner about this
blackhaz wrote 1 day ago:
Anyone else feeling like Daffy Duck reading the 1700s?
TheServitor wrote 1 day ago:
There is a point where English becomes harder than Latin.
hcfman wrote 1 day ago:
Oh man. You really gotta love the unusual special interests of people.
Super work!
arjie wrote 1 day ago:
Haha! That was remarkable! What an enjoyable experience! I read through
and thought I must surely have done better than the average man, having
only started stumbling in the 1200s on account of using my clever
method of speaking out the words, only to find from the author that
this is about the average place a native English speaker would find his
way barred by Germans!
Great fun, and helped a little perhaps by the fact that I've visited
Iceland and that language uses the thorn for the sound we make in
'thin' and eth for the sound we make in 'then' so I mimicked that.
ojbyrne wrote 1 day ago:
Once upon a time I took a course where the prof read excerpts from
Chaucer to us. Middle English was much more decipherable to this modern
English speaker when it was spoken.
kinj28 wrote 1 day ago:
Some random thoughts â
why language would evolve ? Letâs say to make it easier and better ?
And if such a case then wouldnât that be applicable to all languages?
If yes then I am a native kutchi speaker and it just a dialect. How
would its history of change could even be found? But I do speak other
languages like Gujarati and Hindi and I wonder if there was any
evolution if those languages which have a
barnabee wrote 1 day ago:
> Letâs say to make it easier and better ?
I hope not
Better for it to grow layers that are new and exciting, accessible
only to the cultures that create them (and whatever comes after) and
those who make the effort to continue learning
kinj28 wrote 1 day ago:
As I read the article â I was curious if there are any language
museums. If any would love to visit.
baristaGeek wrote 1 day ago:
This very interesting blog post got me thinking how English would look
like in 2100 or 2200 driven by the changes of the internet and AI.
Spelling matters less so alphabet gets reduced? Simpler grammar as it
gets more spoken worldwide? Emojis as punctuation?
window unseal nite no log. odd.
tgtweak wrote 1 day ago:
It just gets more and more Scottish as it goes.
bryanrasmussen wrote 1 day ago:
huh I was looking through it again and I noticed what I think is a typo
"Ãe sayde MaiÅ¿ter, what that hee apperid bifore me"
I believe should be
"Ãe sayde MaiÅ¿ter, what Ãat hee apperid bifore me"
Or were there situations in the 1400s when the thorn would not be used
for representing th?
on edit: or is it a representation of the changeability of spelling
choices in individual texts, which admittedly this text seems a bit
less changeable and random than many authors of that time period.
mauvehaus wrote 1 day ago:
One of the absolute treasures of our time is The History of English
Podcast. 186 episodes in, and he's just gotten past Shakespeare. The
first 30 or so episodes might run a little slow for you for lack of
written sources, but it really does pick up and has been hours of joy.
[1] For the prurient, Chaucer's Vulgar Tongue is a great place to dip a
toe into it: [1] 2019/09/25/episode-129-c...
HTML [1]: https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
HTML [2]: https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2019/09/25/episode-129-cha...
rpicard wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm just ahead of you on episode 200! Just getting into the rise of
printing in English.
I absolutely agree. This has become my comfort podcast when I just
want to decompress.
pests wrote 1 day ago:
To suggest another decompression / interesting podcast, "The Fall
of Civilizations" by Paul Cooper. I do like the visual episodes he
releases later on YT - its not just random stock photos but
directly relevant to what's being discussed, but they release
awhile after the audio. The audio is splendid as well though.
xeromal wrote 1 day ago:
I haven't listened to this podcast, but if you want another one,
the history of rome podcast by Mike Duncan holds a similar place in
my heart. He's kind of monotone but I was entranced and would you
believe that I couldn't listen to the episode for the final emperor
because I didn't want the roman empire to fall. lol. What a good
series.
lqstuart wrote 1 day ago:
I love this podcast, I've listened to it all the way through
probably ten times.
That acoustic guitar riff followed by "Hello, and welcome to the
History of Rome" is how I'll know I'm dead and I've arrived at
the gates of heaven
Fuzzwah wrote 1 day ago:
Acoustic picking 18 from garage band....
wholinator2 wrote 1 day ago:
Oh my God, are you serious? I don't know how to feel about
this
himlion wrote 1 day ago:
His subsequent podcast: "revolutions" is also really good.
Meegul wrote 1 day ago:
The revolutions podcast is perhaps one of my favorite podcasts
of all time. The American, French, and Russian revolution
seasons are all incredibly enlightening to the world that we
live in, while plainly also being just so entertaining.
mauvehaus wrote 1 day ago:
200? The website only goes to 187. Do I need to get on Patreon or
something?
rpicard wrote 1 day ago:
I think thereâs a numbering difference. He went back and re did
a bunch of earlier ones.
Iâm listening on Apple Podcasts. Season 5 episode 5 âPrintin
and Perkinâ if it helps.
Uncorrelated wrote 1 day ago:
You're thinking of the The History of England podcast, not The
History of English. The History of English Podcast does cover
English history, often going deeper than is strictly necessary
for tracing the evolution of English, but its primary focus is
language. It's also very cozy, something you could listen to
while sipping tea by a warm fire, and its consistency, clarity,
and depth has made it my favorite podcast.
rpicard wrote 1 day ago:
Oh thatâs funny. Yes youâre right.
He has actually mentioned the History of English before, but
Iâve never listened to it. Great to hear though!
uhhhd wrote 1 day ago:
There are towns in England and America where I can't understand them
today.
cbdevidal wrote 1 day ago:
In Christian circles some people are KJV-only, only reading from the
1611 KJV. But articles like this demonstrate that languages change
dramatically over time.
Thus I regard KJV-onlyism to be a passing fad; for if another 400 years
passes, the writing in the 1611 will go from being strange to our eyes,
to being unreadable in the future by anyone but trained scholars.
illusive4080 wrote 1 day ago:
Very true. The trueness to the original text is lacking in KJV, which
is the major argument against that translation. It is more written to
be old English proper prose than meaningfully translated. Modern
translations like ESV are much closer to source, although hard to
read compared against others like NIV and NLT which are written for
comprehension.
cbdevidal wrote 1 day ago:
Hmm Iâve always heard that the KJV isnât perfect but it is
closer to the ESV than the NIV. These three charts suggest this[1].
I do know there are places where the KJV isnât faithful to the
sources, such as in the use of the word Easter for Passover in Acts
12:4.
It is a pretty translation, but harder to follow in my experience.
I only use the KJV when talking with other denominations because it
is more readily accepted than my favorite (NASB85).
HTML [1]: https://www.chapter3min.org/bible-translations-comparison-...
illusive4080 wrote 17 hours 43 min ago:
Oh interesting I thought KJV was more like NIV. Looks like itâs
closer to meaning than I assumed. Nice article.
Refreeze5224 wrote 1 day ago:
Kinda does a number on the whole "literal word of god" thing doesn't
it?
cbdevidal wrote 1 day ago:
Hey, if the KJV was good enough for Paul and the Apostles, itâs
good enough for me
LAC-Tech wrote 1 day ago:
SPOILERS: if you give the last section, from 1000 AD, some more modern
orthography, and applying a few modern sound changes, it may start to
look more understandable.
___
The original:
And þæt heo sægde wæs eall soþ. Ic ƿifode on hire, and heo ƿæs
ful scyne ƿif, ƿis ond ƿælfæst. Ne gemette ic næfre ær sƿylce
ƿifman. Heo ƿæs on gefeohte sƿa beald swa ænig mann, and þeah
hƿæþere hire andƿlite wæs ƿynsum and fæger.
Ac ƿe naƿiht freo ne sindon, for þy þe ƿe næfre ne mihton fram
Ƿulfesfleote geƿitan, nefne ƿe þone Hlaford finden and hine
ofslean. Se Hlaford hæfþ þisne stede mid searocræftum gebunden,
þæt nan man ne mæg hine forlætan. Ƿe sindon her sƿa fuglas on
nette, swa fixas on Æ¿ere.
And ƿe hine secaþ git, begen ætsomne, ƿer ond ƿif, þurh þa
deorcan stræta þisses grimman stedes. Hƿæþere God us gefultumige!
___
Applying the following changes mechanically (which I often do in my
head when I see a un-familiar word in old english)
Ä£ = y,
Ä = ch,
sw = s,
Æ¿ = w,
p = th,
x = sk,
we get:
And thæt heo sæyde wæs eall soth. Ich wifode on hire, and heo wæs
ful shyne wif, wis ond wælfæst. Ne yemette ich næfer ær sylche
wifman. Heo wæs on gefeoghte sa beald sa æniy mann, and theah
wæthere hire andlite wæs wynsum and fæyer.
Ac we nawight freo ne sindon, for thy the we næfer ne mighton fram
Wulfesfleote yewitan, nefen we thone Laford finden and hine ofslean. Se
Laford hæfth thisne stede mid searocræftum gebunden, thæt nan man ne
mæy hine forlætan. We sindon her sa fuglas on nette, sa fiskas on
were.
And we hine sechath yit, beyen ætsomne, wer ond wif, thurgh tha
deorcan stræta thisses grimman stedes. Wæthere God us yefultumige!
__
My translation attempt:
And that which she said was all true. I made her my wife, she was a
very beautiful woman, wise and steadfast when dealing death[0]. I had
never met such a woman before. She was as brave in a fight as any
person, yet her appearance was winsome and fair.
But we were no longer free, because we could neaver leave Wulfleet,
even though we found the lord and slew him. The lord had bound this
town with sorcery, such that no one could leave it. We were trapped
like birds on a net, like fishes are by a man.
And we searched yet, being together, man and wife, through the dark
streets of this grim town. God help us!
___
[0] my best attempt at translating "ƿælfæst"; it's like slaughter +
firm/fast/stable. I guess it means she is calm while killing people :))
aswanson wrote 1 day ago:
I dunno. I just learned what 'mogged' means 2 days ago. So probably
not far.
darkhorn wrote 1 day ago:
1700s English is like 1200s Turkish. It looks like English has evolved
very much. 1500s English is kind of underdtandable for me but 1400s
English is not underdtandable.
7bit wrote 1 day ago:
> firſt
It's weird when an "s" that's written in cursive is translated like
that.
Is this about recognizing letters. Then show original scans.
Or is this about understanding the spoken word. Then write "first".
Don't do both and fail at everything.
KPGv2 wrote 1 day ago:
1200 is where I can't anymore. This was interesting. I expected it to
be about there. I'm a highly educated native speaker (i.e., well above
median vocabulary) with some French and a lot of German, plus
understanding of orthographic changes.
I'm expecting that's true of a lot of people who meet my description,
and my guess is university graduates not in STEM can read 1300 without
issue (same as me), and certainly every native speaker with a college
degree can read 1400. (Edit: FWIW I'm thinking here of how I can read
Chaucer, and how I couldn't in 9th grade when I was introduced to him)
1200 I had to focus insanely hard and make guesses and circle back once
I'd gotten more context to the words I couldn't read.
ajb wrote 1 day ago:
Anyone wanting to hear the older language spoken, this is a performance
of Beowulf:
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/live/2WcIK_8f7oQ?si=NpXTrRjcHN09Zn56&t...
zingar wrote 1 day ago:
I find that speaking the words (knowing the different sounds of the
letters) allows me to understand way further back than if I try read
them. I noticed this in undergrad linguistics which has a module on old
English.
bArray wrote 1 day ago:
I can read back to 1500, but 1400 reads like a different language. To
be fair this quite remarkable, given:
> Before the mid 1700s, there was no such thing as standardized
spelling.
It felt like it was become more Germanic, and that appears true:
> The farther back you go, the more the familiar Latinate layer of
English is stripped away, revealing the Germanic core underneath: a
language that looks to modern eyes more like German or Icelandic than
anything weâd call English.
VorpalWay wrote 1 day ago:
I found it was a gradual decline from "figuring out the overall gist
from about half the words" in 1300, to "I have no idea" in 1100.
Perhaps being a native Swedish speaker helped a bit. Some words
definitely looked related and also made sense in context (but who
know, false friend words do exist). I am curious as to what someone
who can read Icelandic would make of this.
For example "grymme" as "cruel" (possibly related to modern English
"grim"?)
Also: after reading the notes below about how the unusual symbols
should be pronounced it becomes easier, if you slowly read it aloud
to yourself. The 1300s is now mostly clear except a few unusual
words.
retrac wrote 1 day ago:
I recently skimmed a grammar of Faroese [0]. Not much has been written
about the language in English; only a few books, and an English-Faroese
dictionary was only first published in the 1980s.
It's spoken by about 50,000 people in the Faroe Islands, which are
between Iceland and Scotland. The isles were settled by Viking-era
Norse about a thousand years ago and then largely forgotten by the rest
of the world. But they kept speaking their version of Old Norse and it
became its own language. There are many dialects and the writing
system was designed to cover all of them, so it is is etymologically
informed by Old Norse and it is very conservative. It's not at all
indicative of how it's really pronounced. The written form is
somewhat even mutually intelligible with Icelandic / Old Norse, but the
spoken language is not.
Underneath those æ and ð is a language that is oddly similar to
English, like parallel convergent evolution. It's a North Germanic
language not a West Germanic language so the historical diversion point
is about 1500 years ago.
But it has undergone an extensive vowel shift (but in a different
pattern). And also like English, it has also undergone extensive
affrication (turned into ch/j) of the stop consonants and reduction of
final stops and intervocalic stops. It has the same kind of stress -
vowel reduction interaction that English has. That further heightens
the uncanny effect.
I came away with the impression that it is English's closest sibling
language, aside from Dutch. Some vocabulary:
broðir "broh-wer" (brother), heyggjur "hoy-cher" (hill/height), brúgv
"brukf" (bridge), sjógvar/sjós "shekvar/shos" (sea), skyggj "skooch"
(sky/cloud), djópur "cho-pur" (deep), veðirinn "ve-vir-uhn"
(weather). Rough pronunciations given between quotes; all examples are
cognate with English!
There's an extended story reading by a native speaker here [1] if you
want an example of what it sounds like. No idea what they're saying.
The intonation reminds me a bit of the northern British isles which
also had a Norse influence.
[0] [1] [2] Repost of an earlier comment of mine.
HTML [1]: https://annas-archive.org/md5/4d2ce4cd5e828bbfc7b29b3d03349b
HTML [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSXu2fuJOTQ
Oreb wrote 1 day ago:
As a native speaker of Swedish and Norwegian, I can mostly understand
spoken Faroese (if they speak slowly). In spoken Icelandic, I
understand some words, but rarely a complete sentence.
FergusArgyll wrote 1 day ago:
> of whom I hadde herd so muchel and knewe so litel.
We need to bring muchel back
loeg wrote 1 day ago:
I can just about comprehend the 1500 stuff (that was also my experience
attempting to read Chaucer during jury duty, though I don't remember
Canterbury Tales having the 1400s "þ" this article uses).
Arubis wrote 1 day ago:
Without even checking the article, presumably around 1067. Pre-Norman
English was a VERY different language.
snickerer wrote 1 day ago:
Could they hunt down the werewolf wizard and defeat him or not?? I need
to know how this ended.
drdeadringer wrote 1 day ago:
In AA, they are coming out with a new addition of the Big book, using
modern language, because apparently people are having a difficult time
understanding language used in the 1940s.
For example, Bill W speaks about being trapped or surrounded by
quicksand. Apparently, nobody today understands quicksand. So they
remove the word quicksand.
I'm 44, and this makes me feel like an old man yelling at clouds.
strawhatguy wrote 1 day ago:
I actually wonder about his conclusion that 50 years hence English will
be unrecognizable.
There will be changes of course. Yet we are also more connected than
ever, whereas the next town over would be a whole day trip in the past.
The separation allows for more divergence.
Well, maybe if we get to Mars, differences might crop up again.
ksenzee wrote 1 day ago:
This isn't how I read his conclusion. He's saying English will be
different in fifty years, but he's not saying it'll be
unrecognizable. Look how little difference there is between the 1900
passage and the 2000 passage.
Esn024 wrote 1 day ago:
Very neat! My native language is Russian. I could understand it pretty
well up to 1300, then only about 40% of the 1200 section (not at all
the beginning, but the last paragraph was easier), then quite little
after that - though I understood enough to glean that there was some
woman who had showed up that caused the Master to flee.
I really got into reading Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" (about 1497)
about a year ago, and I suspect that really helped me with this
exercise, since he uses some language that was archaic even back then.
I really wish there was an audio recording of this story. I found the
spellings in the earlier years more and more confusing.
NooneAtAll3 wrote 1 day ago:
audio would drop off slightly faster than text, due to vowel shift in
1400s
tejohnso wrote 1 day ago:
I read the whole thing and thought I had very little interest in this
kind of thing. I'm not sure if the writing is exceptional, or if I was
captured by the idea that the style would change as I read on. Maybe a
bit of both, but either way, this was very interesting. I wonder, if a
similar thing were done with hand writing, whether many of us would be
lost a lot sooner.
bradley13 wrote 1 day ago:
I've been living in a non-English speaking country for 35 years or so.
Although I read a lot, my English is still somewhat "frozen". I would
still ask you if you have "mown" the lawn - a tense that is now almost
lost. Many irregular verbs are becoming regular, I expect due to the
large number of ESL speakers.
Language changes. It's weird to see it happening in front of you...
VorpalWay wrote 1 day ago:
> Language changes. It's weird to see it happening in front of you...
That happens even if you live in the country where you are a native
speaker though. I have seen this in my native Swedish too. Some are
easy to adapt to, some I find really grating. But there is little
point in being angry over it.
Tor3 wrote 1 day ago:
Yep. The dialect I grew up with, and which I could actually read in
older written works, which meant it was pretty stable in the past,
is now completely gone from my town. Everything which made it
special has disappeared. And nationally? Some pronunciations
inherited all the way from PIE are now disappearing in certain
areas. Oh well. Languages change. I just wish they didn't change is
such a, to me, boring direction..
Defletter wrote 1 day ago:
This is something I struggle with on a semi-regular basis since I'm
fairly interested in our constitutional history, so documents like the
Bill of Rights 1688/9[1], the Petition of Right 1627[2], etc, are not
old or illegible enough to have been given modern translations (like
the Magna Carta 1297[3]). As such, they can be difficult reads,
particularly with their endless run-on sentences. Punctuation seems to
have not been invented yet either.
- [1]
- [2]
-
HTML [1]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/WillandMarSess2/1/2/enacted
HTML [2]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Cha1/3/1/enacted
HTML [3]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Edw1cc1929/25/9
SkyeCA wrote 1 day ago:
I can read until the 1300s, which is about what I expected. I encourage
people to go search up historical newspaper archives from the 1700s
though, because it becomes significantly harder to parse when you have
little to no knowledge of the events, people or even culture of the
time.
VorpalWay wrote 1 day ago:
The 1300s become significantly easier if you read it aloud to
yourself (and you know how to pronounce the unusual symbols). The
1200s become very hard even with that method (I can make out
occasional words and phrases) and then I'm completely lost after
that.
dmurray wrote 1 day ago:
> Somewhere in this section â and if youâre like most readers, it
happened around 1300 or 1200 â the language crossed a boundary. Up to
this point, comprehension felt like it was dropping gradually, but now
itâs fallen off a cliff.
This is generous to his readers. Most American college students
majoring in English can't read Dickens, according to a study discussed
here last year [0].
People reading a post on a blog about dead languages are self-selected
to be better at this task. But so are people who've decided to spend
four years of their life studying English literature.
[0]
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44070716
prmoustache wrote 1 day ago:
Funny how I, as non native english speaker I lose it completely
around 1200-1100's. But maybe that is because I know other languages
like german, french, spanish and italian? I feel the biggest issue
for me was keeping up with the letters changes rather than the new
words.
strawhatguy wrote 1 day ago:
In fairness , Dickens is quite dry. My mind would wonder off.
In some sense, it's better these days, competition has led to care
for the reader that probably didn't exist as much then, since so few
people can read.
shevy-java wrote 1 day ago:
Now now slow down - still struggling with modern English here ...
dataflow wrote 1 day ago:
1400 seems fine except for the one big hurdle being "Ã", which I feel
like I'd seen at some point but did not recall. ("È" is useful but
that's somewhat easier to guess and not too critical. "Å¿" is also easy
to guess and I'd seen it before.)
1300 is noticeably harder and needs some iterative refinement, but once
you rewrite it, it's surprisingly not too bad:
> Then after much time spoke the master, his words were cold as winter
is. His voice was the crying of rauenes(?), sharp and chill, and all
that heard him were adrade(?) and dared not speak.
> "I deem thee(?) to the(?) death, stranger. Here shall you die, far
from thy kin and far from thine own land, and none shall known thy
name, nor non shall thy biwepe(?)."
> And I said to him [...]
1200 is where I can't understand much... it feels like where the
vocabulary becomes a significant hurdle, not just the script:
> Hit(?) is much to saying all that pinunge(?) hie(?) on me(?)
uroyten(?), all that sore(?) and all that sorry. No scar(?) is never
hit(?) forgotten, not uuhiles(?) is libbe(?).
It gets exhausting to keep going after these :-) but this was very fun.
jwrallie wrote 1 day ago:
Agreed, I did quite well until around 1500. At 1400, I did decode Ã
after a while. I realized I was mostly reading though the sounds on
my head as opposed to recognizing the word shapes anymore, which was
quite interesting.
1300 started to get hard because I was missing the meaning of some
words completely. 1200 was where I gave up.
Now, English is my 2nd language so I was surprised I could go that
far.
xelxebar wrote 1 day ago:
> Hit is muchel to seggen all þat pinunge hie on me uuroÈten, al
þar sor and al þat sorÈe. Ne scal ic nefre hit forÈeten, naht
uuhiles ic libbe!
My reading was "There is (too) much to say all that pain he wrought
on me, all there sour and all that sorryness. Not shall I never
forget, not while I live!"
Delk wrote 1 day ago:
> biwepe(?)
Probably beweep; lament, weep over.
> pinunge(?)
This is explained later on the page. "Where a modern writer would say
he underwent torture, a 1200-era writer must say that he suffered
pinunge instead."
I also couldn't understand this one although the word "pining" did
come to mind, apparently not totally off, as that has apparently come
from the same ancestor. Didn't help me figure out the intended
meaning, though.
> No scar(?) is never hit(?) forgotten, not uuhiles(?) is libbe(?).
I guessed this meant something along the lines of "[?] shall I never
[?] forget, not while I live". I didn't figure out that "uu" is
actually "w" until that was explained, so it escaped me that
"uuhiles" is "while[s]", though.
niwis wrote 1 day ago:
In current Limburgs, pinige: to torture. Mien herses pinige:
Wrecking one's brains.
xorcist wrote 1 day ago:
> 1400 seems fine except for the one big hurdle being "Ã",
Someone here needs to brush up on their Icelandic!
DangitBobby wrote 1 day ago:
Ravens, adread (filled with dread), condemn you to your death (I
think just an archaic usage of deem), beweep (none will weep for you,
I think). I also hit a pretty hard wall at 1200.
ETH_start wrote 1 day ago:
1200 was my wall too.
ryanjshaw wrote 1 day ago:
I found it helped me to read it out loud in a pirate voice.
duskwuff wrote 1 day ago:
Fun fact: stereotypical "pirate speech" is actually a relic of the
English West Country dialect.
Podrod wrote 1 day ago:
Not so much a relic as it was West County actor Robert Newton
putting on an exaggerated accent in his depections of Long John
Silver and Blackbeard in several films of the 1950s. His
depictions were extremely influential on later pirates in film.
klondike_klive wrote 1 day ago:
switch the double-u for a w. Uuhiles becomes "whiles" (or "while")
DangitBobby wrote 1 day ago:
Damn I hate that I didn't catch on to why it made a w sound.
krackers wrote 1 day ago:
retvrn to tradition
petesergeant wrote 1 day ago:
> rauenes
Ravens
dataflow wrote 1 day ago:
Amazing. Thanks!
ajross wrote 1 day ago:
> adrade(?)
"adread", meaning afraid
Still a recognizable archaic word, constructed from a still-in-use
root. Just the spelling is different.
dataflow wrote 1 day ago:
Ahh of course! Yeah I guess if I'd read the sentence a few more
times it might have been possible to guess that too. Thanks!
bryanrasmussen wrote 1 day ago:
Their long S is really annoying, although truthfully I generally am
unfamiliar with the long s in modern fonts so I don't KNOW if it really
looks worse than it needs to, but I feel it looks worse that it needs
to and that makes it harder, for example I thought lest at first was
left and had to go back a couple words after.
Anyway as I know from my reading history at 1400 it gets difficult, but
I can make it through 1400 and 1300 with difficulty, but would need to
break out the middle English dictionaries for 1200 and 1100. 1000
forget it, too busy to make that effort.
BobAliceInATree wrote 1 day ago:
Interestingly I found the long s annoying and I had to think every
time I saw it, but I quickly got used to and could read it naturally
after a few paragraphs.
krackers wrote 1 day ago:
(function() {
const SKIP_PARENTS = new Set(["SCRIPT", "STYLE", "NOSCRIPT",
"TEXTAREA"]);
const walker = document.createTreeWalker(
document.body,
NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT,
{
acceptNode(node) {
const p = node.parentNode;
if (!p || SKIP_PARENTS.has(p.nodeName)) return
NodeFilter.FILTER_REJECT;
if (p.nodeName === "INPUT") return
NodeFilter.FILTER_REJECT;
return NodeFilter.FILTER_ACCEPT;
}
}
);
let node;
while ((node = walker.nextNode())) {
node.nodeValue = node.nodeValue.replace(/Å¿/g, "s");
}
})()
NooneAtAll3 wrote 1 day ago:
what?
krackers wrote 1 day ago:
That will replace the long-s with the standard s. You can do the
same for the thorn.
downsplat wrote 1 day ago:
Which LLM hallucinated this monstrosity? Just use a regex, it's
a one-liner!
KPGv2 wrote 1 day ago:
The person you're talking to was wondering if there's a more
elegant long-s font choice, not how to replace long-s with
short-s.
isoprophlex wrote 1 day ago:
Hmm, I thought it wafnt fo bad, myfelf
bryanrasmussen wrote 1 day ago:
oh my god, you're right, they just used an f, no wonder I found it
so bad! That is really annoying. Enraging even.
rhdunn wrote 1 day ago:
The text doesn't use an `f`. If you copy from e.g. the 1700
passage you get `Å¿` not `f`.
bryanrasmussen wrote 1 day ago:
hmm you're right, I guess my eyesight is worse than I thought
KPGv2 wrote 1 day ago:
This is correct. And if you don't like that font's long-s, you
can fix it with
document.body.style.fontFamily = "Baskerville";
Baskerville has a nice long-s. TNR is also not bad. Garamond is
passable.
bryanrasmussen wrote 1 day ago:
thanks for the Baskerville recommendation.
on edit: liked the Garamond better, since the font is a bit
thicker, checked it on "Å¿pake" and was obviously a long S
whereas on the thinner Baskerville still looked like an f to
me. Although the original text was perhaps too thick for me.
poly2it wrote 1 day ago:
Probably people are confused by ligatures. Indeed it is a long
S.
bryanrasmussen wrote 1 day ago:
I should have noticed, it has a full cross bar, I guess it's my
fading eyesight and also the white text of green is perhaps not
the best contrast.
bryanrasmussen wrote 1 day ago:
yeah I was wrong, I happened to look back at Maiſter and my
bad eyesight and the resolution made it look like the long s
had a crossbar from the t next to it in the default font.
zamadatix wrote 1 day ago:
It doesn't have such a bar in the article e.g. "swifter"
HTML [1]: https://imgur.com/a/XwsoVgB
bryanrasmussen wrote 1 day ago:
just noted that in reply to my post but repeat here:
yeah I was wrong, I happened to look back at Maiſter and my
bad eyesight and the resolution made it look like the long s
had a crossbar from the t next to it in the default font.
on edit: this was probably where my problem generally was, in
lest and Maister and anything where the long s is next to a t
it looks very like an f to me, although if I zoom to 170%
then it is clear, however at that size it introduces its own
reading problems; unfortunately my reading glasses are broken
so I just struggled at a lower resolution.
zamadatix wrote 1 day ago:
Heck, I still struggle scanning it properly at high
resolution so no worries!
aardvark179 wrote 1 day ago:
That is superbly done. I can go further back than some here, 1300 is
fine, 1200 I can mange okay, but 1100 takes real effort.
alamortsubite wrote 1 day ago:
If you enjoyed TFA, check out this excellent BBC tv doc (and companion
book) with Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English:
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1XQx9pGGd0
coldtea wrote 1 day ago:
>The blog ends there. No sign-off, no âthanks for reading.â Just a
few sentences in a language that most of us lost the ability to follow
somewhere around the thirteenth century.
Fucking AI slop, even this
chuckadams wrote 1 day ago:
Congratulations, you are the very first person on this Earth to have
a suspicion that something might have been written by AI. Thank you
sincerely for conveying this stunning and novel insight to the rest
of us, who were previously blind to this tremendous revelation. Keep
up the great sleuthing work.
poly2it wrote 1 day ago:
My slopometer tells me an LLM would not by itself write something so
concise, especially beginning with "the blog ends there".
zamadatix wrote 1 day ago:
Not sure what you mean?
coldtea wrote 1 day ago:
That this kind of writing "The blog ends there. No sign-off, no
âthanks for reading.â" has tell-tale AI mannerisms
zamadatix wrote 1 day ago:
If you mean "The extremely modern style of voice used to provide
contrast between the anachronistic end of the story and the
review of the same is how LLMs also sound" the I agree. That
style voice is, after all, exactly what most of the training
content major LLMs are trained on will use.
If you mean "the usage of that voice implies the article itself
is written by LLMs" then I strongly disagree. I'd eat my shoe if
an article written this well were made by today's LLMs. Doubly so
for an article from a linguistics PhD who was written similar
content prior to LLMs.
NooneAtAll3 wrote 1 day ago:
ironically, I think there's an epidemic of ai bots accusing
everything of being ai-written here on hn
brandall10 wrote 1 day ago:
Reading Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct", and he has a section
that shows how the Lord's Prayer has changed over the ages.
What's interesting is the one in use today - from the early 17th
century - is not the most modern variant. There was another revision
from the mid-19th century that fell out of favor because it sounded a
bit off, less rhythmic, less sacred (ie. Kingdom -> Government).
guerrilla wrote 1 day ago:
Man when I read Adam Smith, that was a challenge. Not only is his
Enlgish super archaic with all kinds of strange units, but he writes
these incredibly long logically dense sentences.
constantcrying wrote 1 day ago:
I have an edition of the Nibelungenlied, which presents a modern German
translation right next to a version of the original text. While the
original is somewhat difficult to understand there is an amazing
continuity between the two.
To me this made it clear that the German Nation has been clearly
defined over the last thousand years and just how similar the people
who wrote and enjoyed that work are to the native Germans right now.
Can only recommend people do something like that if they want to dispel
the delusion that people of your Nation who lived a thousand years ago
were in any way fundamentally different from you.
amarant wrote 1 day ago:
Is it weird that the 1900 style is closer to how I typically write than
the first 2000 style? I'm not that old, am I?
zamadatix wrote 1 day ago:
The difference between 1900 and 2000 seems to largely be the
voice/intended audience changing rather than the language.
I.e. the 2000s one is a casual travel blog style intended normally
intended for any random quick reader and the 1900s one is more a mix
of academic sounding/formal conversation intended for longer content.
If you assume a more casual voice in the 1900s one and a more formal
voice in the 2000s one I bet they'd even almost seem to be placed
backwards chronologically.
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
The 2000 sample was a bit exaggerated.
BorisMelnik wrote 1 day ago:
I really think that the onset of mobile device communication will be a
major pillar in the history of the English language. lol / crash out /
unalive / seggs / aura
1bpp wrote 1 day ago:
lowkey gives cultural collapse type vibes
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
Since these occur primarily in ephemeral communication, itâs
unclear how much of a lasting influence there will be. Itâs also
âonlyâ vocabulary, to a limited degree orthography, and rarely
grammar.
y-c-o-m-b wrote 1 day ago:
This was a fun exercise. I made it through 1300 by reading it in a
Scottish accent and being familiar with some basic old Norse characters
from a prior trip to Iceland. I watch Scottish shows like "Still Game",
and for some reason that combo with the accent and their lingo made it
simpler to read. By 1200 I was completely lost; it looks more Germanic
to me, which I don't have the knowledge to read.
rubee64 wrote 1 day ago:
Thanks to RobWords [1] I at least remember thorn (Ã) pronunciation and
could mostly decipher 1400. Not much past that, though
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJxKyh9e5_A&t=36s
ghaff wrote 1 day ago:
It's probably roughly Elizabethan English (1600s).
thomassmith65 wrote 1 day ago:
Something I look forward to, though it could take a few years, is for
someone to train a family of state-of-the-art chatbots where each uses
a corpus with a cut off date of 1950... 1900... 1850.. and so on. How
fascinating it would be to see what words and concepts it would and
would not understand. That would be as close to time travel as a person
could get.
ksymph wrote 1 day ago:
It exists! Showed up on HN a few months back: [1] Only from 1913-1946
though.
HTML [1]: https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms
thomassmith65 wrote 1 day ago:
Capital! That's one of the most interesting time periods.
stego-tech wrote 1 day ago:
A delightful exercise. Inference and phonetics alone got me back to
~1200 with probably a 90% hit rate. Then it just collapsed under me
around 1100.
Honestly not a bad critical thinking exercise in general, for someone
with language fluency. Much of it can be âworked outâ just through
gradual inference and problem-solving, and Iâd be curious to see its
results as a test for High Schoolers.
teo_zero wrote 1 day ago:
Excellent essay.
To those who enjoyed it so much as to come here and read these
comments, I'd suggest to fetch a copy of David Mitchell's "Cloud
Atlas", and appreciate the multiple style changes between the various
sections.
n8cpdx wrote 1 day ago:
no cap u need to b like so unc 2 read this I finna yeet my phone like
who even reads I have siri English is lowkey chueggy anyway all my
homies use emoji now bet
English is cooked fam. Gen Alphaâs kids are going to get lost at the
2000 paragraph.
arduanika wrote 1 day ago:
Ugh, we've been slangmogged
logicchains wrote 1 day ago:
"unc" can't be used as an adjective like that.
SSLy wrote 1 day ago:
memes about unc video games are galore
n8cpdx wrote 1 day ago:
4 now imma trendsetter homie u b tripping
zamadatix wrote 1 day ago:
Things like slang and casual registers always seem to move much
faster but for some reason we assume it's always going to be the next
set newer than how we'd write that will result in things going off
the rails or resulting in it being the only speech understood by that
generation.
Lowkey though, letâs keep it 100 and check it. Back in the day
Millennials got totally ragged on for sounding all extra like this n'
usin all sort of txting abbreviations early on 2. Yet they can still
peep oldskool English just the same - talk about insane in the
membrane, for real.
nosrepa wrote 1 day ago:
Straight up
Arch485 wrote 1 day ago:
fr fr, OP be cappin 2000 ain't English
pixelsub wrote 1 day ago:
Ask an Indian haha :)
pbhjpbhj wrote 1 day ago:
I don't know what your problem is, your comments so far are all low
effort and not really contributing to the conversation.
Your language is not acceptable here.
If you're not already shadow-banned I suspect that's the way you're
heading.
Have a word with yourself. (A British idiom, meaning to consider what
you're doing, particularly in terms of morality and cultural
acceptability.)
WalterGR wrote 1 day ago:
What would they say?
sometimes_all wrote 1 day ago:
Really interesting! Somewhat reminds me of the ending of H. P.
Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls", where the main character, a scion
of a very old family which has done some really bad things, goes mad
and progressively starts speaking in older and older versions of
English after every sentence.
mhitza wrote 1 day ago:
Thanks, that's such a great detail. I was reading Lovecraft during
highschool in locally translated print editions. Where such details
didn't come through.
Do you know if there any other such language related eastereggs in
other of Lovecraft's writing? should I chose to revisit them, in
English this time around.
sometimes_all wrote 1 day ago:
The Call of Cthulhu seemed to have a bit of language construction
and world-building, if you are into that. But my knowledge of
Lovecraft lore is limited, so I wouldn't know all details; I just
read his short stories from Standard eBooks a few months ago, which
was my first exposure to his work.
I'm sure S. T. Joshi might have a bit to say about the topic.
Personally speaking from very limited exposure and knowledge of
language games, and me not being from an environment which has
European language roots, I might have missed quite a bit of such
easter eggs in the atmosphere and writing. Like, for example, your
comment prompted me to find out what "rue d'auseil" (from The Music
of Erich Zann) meant, I didn't bother to find out until today.
I do recommend rereading Lovecraft in English either way, since you
never know what gets lost in translation!
artyom wrote 1 day ago:
Well, I 100%'d Dark Souls, so surprisingly (or not) I can understand a
lot of it.
englishrookie wrote 1 day ago:
Well, for a native speaker of Dutch who doesn't speak English at all
(not many left since my grandmother died in 2014), I'd say old English
is actually easier to read than modern - starting around 1400.
Around 1000, English and Dutch must have been mutually understandable.
vidarh wrote 23 hours 15 min ago:
Eddie Izzard speaking old English to a Frisian farmer: [1] As a
Norwegian who speaks English and school-German, Dutch is fairly easy
to read but sounds like you're speaking a mix of English, Norse and
German with a mouthful of gravel (similar to the Danish, who
Norwegians like to say speaks Norwegian with a potato in their mouth)
HTML [1]: https://youtu.be/OeC1yAaWG34?si=lkoQ--uZNN8Ntpqy
lbourdages wrote 1 day ago:
Native French speaker here. 1300s I could still kinda follow the
story with difficulty but from the 1200s I just couldn't anymore.
I felt like it helped to use an "old english" accent in my inner
voice when reading.
LAC-Tech wrote 1 day ago:
Really? I read German (not at a very high level anymore admittedly),
and I find that while Old English is closer to German than modern
English is, I would still say a deep knowledge of Modern English
helps me more, and that most things have be learned frlm scratch.
Like does Dutch have anything like "cƿæð"? Or "Hlaford"? Or
"soð"? "þeah þe"?
I know Dutch should be a little closer to Old English than German,
but if you truly can pick up words like that leaning on Dutch, maybe
I should learn to read it. (I can read the 1000 Old English sentence
pretty well).
zingar wrote 1 day ago:
Most of what I understood from that far back was because of
Afrikaans, more than English.
trelane wrote 1 day ago:
Probably not a coincidence: [1]
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxons
HTML [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Anglo-Saxon_England
marssaxman wrote 1 day ago:
I've often had the same thought coming from the other direction, as
an English speaker learning Dutch for the past couple of years: I
hear many little echoes in Dutch of archaic or poetic English forms.
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
Beowulf was discovered and translated by GrÃmur Jónsson ThorkelÃn,
an Icelander who was National Archivist [0] in Denmark, researching
Danish history in the British Library.
[0] Or at the time promised the post, I don't remember the details.
rapidfl wrote 1 day ago:
tried to read Prince and I assume it is a translation to English from
Italian or whatever.
Assuming that translation was done a while ago (100+ yrs?)... It is
hard to read. I can understand it if I try. But the phrasing is not
current. 100 pages will take double the time at the least.
Almost think AI needs to rephrase it into current English.
Probably has these double negatives, long sentences, etc.
trueismywork wrote 1 day ago:
I am Indian. I read easily to 1400. But then 1300 is suddenly
difficult to read
sokols wrote 1 day ago:
Albanian, managed to understand till 1300. Then it gets more
germanic i think, though I speak a bit of German as well, the
characters make it a bit difficult to parse.
âSwie!â is interesting, I understood it somehow naturally. In
Gheg Albanian we say âShuj!â, which means âBe silent!â.
riffraff wrote 1 day ago:
Italian here, and it was the same for me, the language feels very
different by 1300.
Which is interesting cause 1200 italian[0] seems pretty readable by
everyone who can read italian (and likely every other romance
language), you have to go further back to have a shift.
[0] E.g. Saint Francis' Canticle of the Sun
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canticle_of_the_Sun
thaumasiotes wrote 1 day ago:
> it was the same for me, the language feels very different by
1300.
The language in section 1300 isn't much different from section
1400. Almost all of it is still good English today if you give
the words their modern spelling:
Then after much time spoke the Master, and his words were cold as
winter is. His voice was as the crying of ravens, sharp and
shrill, and all that heard him were adread and durst not speak.
"I deem¹ thee to the death, stranger. Here shalt thou die, far
from thy kin and far from thine own land, and none shall know thy
name, nor none shall thee beweep."
And I said to him, with what boldness I might gather, "Why farest
thou with me thus? What trespass have I wrought against thee,
that thou deemst¹ me so hard a doom?"
"[Swie!]"² quoth he, and smote me with his hand, so that I fell
to the earth. And the blood ran down from my mouth.
And I [swied],² for the great dread that was come upon me was
more than I might bear. My heart became as stone, and my limbs
were heavy as lead, and I []³ might no more stand nor speak.
The evil man laughed, when that he saw my pain, and it was a
cruel laughter, without mercy or pity as of a man that hath no
[rewthe]â´ in his heart.
Alas! I should never have come to this town of Wolvesfleet!
Cursed be the day and cursed be the hour that I first set foot
therein!
¹ We still have this word in modern English, but the meaning is
different.
² No idea what this word is.
³ I assume the ne in the text here is required by some kind of
grammatical negative agreement with the rest of the clause. In
more modern (but still fairly archaic) English, nothing goes
here. In actual modern-day English, the grammar of this clause
isn't really available for use, but it's intelligible.
â´ This turns out to be the element ruth in ruthless, and a man
with no ruth in his heart is one who is literally ruthless,
without "ruth". It literally means "regret", but the use in the
text clearly matches the metaphorical sense of the modern word
ruthless.
riffraff wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah but the spelling is part of how the language feels :)
Also, you say spelling but e.g. "speken" feels more a
grammatical than orthographic difference.
By comparison, Dante's incipit to the Divine Comedy is 100% the
same spelling and grammar as modern Italian (nel mezzo del
cammin di nostra vita/mi ritrovai per una selva oscura/che la
diritta via era smarrita)
thaumasiotes wrote 1 day ago:
> Also, you say spelling but e.g. "speken" feels more a
grammatical than orthographic difference.
Doesn't make a difference if you're reading it.¹ If you were
trying to produce correct Middle English, you're correct that
this would cause difficulties.
(And to me it looks like it has caused difficulties for the
author. The passage has several verbs introduced by auxiliary
modals. Check out the list:
1. Here Å¿chaltou dyen Here shalt thou die
2. non ſchal knowen þi name none shall know thy name
3. non schal þe biwepe none shall thee beweep
4. wiþ what boldenesse I miÈte gaderen with what boldness I
might gather
5. more þan I miÈte beren more than I might bear
6. I ne miÈte namore stonden ne spoken I [] might no more
stand nor speak
Three examples use shall and three examples use might. Five
of them have an -n suffix (must be infinitive or subjunctive;
not to be confused with the 3rd person plural -n suffix that
we also see) on the verb, but that suffix is missing from non
schal þe biwepe, which is otherwise an exact grammatical
match to non ſchal knowen þi name)
¹ The reason it doesn't make a difference is that the
sentence structure is still that of modern English and
there's only one permissible form of the verb in the
modernized sentence. So it's sufficient to know (a) what verb
is being used; plus (b) what the sentence it's being used in
is.
Amezarak wrote 1 day ago:
Are you sure you haven't been victimized by manuscripts with
modernized spellings?
When I look up ealry manuscript scans of the Comedy, I get:
*Nel mezo delcamin dinra uita / mi trouai puna(?) felua (long
s letter) ofcura / che la diricta (some bizarre letter in
there) uia era fmarrita (long s).
HTML [1]: https://www.digitalcollections.manchester.ac.uk/view...
thaumasiotes wrote 1 day ago:
> puna(?)
Note that the p is struck through below its loop; that is
probably an abbreviation for "per". That would be an
example of the spelling being the same as modern Italian,
but the manuscript is written in a kind of shorthand
because writing takes a lot of time and effort.
dinrã is probably also an abbreviation, given the
diacritic.
> diricta (some bizarre letter in there)
No, the letters are exactly what you've just typed. There
is a ligature between the c and the t. You could call this
a difference in font, but not in spelling. (Though diricta
for modern diritta is a real difference.)
> Nel mezo delcamin
This is a real spelling difference. There's a really
glaring one in stanza 3, where poco is spelled pocho in
contravention of the rules of Italian spelling. I don't
know what an Italian today would think if confronted with
-cho-.
ajb wrote 1 day ago:
From some random googling it seems like "swie" could be
"silence", but it doesn't seem to be quite that meaning. There
may be some religious overtones .
thaumasiotes wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, I found [1] , which glosses "swie" as "silence".
Here the text says "I swied", so it has to be a verb, but the
meaning "be silent" makes sense in the passage.
Something to think about in this exercise is that the
shortness of the passages adds difficulty.
Consider section 1200, where a verb with the root ner is
used. It's given so much focus and contextual elaboration
that you can easily tell what it means, even though the word
is unfamiliar.
If you read longer passages of Middle English, this same
phenomenon will occur with more words.
HTML [1]: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictiona...
SilasX wrote 1 day ago:
Wiktionary doesn't mention it for either word, but it looks
to be cognate with German schweigen, "to be silent":
HTML [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schweigen
thaumasiotes wrote 1 day ago:
Well, wiktionary does call them cognates, if you follow
the links around.
Old English swige < proto-West-Germanic swiga ; German
schweigen < proto-West-Germanic swigen < swiga
(Following the links around on wiktionary may, in
general, lead to self-contradictory results.)
niwis wrote 1 day ago:
In Limburgs, still today: Zwieg!: Shut up, zwiegen: Not
saying anything.
Gander5739 wrote 1 day ago:
I speak English natively. I read to 1400 without difficulty, read
1400 and 1300 with some sruggle, and found beyond that it was
largely unintelligible; I can understand maybe 1 in 3 words.
thaumasiotes wrote 1 day ago:
1200 looks harder than it is because of the change in pronouns.
...Nor shall I never it forget, not while I live!
... and that was a wife [= woman], strong and [stith]! She came
in among the evil men and me [nerede] from their hands.
She slew the heathen men that me pinned, slew them and felled
them to the ground. There was blood and [bale] enough. And they
fell [and] lay still, for they [] might no more stand. And the
Master, the [wraþþe] Master, he flew away in the darkness and
was seen no more.
I said [to] her, "I thank thee, [leove] wife, for thou hast me
[ineredd] from death and from all mine [ifoan]!"
Interestingly, nerede/ineredd has no descendant in modern
English, but it's not difficult to understand in the passage,
while leove and ifoan do have descendants, and in the case of
ifoan the meaning hasn't changed, but they are harder to read.
In 1100 the idea of "just substitute the modern word in for the
old word" starts to break down.
vaylian wrote 1 day ago:
A native Frisian speaker would probably have an even easier time,
given that Frisian is the closest language to English. However,
Frisian is still more similar to other west-germanic languages than
English.
Kim_Bruning wrote 1 day ago:
What accent did you read it in? Vlaams? Gronings?
englishrookie wrote 1 day ago:
I don't have a voice in my head when I read. Knowledge of
West-Fries helps though.
dboreham wrote 1 day ago:
My experience traveling to the Netherlands as an English speaker is
that people are speaking English, but they're drunk!
ekr wrote 1 day ago:
That's strange (i.e. different from my experience). I've been
living in the Netherlands since 2021, speak some (~ B1) Dutch, but
good English and German. Dutch language was from day one
comprehensible due to German similarity. Many/most words either
sound like the German equivalent to the point where you naturally
match them in your thought, or they are written (mostly) like the
German equivalent.
The connection between Dutch and English languages is far more
minimal in comparison. In fact, when I first faced the language, I
would have said it was a combination of ~80% German, 10% English,
5% French, +5% Others.
satvikpendem wrote 1 day ago:
There's a meme about how Dutch doesn't seem like a serious language
to English speakers, and what's funnier is Dutch speakers trying to
figure out why it's so funny to English speakers.
HTML [1]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/english-to-dutch-translatio...
jakevoytko wrote 1 day ago:
As someone who took German in high school, Dutch had my brain
flailing for vocabulary to understand but nothing connected.
phpnode wrote 1 day ago:
When they seamlessly switch from English to Dutch I feel like Iâm
having a stroke: all the same intonation, the same accent, but
nothing makes sense any more
marssaxman wrote 1 day ago:
I had a strange experience during one episode of the show
"Amsterdam Empire", which is spoken in Dutch. There's a scene
where one of the characters addresses some foreign tourists: the
(Dutch) subtitles continued to make sense, but his speech was
just absolute gibberish. It was startling to realize that he had
been speaking English, my native language: in the moment, I did
not recognize it at all.
mattmanser wrote 1 day ago:
That doesn't jive with my experience at all. I'm half-dutch,
raised in England.
Dutch doesn't have the same intonation, has harsher
pronunciations, and has a whole extra sound most English people
struggle with (a rolled r).
The older generations also can't pronounce -thew very well as
it's not a thing in Dutch, so struggle to pronounce my name,
calling me Matchoo instead of Matthew. It still boggles my mind
that my Mum would pick a name the Dutch can't pronounce.
The Dutch accent is also extremely noticeable to a native English
speaker.
Ultimately, they're not the same at all as English is
Germanic/Latin hybrid where half the words are French/Italian
words, and half the words are Germanic/Dutch words.
Dutch is not.
You can usually tell by looking at the word and the end of the
word.
Words like fantastic, manual, vision, aquatic, consume are all
from -ique, -alle, -umme and will have similar words in
French/Italian. The tend to be longer words with more syllables.
Words like mother, strong, good, are Germanic in root. The -er,
-ong, -od words will all be similar to the German/Dutch words.
Shorter, quicker to pronounce.
opengrass wrote 1 day ago:
1500
Dutch is 1400s English.
npilk wrote 1 day ago:
This is cool, I love the concept.
I wonder how much our understanding of past language is affected by
survivorship bias? Most text would have been written by a
highly-educated elite, and most of what survives is what we have valued
and prized over the centuries.
For instance, this line in the 1800s passage:
> Hunger, that great leveller, makes philosophers of us all, and
renders even the meanest dish agreeable.
This definitely sounds like the 1800s to me, but part of that is the
romance of the idea expressed. I wonder what Twitter would have been
like back then, for instance, especially if the illiterate had
speech-to-text.
chuckadams wrote 1 day ago:
There's also a lot of historical writing out there that's more or
less the shorthand scribblings of shopkeepers, foremen, and low-level
clerks, so it's not all flowery prose. There's even surviving
Egyptian hieroglyphics that are more or less just work logs, and
they're quite different than the painted ones in the tombs. Then
there's the graffiti that's all over Pompeii.
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
I'd love to see actual, authentic material that was rewritten through
the years. One possibility is a passage from the Bible, though that's
not usual English. Another is laws or other official texts - even if
not exactly the same, they may be comparable. Maybe personal letters
written from or to the same place about the same topic - e.g., from or
to the Church of England and its predecessor about burial, marriage, or
baptism.
The author Colin Gorrie, "PhD linguist and ancient language teacher",
obviously knows their stuff. From my experience, much more limited and
less informed, the older material looks like a modern writer mixing in
some archaic letters and expression - it doesn't look like the old
stuff and isn't nearly as challenging, to me.
dhosek wrote 1 day ago:
Some early English translations of the Bible were unintentionally
comical, e.g., âand Enoch walked with God and he was a lucky
fellowe.â
Of course thatâs not limited to the 16th century. The Good News
Bible renders what is most commonly given as âour name is Legion
for we are manyâ instead as âour name is Mob because there are a
lot of us.â In my mind I hear the former spoken in that sort of
stereotypical demon voice: deep with chorus effect, the latter spoken
like Alvin and the Chipmunks.
ilamont wrote 1 day ago:
Would be curious to know from other HN readers: how far back can you
understand written prose of your own language, assuming the writing
system uses mostly the same letter or characters?
Medieval French, Middle High German, Ancient Greek, Classical Arabic or
Chinese from different eras, etc.
YZF wrote 1 day ago:
I read Hebrew and I can more or less read the dead sea scrolls that I
think are 250BCE. According to Google's AI from around 800BCE the
alphabet was different enough that I won't be able to read those
writings but given the translation between the letters you can still
understand the words. While I haven't seen them or tried to read them
supposedly the 600BCE Ketef Hinnom Silver Scrolls should be readable
by a modern Hebrew reader.
DonaldFisk wrote 1 day ago:
Written Chinese stayed the same while the spoken language evolved
from the 5th century BC until the 1911 revolution, after which people
began writing Chinese the way it's spoken in Beijing. So there's a
sharp dividing line just over 100 years ago; Literary Chinese is
still taught in school but without that you'd have trouble
understanding it.
the_gastropod wrote 1 day ago:
I'm studying Chinese (Taiwanese style, so traditional characters),
and my understanding is anything back to about the Han Dynasty (~200
BCE) is intelligible to an educated Chinese speaker.
Resiliency is one of the weird beneficial side-effects of having a
writing system based on ideas instead of sounds. Today, you've got a
variety of Chinese dialects that, when spoken, are completely
unintelligible to one another. But people who speak different
dialects can read the same book just fine. Very odd, from a native
English speaking perspective.
riffraff wrote 1 day ago:
In Italy we all study Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio in school, which
are 1300, and it's quite easy to understand them beyond some unusual
words. 1200 poetry is easy enough too.
There's not much literature older than that, cause people preferred
to write in Latin, the oldest bit in "volgare" is the Indovinello
Veronese[0] which is from the 8th or 9th century and at that point
it's almost latin spelling-wise, it's understandable if you're well
educated but wouldn't be understandable by everyone.
[0]
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronese_Riddle
idoubtit wrote 1 day ago:
I think it depends a lot on the history of the language. My native
language is French, and since long ago various authorities try to
normalize and "purify" the language. This is why the gap between
spoken French and written French is so wide. Now my experience as an
avid reader...
Books written in the 17th century or later are easy to read. Of
course, the meaning of some words can change over time but that's a
minor trouble. I believe Molière and Racine are still studied in
school nowadays, but the first name that came to my mind was Cyrano
de Bergerac (the writer, not the fictitious character).
Books from the 16th need practice, but I think anyone who tries hard
will get used to the language. I enjoyed Rabelais's Pantagruel and
Gargantua a lot, and I first read them by myself when I was in
highschool (I knew a bit of Latin and Greek, which helped).
Before that, French was much more diverse; the famous split into
"langue d'oc" and "langue d'oïl" (terms for "oui" â yes â at the
time) is a simplification, because there were many dialects with
blurry contours over space and time.
I've read several 11th-12th novels about the Round Table, but I was
already experienced in Old French when I started, and I think most
readers would struggle to make sense of it. It may depend on the
dialect; I remember "Mort Artur" was easier than "Lancelot, le
chevalier à la charette".
"La chanson de Roland" (11th century, Old French named anglo-normand)
is one of my favorite books of all times. Reading it for the first
time was a long process â I learned the declensions of Old French
and a lot of vocabulary â but it was also fun, like deciphering
some mystery. And the poesy is a marvel, epic, incredibly concise,
surprising and deep.
Before that (9th-10th), Old French was even closer to Latin.
cenamus wrote 1 day ago:
If you're interested you can read up on language change (and
glottochronology, although that's a bit controversial now), and the
Swadesh lists.
In general, language changes around at the same rate all over history
and geography, barring some things (migration, liturgical languages)
e-khadem wrote 1 day ago:
People read Shahname[1] regularly in Iran, and it was written at
around 1000 CE, but there isn't much before 900 CE that is
comprehensible to a modern day Persian speaker. [1]
The Shahnameh is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet
Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 CE and is the national epic of
Greater Iran. Shahnameh is one of the world's longest epic poems, and
the longest epic poem created by a single author.
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh
idoubtit wrote 1 day ago:
Most European people know about Odysseus, but few have read Homer,
even in translation.
I one met a visiting Iranian academic just after I'd learned about
the Shahnameh. I'd also read the opinion of a French scholar who
thought its language was, for a modern Iranian, like Montaigne for
a modern French. The Iranian woman told me that very few people in
Iran actually read the book. It's very long, and hard to grasp for
untrained readers. But most people know some of its stories and
characters, because they are often mentioned in everyday life, and
because the abridged prose books are widespread.
BTW, I don't know which editions are the most popular in Iran.
Wikipedia says the Shahnameh was heavily modified and modernized up
to the 14th century, when its most famous illustrated edition was
created. The book most read today is probably not a scholar
edition.
e-khadem wrote 1 day ago:
> The Iranian woman told me that very few people in Iran actually
read the book. It's very long, and hard to grasp for untrained
readers.
She makes a fair point. Reading and fully understanding Shahnameh
is not straightforward. The difficulty does not primarily stem
from drastic linguistic change, although the language has evolved
and been somewhat simplified over time, but rather from the
nature of Persian poetry itself, which is often deliberately
layered and intricate *.
That said, Iranian students are introduced to selected passages
and stories from Shahnameh throughout their schooling. Teachers
typically devote considerable time to these texts, as the work is
closely tied to cultural identity and a sense of historical
pride.
* Persian, in particular, is often described as highly suited to
poetic expression. Its flexible grammar and word order allow for
a degree of intentional ambiguity, and this interpretive openness
is frequently regarded as a mark of sophistication (difficult to
master at a high-level for a layperson). A single ghazal by
Hafez, for instance, can be read as a dialogue with God, a
beloved man, or a beloved woman, with each interpretation leading
to a different emotional and philosophical resonance. This
multiplicity is the core part of the artistry.
Personally, I did not truly understand Hafez until I fell in love
for the first time. My vocabulary and historical knowledge
remained the same, yet my experience of the poetry changed
completely. What shifted was something more inward and spiritual
and only then did I begin to feel the full force of the verses.
For example, consider the following (unfortunately) translated
lines:
O cupbearer, pass the cup around and offer it to me --
For love seemed easy at first, but then the difficulties began.
The Persian word corresponding to "cupbearer" may be read as a
bar servant, a human beloved, a spiritual guide, or even the
divine itself. The "wine" may signify literal intoxication,
romantic love, mystical ecstasy, or divine knowledge. Nothing in
the grammar forces a single interpretation, the poem invites the
reader's inner state to complete it (and at the same time makes
it rhyme).
myth_drannon wrote 1 day ago:
For square Hebrew (Assyrian) you can go back for about 2000 years. So
for example Dead Sea scrolls are fairly readable. But old classical
Hebrew impossible.
fooker wrote 1 day ago:
This is, roughly, a measure of how old your civilization is.
MrDrDr wrote 1 day ago:
The other difficulties with older texts is not just the different
spellings or the now arcane words - but that the meaning of some of
those recognisable words changed over time. C.S. Lewis wrote an
excellent book that describing the changing meanings of a word (he
termed ramifications) and dedicated a chapter to details this for
several examples including âNatureâ, âFreeâ and âSenseâ.
Would highly recommend a read.
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_in_Words
throwaway3060 wrote 1 day ago:
I can get through 1300 with some effort, but from 1200 I get nothing.
Just a complete dropoff in that one time frame.
ajb wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah same. The explanation at the bottom is interesting, lots of the
words imported from Normandy drop off then, and the grammar changes
more significantly.
NooneAtAll3 wrote 1 day ago:
I think people see "The blog ends there. No sign-off, no âthanks
for reading.â" and stop reading everything after that xD
ajb wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, I nearly missed it myself
antonvs wrote 1 day ago:
I was able to get the gist of 1200, with some effort. By paragraph:
P1: Unclear, but I think it's basically saying there is much to say
about all that happened to him.
[Edit: the more I stare at it, the more sense it makes. "There is
much to say about all that ? was wrought on me, ???. I shall never
forget it, not while I live!"]
P2: Unexpectedly, a woman ("uuif", wife) appeared at "great speed" to
save him. "She came in among the evil men..."
P3: "She slaughtered the heathen men that pinned me, slaughtered them
and felled them to the ground. There was blood and bale enough and
the fallen lay still, for [they could no more?] stand. As for the
Maister, the [wrathe?] Maister, he fled away in the darkness and was
seen no more."
P4: The protagonist thanks the woman for saving him, "I thank
thee..."
On first reading, I didn't know what "uuif" was. I had to look that
one up.
coolcoder613 wrote 1 day ago:
Same here, pretty much. I was able to get to 1200 without much
difficulty but 1200 took a lot of effort to decipher.
antonvs wrote 1 day ago:
Also I loved this little discovery, from 1300:
> "Ãe euele man louÈ, whan that he sawe my peine, and it was a
crueel louÈter, wiþouten merci or pitee as of a man þat haþ no
rewþe in his herte."
"The evil man laughed, when he saw my pain, and it was a cruel
laughter, without mercy or pity as of a man that has no rewthe in
his heart."
In other words, a rewthe-less man.
We've retained the word "ruthless" but no longer use the word
"ruth", "a feeling of pity, distress, or grief."
adrian_b wrote 1 day ago:
That older spelling is the reason why "w" is called "double u".
Had the word been written "wif", I don't think that there would
have been any need for you to search the word, as the relationship
with "wife" would have been obvious.
Between then and now, in this word only the pronunciation of "i"
has changed, from "i" like in the European languages to "ai".
markus_zhang wrote 1 day ago:
1500 is the threshold I think. I donât understand 1400. I can go a
bit further back in my mother tongue, but 1200 is definitely tough for
me.
MBCook wrote 1 day ago:
I can get to 1300, though itâs harder there and there were a couple
words that I just couldnât figure out.
For me 1200 is off a cliff, just like the author describes. I can get
a few words here or there but comprehension is just gone.
smitty1e wrote 1 day ago:
Shakespeare is a definite barrier.
delecti wrote 1 day ago:
I normally don't use a "voice" in my head when reading, but doing
so is invaluable when reading Shakspeare. If I can't "hear" what
I'm reading, it's much harder to parse.
WillAdams wrote 1 day ago:
A recent book which looks at this in an interesting fashion is _The
Wake_ which treats the Norman Conquest in apocalyptic terms using a
language markedly different and appropriate
HTML [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21023409-the-wake
inglor_cz wrote 1 day ago:
There is an interesting review of The Wake on the PSmiths literary
substack:
HTML [1]: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/guest-review-the-wake-by-paul-k...
WillAdams wrote 1 day ago:
That has moved it out of a wish list and into my cart for my next
purchase.
Makes me wonder what J.R.R. Tolkien would have thought of this.
CamperBob2 wrote 1 day ago:
If you go far enough down the Psmiths' online rabbit hole, you'll
find (via footnote 7) some speculation on that. Tolkien was
apparently of the opinion that the Norman Conquest was a Very Bad
Thing for English historical language and culture, hence his
frequent references and allusions to Anglo-Saxon mythology. It
sounds like he would have been a fan of The Wake as described
here.
WillAdams wrote 1 day ago:
That was my thought as well, and it's an interesting thought
exercise, but unless there is some note on this which I'm not
aware of, it's just reasoned speculation.
jmclnx wrote 2 days ago:
It will be interesting on how texting will change things down the road.
For example, many people use 'u' instead of 'you'. Could that make
English spelling in regards to how words are spoken worse or better
then now ?
antonvs wrote 1 day ago:
> worse or better then now?
*than.
Which I realize is an ironic correction in this context. I wonder if
we'll lose a separate then/than and disambiguate by context.
dhosek wrote 1 day ago:
Iâd say weâve already partly lost separate then/than. Itâs
sort of like how you can sometimes tell second-language speakers of
a language because their grammar is much more precise than a native
speakerâs would be (I have a vague notion that native French
speakers tend to use third person plural where the textbooks inform
French learners to use first person plural, but Iâm too lazy to
open another tab and google for the sake of an HN comment).
teo_zero wrote 1 day ago:
You can tell second-language speakers because they know when to
use "its" and "it's".
dhosek wrote 1 day ago:
Thanks to having kids, I ended up reliving lots of details from
my own K-3 education and one of the things I clearly remember
was coming up with my own mnemonic of remembering its vs itâs
by comparing those to his vs heâs.
NooneAtAll3 wrote 1 day ago:
and knowing how to count to 1 to not use "they" xD
dhosek wrote 1 day ago:
âtheyâ as a non-gendered singular pronoun dates back
hundreds of years.
NooneAtAll3 wrote 1 day ago:
thankfully, "the enemy can't disseminate bad grammar on the
internet if you disable his hand!" =)
SoftTalker wrote 1 day ago:
People say that but I think it's gaslighting. I got marked
down for using singular "they" in any writing I did in
school in the 1980s. I didn't start to see it as a common
"gender neutral" pronoun in professional writing (e.g.
newspapers) until the last 20 years or so, and really not
commonly until the past decade. It still trips me up when I
see it used, I have to go back and make sure I didn't miss
that more than one person was being discussed.
I suppose one could go back and look at popular style
guides from the 1980s and 1990s and see if they endorsed
it.
rsynnott wrote 1 day ago:
> I got marked down for using singular "they" in any
writing I did in school in the 1980s.
And your teacher would presumably have marked down
Shakespeare for the same thing. If it was good enough for
Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Austin, you'd think it would be
good enough for your teacher, but we went through a
particularly prescriptive period in the early to mid 20th
century (though your teacher was maybe slightly behind
the times even in the 80s).
ksenzee wrote 1 day ago:
They were teaching us that in the 1980s, yes, but it was
an overcorrection. They also taught us not to split our
infinitives. That was BS as well. I see no need to
maintain standards that were originally imposed by
grammarians who undervalued English and overvalued Latin.
These days we would call that linguistic insecurity.
dhosek wrote 51 min ago:
Indeed, a lot of grammatical ârulesâ of English
were a result of attempting to impose Latin grammatical
rules upon English as part of the neoclassical movement
of the 18th century. Split infinitives, dangling
prepositions (English is somewhat of an outlier among
Indo-European languages in that it lacks the practice
of prefixing verbs with prepositions to form new
verbsâconsider e.g., Czech odjit (jit + od), Spanish
contener (tener + con), Latin exeo (eo + ex), Greek
καÏαÏÏÏÎÏÏ (ÏÏÏÎÏÏ + κᾰÏá¾°)¹) so
arguably, phrase like âgo withâ fulfill that role
and are not prepositions lacking an accompanying noun.
⸻
1. While in most languages, this class of verbs becomes
apparent when the base noun is irregular or has special
conjugation rules, in Greek,² itâs especially
noticeable thanks to the fact that the aorist causes a
morphological change to the beginning of the verb as
well as the end. Except for these verbs, the
morphological change ends up happening in the middle of
the verb.
2. I donât know modern Greek beyond what I can
discern from my classical Greek knowledge, so I donât
know if modern Greek has retained this feature.
BadBadJellyBean wrote 2 days ago:
Around 1300 to 1400. Some words were harder. But English isn't my first
language either. So I guess that's alright. I guess I'd be fine in the
1500 in England. At least language wise.
Sharlin wrote 1 day ago:
In 1500 a lot of pronunciation would've been different too, it was in
the middle of the Great Vowel Shift [1]. And of course while the UK
is still (in)famous for its many accents and dialects, some nigh
mutually unintelligible, the situation would've been even worse back
then.
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
BadBadJellyBean wrote 1 day ago:
I'd assume I'd be able to adapt. Might take a little while bit
seems comprehensible.
dhosek wrote 1 day ago:
Or as Iâve heard it described humorously, the Big Vowel Movement.
aeve890 wrote 2 days ago:
> No cap, that lowkey main character energy is giving skibidi rizz, but
the fanum tax is cooked so weâre just catching strays in the group
chat, fr fr, itâs a total skill issue, periodt.
I'd say around 2020
leoc wrote 2 days ago:
If you want to improve your score, the blog author (Dr. Colin Gorrie)
has just the thing: a book which will teach you Old English by means of
a story about a talking bear. Here's how it works: [1] . Your dream of
learning Old English has never been closer: get Åsweald Bera [2]
today.
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZhlWdVvZfw
HTML [2]: https://colingorrie.com/books/osweald-bera/
Podrod wrote 1 day ago:
Shame that it only seems to be available in physical form and only
from the US. The price is already quite high and with postage to the
UK it adds up to be quite expensive.
LAC-Tech wrote 1 day ago:
My friend from the UK bought it and it got sent from somewhere
locakly. I am in NZ and mine was sent from AU. So I think you
should be covered.
tkocmathla wrote 1 day ago:
The "locakly" typo is perfectly placed in the comment thread of
this article!
LAC-Tech wrote 1 day ago:
co-sign this. Oswald the Bear is an amazing book and taught me how to
read Old English remarkably quickly.
The first chapter is like a book for toddlers in Old English (with
questions and loads of repeated vocab), and each chapter gets a bit
harder. Half way in its like a Young Adults Novel level of
difficulty. But each step up is relatively small.
The actual story is great too. ÃthelstÄn MÅ«s is my spirit animal.
satvikpendem wrote 1 day ago:
The Ãrberg method is great, I wish more languages had media
utilizing it.
fpsvogel wrote 1 day ago:
There are actually several similar books for modern European
languages, available as PDFs (in the public domain and/or out of
print): [1] Ãrberg may be the best, though.
HTML [1]: https://blog.nina.coffee/2018/08/27/all_nature_method_book...
guerrilla wrote 1 day ago:
Man, I really needed this when I was studying OE. I was trying to do
the Alice in Wonderland book and an Oxford textbook but it was really
a lot of work compared to other language learning (even compared to
Latin). This would have made it a lot more fun.
satvikpendem wrote 1 day ago:
The link above mentions Ãrberg who did something similar for Latin
(Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, ebook and audiobook), which I've
read through with good success. It's known as the immersive Ãrberg
method after him.
Dwedit wrote 2 days ago:
Seems to be heavily focused on orthography. In 1700s we get the long S
that resembles an F. In 1600 we screw with the V's and U's. In 1400,
the thorn and that thing that looks like a 3 appears. Then more
strange symbols show up later on as well.
aardvark179 wrote 1 day ago:
Orthography is probably the biggest stumbling block going back to the
1500s or 1400s , but thatâs really because the rest of the language
has changed in vocabulary and style, but is still understandable. If
you think the 1200 or 1100 entry are mostly orthographical changes
then you are missing the interesting bits.
saltcured wrote 1 day ago:
I would prefer to see a version that was skillfully translated to
modern orthography so that we could appreciate shifts in vocabulary
and grammar.
To me, it is nearly like trying to look at a picture book of
fashion but the imagery is degraded as you go back. I'd like to see
the time-traveler's version with clean digital pictures of every
era...
bryanrasmussen wrote 1 day ago:
so replace the long s with just s and the thorn (þ) with th?
others?
reader9274 wrote 2 days ago:
At around 1200, Godzilla had a stroke
b112 wrote 2 days ago:
Don't get the reference compared to the text in the article for that
timeframe.
Is there something specific in there?
doctor_blood wrote 1 day ago:
"Godzilla Had a Stroke Trying to Read This and Fucking Died" is a
meme frequently posted in response to incomprehensible/extremely
dumb posts.
BoredomIsFun wrote 2 days ago:
I am an ESL, but I can easily comprehend 1600. 1500 with serious
effort.
Dwedit wrote 2 days ago:
At 1400, they add in the thorn "þ". If you don't know that's
supposed to be "th", you'll get stuck there.
BoredomIsFun wrote 1 day ago:
No, not that. The endings are different, the verbs are
substantially different. AFAIK invention of printing had generally
stabilizing effect on English.
It is not that I am incapable to understand old English, it is that
1600 is dramatically closer to modern than 1400 one; I think
someone from 1600 would be able to converse at 2026 UK farmers
market with little problems too; someone from 1400 would be far
more challenged.
adrian_b wrote 1 day ago:
The invention of printing had a stabilizing effect on all
languages, at least of their written form, because for some
languages, especially for English, the pronunciation has diverged
later from the written form, but the latter was not changed to
follow the pronunciation.
I have read many printed books from the range 1450 to 1900, in
several European languages. In all of them the languages are much
easier to understand than those of the earlier manuscripts.
dhosek wrote 1 day ago:
Not to mention that there are pockets of English speakers in
Great Britain whose everyday speech isnât very far from 17th
century English. The hypothetical time traveler might be asked,
âSo youâre from Yorkshire then, are you?â
dddgghhbbfblk wrote 2 days ago:
Should be "how far back in time can you read English?" The language
itself is what is spoken and the writing, while obviously related, is
its own issue. Spelling is conventional and spelling and alphabet
changes don't necessarily correspond to anything meaningful in the
spoken language; meanwhile there can be large changes in pronunciation
and comprehensibility that are masked by an orthography that doesn't
reflect them.
carlosjobim wrote 1 day ago:
We have the written word from centuries ago available today.
Where are you going to find the spoken word from centuries ago?
noosphr wrote 1 day ago:
I use a screen reader and in managed quite well until 1200.
That said: phonetic spelling now. We have spent 500 years turning
English into something closer to Egyptian hieroglyphs than a language
with an alphabet.
sheept wrote 1 day ago:
phonetic spelling based on whose dialect? should "merry" "marry"
and "Mary" be spelled the same?
besides, pronunciation continues to evolve, so any phonetic
spelling would continue to gradually diverge from the spoken
language
noosphr wrote 1 day ago:
You suffer from the typical brain damage caused by using a
language without an alphabet.
There is no such thing as spelling in phonetic writing systems
because they render what is said, not some random collection of
glyphs that approximated how a word was pronounced 500 years ago,
in the best case.
If two people with different accents can speak to each other,
they can also write to each other under a phonetic writing
system.
eesmith wrote 1 day ago:
The best case is a syllabary with how the word was pronounced a
few years previous. [1] > Around 1809, ... Sequoyah began work
to create a writing system for the Cherokee language. ... He
worked on the syllabary for twelve years before completion and
dropped or modified most of the characters he originally
created.
> After the syllabary was completed in the early 1820s, it
achieved almost instantaneous popularity and spread rapidly
throughout Cherokee society.[4] By 1825, the majority of
Cherokees could read and write in their newly developed
orthography. ...
> Albert Gallatin ... believed [the syllabary] was superior to
the English alphabet in that literacy could be easily achieved
for Cherokee at a time when only one-third of English-speaking
people achieved the same goal.[6] He recognized that even
though the Cherokee student must learn 85 characters instead of
26 for English, the Cherokee could read immediately after
learning all the symbols. The Cherokee student could accomplish
in a few weeks what students of English writing might require
two years to achieve.
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
DiogenesKynikos wrote 1 day ago:
That's kind of a mean and not very relevant response.
The point is that if anyone wanted to reform English spelling,
they would have to choose a particular dialect to standardize
around.
There is no standard English dialect. There is a relatively
standard version of American English ("Walter Cronkite
English"), and there is Received Pronunciation in England, but
then there are all sorts of other dialects that are dominant
elsewhere (Scotland, Ireland, India, etc.).
Which one should we choose to base our orthography on? Or
should we allow English spelling to splinter into several
completely different systems? Yes, there are already slight
differences in British vs. American spelling, but they're
extremely minor compared to the differences in pronunciation.
And after this spelling reform, will people still be able to
read anything written before the reform, or will that become a
specialized ability that most people don't learn?
noosphr wrote 1 day ago:
You don't standardise. That's the point. If you can
understand how people speak you will understand how they
write.
DiogenesKynikos wrote 1 day ago:
So you want a thousand different writing systems, or
everyone just winging it as they go along?
That would make reading anything extremely slow and
difficult.
withinboredom wrote 1 day ago:
Worked for thousands of years with other phonetic written
languages. Words change spelling over time, instead of
pronounciation drifting without the spelling changing.
sheept wrote 1 day ago:
Then under your definition there must not be any widely used
written language with an alphabet. Most of the world's
alphabetic writing systems aren't phonetic transcriptions,
they're standardized. They're usually based on the prestige
dialect, at the cost of diminutizing other dialects.
For example, Spanish has a fairly consistent spelling system
standardized by RAE, based in Madrid. But, for instance, even
though much of Latin America doesn't have a distinction between
s and soft c (seseo), they still keep the distinction in its
spelling.
noosphr wrote 1 day ago:
One I can say for sure is Serbian. Italian looks like it
does. Finnish, Hungarian, Georgian, Armenian, Albanian,
Turkish and Korean are all ones I've heard are to a lesser or
greater degree, but I don't know enough to say either way.
kortex wrote 1 day ago:
Standard Italian speakers in Rome struggle to understand
Ciociaro dialect, which is from the region on the outskirts
of Rome. Take "n'coppa" - spelled with a "c" but very much
pronounced /Ågopa/ with a voiced [g]. I dont even have a
reference point for Sicilian but that really pushes the
bounds of the dialect/language distinction.
That's one example, from a language with ~70M native
speakers, in a geographically tight region.
Likewise, all your other languages (sans Turkiye) are very
compact geographically with small speaker bases. And
Turkish undoubtedly has large aspects of forced
standardization and dialect extinction.
English is spoken by 1.5 billion, by ESL speakers from
basically every language tree, across the world. Try to get
folks from Boston, Brooklyn, Philly, and Albany in a room
and get them to agree on a phonetic spelling.
accidentallfact wrote 1 day ago:
People always overestimate how 'phonetic' their language
is, because nobody actually uses phonemes in regular
speech. In Korean in particular, there doesn't even seem to
be any obvious correspondence between what is written, and
what is actually said.
Foreign accents don't come from any inherent inability to
learn language after X years of age. They come from people
pronouncing languages as they are written, and virtually no
language is like that in reality.
DiogenesKynikos wrote 1 day ago:
Foreign accents come from both.
It's true that when studying a foreign language, learning
to read too early can harm your pronunciation. However,
it is very difficult to learn new sounds that have no
equivalent in your native language, and some languages
have very restrictive phonology (like Italian and
Japanese requiring a vowel at the end of every word) that
their native speakers struggle to break out of.
williadc wrote 1 day ago:
I've been thinking about this problem for quite awhile, and
recently coded up something that allows for easy conversion between
today's written English, and a phonetic spelling convention. [1]
I've created a Firefox Add-on for it as well.
HTML [1]: https://git.sr.ht/~dcw/iNgliS
HTML [2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/inglis/
Oreb wrote 1 day ago:
Phonetic spelling would perhaps make the language easier to learn
for native speakers, but it would make it harder to learn for
foreigners, at least those of us who come from Europe. Most words
in written English resemble words in Germanic or Romance languages.
If English was spelled phonetically, the resemblance would be
significantly smaller.
People often say that the English spelling is weird or illogical.
As a non-native speaker, I disagree. The English spelling makes
perfect sense. Itâs the English pronunciation which is really
strange and inconsistent.
cyberax wrote 1 day ago:
> Phonetic spelling would perhaps make the language easier to
learn for native speakers, but it would make it harder to learn
for foreigners, at least those of us who come from Europe.
BS. Phonetic alphabets are _much_ easier to learn for everyone.
In Russia and Ukraine pretty much every child can read by the
time they enter the first grade. It's _that_ easy because both
alphabets are phonetic (although it's only one-way in case of
Russian).
Meanwhile, when I was learning English there basically was one
spelling rule: memorize. It was not at all helpful. I also ended
up learning English as a mostly written language, so after moving
to the US, I kept getting surprised by how familiar written words
are actually pronounced.
E.g. it took me a while to explain to a nurse over the phone that
I may have pneumonia and need an appointment. Why the heck that
leading "p" is completely silent?!?
mcswell wrote 1 day ago:
To be technical: the term is phonemic, not phonetic. If we
spelled phonetically, we'd have different symbols for the p in
'spin' and the p+h in 'pin'. Similarly for 'tick' and 'stick',
and 'scale' and 'kale'. Native English speakers generally
don't notice the differences, just like speakers of many
oriental languages don't easily recognize the difference
between English /l/ and /r/.
kstrauser wrote 1 day ago:
OTOH, Iâve seen what yâall call cursive, and want no part
of it.
mananaysiempre wrote 1 day ago:
The usual pictures of и / п / Ñ / Ñ ambiguity that you
see are exaggerated in that they show forms that are
nominally âstandardâ but basically impossible to
reproduce without a fountain (or, even better, dip) pen
(think round hand or, as 'cyberax mentions, Spencerian
script), yet use a constant stroke width that such an
implement wouldnât produce. For the latter two, people who
actually write m and not Ñ will often resolve the ambiguity
with Ñ with an over- resp. underbar (the same ones that
Serbian uses even in print[1]). Itâs also pretty normal to
exaggerate letter joins when they come out looking too
similar to parts of other letters, etc. Overall, modern
Russian cursive is about as legible as the modern French one,
and I donât think people complain much about the latter.
I also find the hand-wringing about English accents somewhat
surprising. Yes, different accents exist, and yes, English
has a much wider variation than (urban) Russian (there are
things in the countryside that urban dwellers havenât heard
for a century), but phonemic orthographies are a thing, and
though children in e.g. Moscow may perpetually struggle with
orthographic distinctions that no longer correspond to
anything in their accent, the idea of a spelling competition
remains about as laughable as that of a shoelace-tying one.
Nobody makes you represent the many mergers of English with a
single letter in your new orthography (though it would be
funny). [1] , rightmost column
HTML [1]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cyrillic_alt...
cyberax wrote 1 day ago:
It depends on a writer, but it can be very legible.
I used to be able to jot down notes during lectures almost as
fast as the normal spoken speed. We often traded notebooks
when preparing for the exams, and I rarely had problems
reading other people's notes.
It's also really nice to write, once you learn it. I was
surprised after moving to the US that almost nobody here
knows how to write in cursive anymore.
A part of this is a really terrible cursive variant that
schools in the US used to teach ( [1] ). Modern Russian (and
Ukrainian) cursives are closer to the older Spencerian
script:
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method
HTML [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencerian_script
dontlaugh wrote 1 day ago:
The other big problem would be the lack of intelligibility of
English written by native speakers from different places.
abustamam wrote 1 day ago:
I'm a bit confused by what you mean by that, unless you're talking
about emoji, but those weren't around 500 years ago.
Do you mean that since English isn't phonetically spelled, that
which we call the alphabet is rather arbitrary?
ETH_start wrote 1 day ago:
I think he means the latter. This makes learning the spelling
harder because you have to learn each word individually, as you
would have with hieroglyphs, as opposed spelling it out based on
phonemes (that you would have learned from learning how words
sound when spoken) and a limited alphabet.
SoftTalker wrote 1 day ago:
That's not how I learned to read or spell in the 1970s.
"Sounding it out" was the main strategy. You learned a few
rules for how different combinations of letters sounded, and
the exceptions to those, as you went along. But most words are
spelled as they sound.
noosphr wrote 1 day ago:
>But most words are spelled as they sound.
English has 45 sounds and 26 letter. There are basically no
words over three letter long that are written as they are
spoken.
scubbo wrote 1 day ago:
Spelling can still be phonetic even if groups of letters
have differing sounds from those letters' sounds serially
in isolation. The key criterion is that the rules must be
universal, applying to every instance of those groupings,
rather than having exceptions for their appearances in
certain words.
...ok, it occurs to me now that a smart-alec might declare
each individual word to be a "grouping of letters with its
own phonetic pronounciation", whereupon phoneticism
as-defined is achieved trivially because pronounciation is
universal over the singleton universe of words spelt
exactly like that word. You know what I _mean_ -
"sufficiently small groups of letters", hand-wave.
noosphr wrote 1 day ago:
The issue is that the language can never render that
collection of letters. Sh in English can render the sh in
sheep. It can't render any word with the sounds s and h
together.
kstrauser wrote 1 day ago:
Perhaps you misheard.
naniwaduni wrote 1 day ago:
The Latin alphabet variant modern English uses has uses
only ~11 kinds of strokes, where is this 26 coming from?
noosphr wrote 1 day ago:
An alphabet assigns a letter to a sound. No more no less.
English no longer has an alphabet because the Latin
alphabet, designed for Latin languages, replaced the
native Runic alphabet.
Serbian has an alphabet, as does Italian. All other
European languages I'm aware of don't.
jamiek88 wrote 1 day ago:
Interesting! So whatâs the abcâs we learn then?
KPGv2 wrote 1 day ago:
> Spelling is conventional and spelling and alphabet changes don't
necessarily correspond to anything meaningful in the spoken language
On the contrary, spelling is highly idiosyncratic until the 18th
century, and until then it was tightly correlated to the sounds of
spoken language. Shakespeare didn't even HIMSELF have one way of
spelling his own last name. That's how non-conventional spelling was
until pretty recently.
You can even see it in these examples, words like "maiſter" in IIRC
the 1300s example. Which becomes "master" later in English, but
remains Mäster in Frisian (the closest Germanic language to English)
and is also mäster in Swedish.
chuckadams wrote 1 day ago:
Screw these modern sensibilities, I am totally renaming my default
git branch to "maiſter".
dddgghhbbfblk wrote 1 day ago:
I think you are missing my point. Just because spelling can be
inconsistent doesn't mean it's not conventional. We agree that
certain letters and combinations of letters correspond to certain
sounds--that's a convention. We could just as easily remap the
letters in our alphabet to entirely different sounds from the ones
they represent today and the resulting written text would be, on
the surface, entirely incomprehensible, because we no longer
understand the conventions being used.
In this particular case, there are several glyphs used in the older
texts which we don't use any more today, which makes the older text
both appear more "different" and, for most people, harder to read.
But this is an artificial source of difficulty in this case. I
acknowledge your point that some other spelling differences track
pronunciation differences but this isn't always true.
As far as pronunciation changes that aren't captured in spelling
changes, this is true most obviously for a lot of words whose
spelling standardized during or before the Great Vowel Shift, like
"day".
thaumasiotes wrote 1 day ago:
Languages can change in many different ways. Pronunciation changes
impede you a lot more the first time you meet someone with a
different pronunciation than they do as you interact over time.
Grammatical changes are trickier.
gfto wrote 1 day ago:
You can try this video to see how far back you can understand spoken
English:
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic
frogpelt wrote 1 day ago:
I came here to post the same video. I couldn't understand it until
1600-ish. My wife immediately recognized swinu as pigs early in the
video.
mock-possum wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah itâs really just the glyphs that are changing here, and
occasionally the spelling, otherwise the words themselves are still
fairly recognizable if youâre well-read.
ksenzee wrote 1 day ago:
This is true through 1300 or so. If you transliterate the 1200,
1100, and 1000 sections to modern glyphs, it's still a foreign
language with the occasional recognizable word (such as "the").
Learning Old English in college was a lot like learning Latin: lots
of recognizable vocabulary, totally unfamiliar case endings, mostly
unfamiliar pronouns, arbitrary word order.
jjtheblunt wrote 1 day ago:
there'd be a discontinuity around 1066 since Normans brought over
Latin-derived vocabulary aplenty, and overlayed germanic
vocabulary. it's super evident if you learn Swedish (for
example...very related to pre-1066 English) and have learned Latin
(or French), while speaking English.
depressedpanda wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah. Try comparing texts written in Old English and Old Norse.
It's basically the same language. (I'm not surprised at all that
Beowulf takes place in Scandinavia.)
But I think they would both be easier to decipher for someone
speaking Swedish than English.
dhosek wrote 1 day ago:
Indeed, I remember being in Oxford in the 90s and an older man
approached me and spoke to me in English and I couldnât understand
a word he said. My ex-wife, whoâs an ESL speaker who speaks
fluently and without an accent has trouble with English accents in
general. Similarly, in Spanish, I find itâs generally easier for me
to understand Spanish speakers than Mexican speakers even though I
learned Mexican Spanish in school and itâs been my primary exposure
to the language. Likewise, I generally have an easier time
understanding South American speakers than Caribbean speakers and
both sound little like Mexican Spanish. (The Spanish I understand
most easily is the heavily accented Spanish of non-native Spanish
speakers.)
Accents have diverged a lot over time and as I recall, American
English (particularly the mid-Atlantic seaboard variety) is closer to
what Shakespeare and his cohort spoke than the standard BBC accent
employed in most contemporary Shakespeare productions).
syspec wrote 2 hours 35 min ago:
Did you mean it is easier for you to understand Spaniards speaking
Spanish than Mexican speakers?
ranger_danger wrote 1 day ago:
I didn't think it was possible to speak "without an accent."
bityard wrote 1 day ago:
It depends on who you ask.
There is a "dialect" called General American English, which is
essentially how national news anchors and some actors are
trained, so that they don't sound like they are too obviously
from anywhere in particular to the public.
A large percentage of Midwesterners and Canadians speak _mostly_
General American, if you allow for the occasional drawl or
shifted vowel.
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English
lqstuart wrote 1 day ago:
I think I read it's more "hillbilly" English that sounds like
Shakespeare? Like coal mining towns where words like "deer" and
"bear" are two syllables. Probably a combination of that and
eastern seaboard.
I only learned recently that the vowel shift and non-rhotic R's in
Britain happened after the colonization of America. Americans still
talk "normally" whereas the English got weird. Also why Irish
accents sound closer to American than British I think. Linguistics
is cool
clw8 wrote 1 day ago:
Also why the non-rhotic American accents are all by the East
Coast, they were influenced by the non-rhotic British visitors
while the inland areas were spared.
tayo42 wrote 1 day ago:
Who taught you Mexican Spanish in school? Im always hearing about
how Spanish speakers not from Spain struggle with Spanish in
school. You didn't learn vosostros?
well_actulily wrote 1 day ago:
Anecdata, but I took Spanish all four years in high school in
Southern CaliforniaâI knew of vosotros, but was never really
taught it
kstrauser wrote 1 day ago:
Different person, but I learned Mexican Spanish in school. The
teacher taught us vosotros âfor the test, and itâs not any
harder than the others once you learn it, so might as well, but
youâll never need this again unless you go to Europeâ. She
seems to have been right. To this day, Iâve never needed
vosotros.
Oreb wrote 1 day ago:
> The Spanish I understand most easily is the heavily accented
Spanish of non-native Spanish speakers.
Are you sure this is because of their accent? I have the same
experience with French (the non-native speakers are easier to
understand), but I always thought that was because they use fewer
and simpler words.
lefra wrote 1 day ago:
As an ESL I'd say it depends on the native language of who's
speaking. I'll have no trouble with a thick spanish, italian or
romanian language (I'm french), but indians speaking english are
completely incomprehensible to me.
quadrifoliate wrote 1 day ago:
If you want to be able to understand them, you should probably
stop thinking of them as a monolithic groupd of "Indians".
Individual states in India are comparable in size and greater
in population than Spain or Italy; and some cities and their
suburbs are comparable to Romania. Overall, India's population
is more than 3x that of Europe.
A lot of Indians have English that's influenced by the specific
region they come from and the native language. A couple
examples:
- Specific regions of Northwestern India have the "e-"
prefixing (e.g. "stop" turns into "estop") while speaking
English
- Southern Indians tend to y-prefix due to their native
languages having more of that sound (e.g. "LLM" can turn into
"yell-ell-em").
mistrial9 wrote 1 day ago:
as a native English speaker in California, this is funny to
read. I was standing in a crowd of undergraduates at UC
Berkeley, shoulder to shoulder, during a break in a movie.
Two guys were talking Very Fast right next to me, I mean 0.5
meter in a crowd. I decided to run an experiment because I
could not pick out any of what they said. So I turned and
spoke slowly in an ever so slight British formal version of
California English "excuse me, do you know what time it is?'
. One stopped and answered -- almost exactly as I spoke --
the current time (around 18:00). Then they went back to their
talk! it was English!
VorpalWay wrote 1 day ago:
It took months of being exposed to Indian English on a regular
basis for me to start to understand it (and I still find it
requires significant mental effort). Context: I'm a Swede who
regularly thinks and dreams in English (and when I did an
English language test for exchange student purposes I got top
marks in all categories).
pavel_lishin wrote 3 min ago:
My college had a lot of Indian & Pakistani students &
instructors, and the first few semesters were rough, but by
junior year, their accents were totally understandable to me.
It was a very useful experience to have, as someone who
became a software developer.
I wonder what they thought of my Russian accent.
NooneAtAll3 wrote 1 day ago:
> older man approached me and spoke to me in English and I
couldnât understand a word he said
like this [1] ?
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc
mh- wrote 1 day ago:
I was expecting the hooligans from Eurotrip.
pjc50 wrote 1 day ago:
I have had to interpret between an Ulsterman and a South African,
who were both speaking English. I think those accents have vowel
shifted in opposite directions.
I was also taught a bit of Chaucer (died 1400) in English at
school. Although not any of the naughty bits.
clw8 wrote 1 day ago:
I imagine a current generation high school English class would be
giggling right from the first line about gooning while on
pilgrimages.
halapro wrote 1 day ago:
This sounds like a Hot Fuzz scene.
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cun-LZvOTdw
noosphr wrote 1 day ago:
My funniest moment working in Singapore was translating between
an Indian and a Chinese co-worker. The translation was repeating
what each said in English in English.
aardvark179 wrote 1 day ago:
Having interpreted for a guy speaking with a broad Glaswegian
accent on the east coast main line, I can totally believe this.
JasonADrury wrote 1 day ago:
I live in London, I can drive a little over an hour from where I
live and hardly understand the people working at the petrol
station. A few more hours and they start to speak French.
good-idea wrote 2 days ago:
How far into the future is my concern
iso1631 wrote 1 day ago:
I'm heading to Stornoway next week, I don't hold out much hope
rhdunn wrote 2 days ago:
Simon Roper has a spoken equivalent for Northern English -- [1] .
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Zqn9_OQAw
PaulDavisThe1st wrote 1 day ago:
He has a spoken one that isn't Northern English specific too: [1]
"From Olde English to Modern American English in One Monologue"
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic
qingcharles wrote 1 day ago:
LOL I'm from Northern England and I tapped out ~1850.
I remember my father and I having to enable the subtitles for Rab C
Nesbitt when I was a kid. There are areas of Scotland (especially the
isles) which are probably still unintelligible to most of the British
population I would wager.
petesergeant wrote 1 day ago:
for a very specific dialect of Northern English. I struggled to
understand much beyond 1950, and I had a good ear
metalman wrote 2 days ago:
the experience of grendle in the original flashing between
comprehensibility and jumbled letters is as far back as I have gone,
but I read everything truely ancient that I can get my hands on from
any culture in any language(translated) and try and make sense of it
best as I can
rhdunn wrote 2 days ago:
I can comprehend most of the text back to 1300, if slower than
Modern/Present Day English. It helps to know the old letter forms,
and some of how Shakespearean (Early Modern), Middle, and Old English
work. It also helps sounding it out.
Past that, I'm not familiar with Old English enough to understand and
follow the text.
antonvs wrote 1 day ago:
Knowing a bit of German or Dutch helps as well.
I posted my amateur translation of 1200 here: [1] At first it
stumped me, but I spent some time on it and it started to become
intelligible. I didn't look up any words until after I was done, at
which point I looked up "uuif" (woman/wife) since I wanted to know
what manner of amazing creature had saved the protagonist :D
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47102874
dhosek wrote 1 day ago:
Knowing that W is a late addition to the alphabet and would have
been written UU or VV suddenly makes uuif obvious.
antonvs wrote 1 day ago:
I could intuit the pronunciation but I didnât make the
connection from âwifâ to âwomanâ in general. In
hindsight I should have, after all we have words like
âmidwifeâ which doesnât refer to a personâs actual
married partner.
Symbiote wrote 1 day ago:
"Wif" meant woman at the same time that "wer" meant man and
"man" meant person.
Man changed to mean only a male person, and we lost wer
except in the word "werewolf".
remyp wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm a native English speaker and I think this is an easier
jump if you know other Romance languages. In Spanish and
Portuguese âwomanâ and âwifeâ are often the same
word, âmujerâ and âmulherâ respectively.
DonaldFisk wrote 1 day ago:
Also French femme. It isn't limited to Italic languages
either. There's also German Frau, Dutch vrouw, Irish
bean.
dhosek wrote 1 day ago:
Czech žena
7v3x3n3sem9vv wrote 2 days ago:
an audible example:
HTML [1]: https://loops.video/v/dxXFQREMjg
leoc wrote 2 days ago:
And here's the Simon Roper videos acknowledged in the article: "From
Old English to Modern American English in One Monologue" [1] (short
version: [2] ). This runs forward rather than back in time. However,
Roper's "How Far Back Can You Understand Northern English?" [3] does
run backwards in time.
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic
HTML [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_pS3_c6QkI
HTML [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Zqn9_OQAw
fuzzfactor wrote 5 days ago:
This is a good quick example, almost like an eye test where the
characters are harder to interpret when you go down the page because
they are smaller.
Only for this the font stays the same size, and it gets harder to
interpret as is deviates further from modern English.
For me, I can easily go back to about when the printing press got
popular.
No coincidence I think.
DIR <- back to front page