[HN Gopher] How far back in time can you understand English?
___________________________________________________________________
How far back in time can you understand English?
Author : spzb
Score : 644 points
Date : 2026-02-18 14:56 UTC (4 days ago)
HTML web link (www.deadlanguagesociety.com)
TEXT w3m dump (www.deadlanguagesociety.com)
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| 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.
| 7v3x3n3sem9vv wrote:
| an audible example:
|
| https://loops.video/v/dxXFQREMjg
| leoc wrote:
| And here's the Simon Roper videos acknowledged in the article:
| "From Old English to Modern American English in One Monologue"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic (short version:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_pS3_c6QkI ). This runs
| forward rather than back in time. However, Roper's "How Far
| Back Can You Understand Northern English?"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Zqn9_OQAw does run backwards
| in time.
| metalman wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| Knowing a bit of German or Dutch helps as well.
|
| I posted my amateur translation of 1200 here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47102874
|
| 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
| dhosek wrote:
| Knowing that W is a late addition to the alphabet and would
| have been written UU or VV suddenly makes uuif obvious.
| antonvs wrote:
| I could intuit the pronunciation but I didn't make the
| connection from "wif" to "woman" in general. In hindsight
| I should have, after all we have words like "midwife"
| which doesn't refer to a person's actual married partner.
| remyp wrote:
| I'm a native English speaker and I think this is an
| easier jump if you know other Romance languages. In
| Spanish and Portuguese "woman" and "wife" are often the
| same word, "mujer" and "mulher" respectively.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| Also French femme. It isn't limited to Italic languages
| either. There's also German Frau, Dutch vrouw, Irish
| bean.
| dhosek wrote:
| Czech zena
| Symbiote wrote:
| "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".
| rhdunn wrote:
| Simon Roper has a spoken equivalent for Northern English --
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Zqn9_OQAw.
| petesergeant wrote:
| for a very specific dialect of Northern English. I struggled to
| understand much beyond 1950, and I had a good ear
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| He has a spoken one that isn't Northern English specific too:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic
|
| "From Olde English to Modern American English in One Monologue"
| good-idea wrote:
| How far into the future is my concern
| iso1631 wrote:
| I'm heading to Stornoway next week, I don't hold out much hope
| dddgghhbbfblk wrote:
| 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.
| dhosek wrote:
| Indeed, I remember being in Oxford in the 90s and an older man
| approached me and spoke to me _in English_ and I couldn't
| understand a word he said. My ex-wife, who's an ESL speaker who
| speaks fluently and without an accent has trouble with English
| accents in general. Similarly, in Spanish, I find it's
| generally easier for me to understand Spanish speakers than
| Mexican speakers even though I learned Mexican Spanish in
| school and it's 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).
| JasonADrury wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| Having interpreted for a guy speaking with a broad
| Glaswegian accent on the east coast main line, I can
| totally believe this.
| noosphr wrote:
| 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.
| halapro wrote:
| This sounds like a Hot Fuzz scene.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cun-LZvOTdw
| clw8 wrote:
| I imagine a current generation high school English class
| would be giggling right from the first line about gooning
| while on pilgrimages.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| > older man approached me and spoke to me in English and I
| couldn't understand a word he said
|
| like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc ?
| mh- wrote:
| I was expecting the hooligans from Eurotrip.
| Oreb wrote:
| > 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:
| 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.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| 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).
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| 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:
| 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 talked 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!
| tayo42 wrote:
| 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?
| kstrauser wrote:
| Different person, but I learned Mexican Spanish in school.
| The teacher taught us vosotros "for the test, and it's not
| any harder than the others once you learn it, so might as
| well, but you'll never need this again unless you go to
| Europe". She seems to have been right. To this day, I've
| never needed vosotros.
| well_actulily wrote:
| Anecdata, but I took Spanish all four years in high school
| in Southern California--I knew _of_ vosotros, but was never
| really taught it
| lqstuart wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| I didn't think it was possible to speak "without an accent."
| bityard wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English
| mock-possum wrote:
| Yeah it's really just the glyphs that are changing here, and
| occasionally the spelling, otherwise the words themselves are
| still fairly recognizable if you're well-read.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| ksenzee wrote:
| 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.
| gfto wrote:
| You can try this video to see how far back you can understand
| spoken English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic
| frogpelt wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| > 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 Master in Frisian (the closest Germanic
| language to English) and is also master in Swedish.
| dddgghhbbfblk wrote:
| 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".
| chuckadams wrote:
| Screw these modern sensibilities, I am totally renaming my
| default git branch to "maister".
| noosphr wrote:
| 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.
| abustamam wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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:
| >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.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| The Latin alphabet variant modern English uses has uses
| only ~11 kinds of strokes, where is this 26 coming from?
| noosphr wrote:
| 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:
| Interesting! So what's the abc's we learn then?
| scubbo wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| Perhaps you misheard.
| Oreb wrote:
| 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. It's the English
| _pronunciation_ which is really strange and inconsistent.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| The other big problem would be the lack of intelligibility
| of English written by native speakers from different
| places.
| cyberax wrote:
| > 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?!?
| kstrauser wrote:
| OTOH, I've seen what y'all call cursive, and want no part
| of it.
| cyberax wrote:
| 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 (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method ). Modern
| Russian (and Ukrainian) cursives are closer to the older
| Spencerian script:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencerian_script
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| The usual pictures of i / p / t / sh ambiguity that you
| see are exaggerated in that they show forms that are
| nominally "standard" 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 wouldn't produce. For the latter two, people
| who actually write m and not t will often resolve the
| ambiguity with sh with an over- resp. underbar (the same
| ones that Serbian uses even in print[1]). It's 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 don't 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 haven't 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] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cyrillic_alte
| rnates...., rightmost column
| williadc wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://git.sr.ht/~dcw/iNgliS
|
| I've created a Firefox Add-on for it as well.
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/inglis/
| sheept wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| sheept wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| accidentallfact wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| kortex wrote:
| 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 /NGgopa/ 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.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| 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:
| You don't standardise. That's the point. If you can
| understand how people speak you will understand how they
| write.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| 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:
| Worked for thousands of years with other phonetic written
| languages. Words change spelling over time, instead of
| pronounciation drifting without the spelling changing.
| eesmith wrote:
| The best case is a syllabary with how the word was
| pronounced a few years previous.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
|
| > 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.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| We have the written word from centuries ago available today.
|
| Where are you going to find the spoken word from centuries ago?
| BoredomIsFun wrote:
| I am an ESL, but I can easily comprehend 1600. 1500 with serious
| effort.
| Dwedit wrote:
| At 1400, they add in the thorn "th". If you don't know that's
| supposed to be "th", you'll get stuck there.
| BoredomIsFun wrote:
| 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.
| dhosek wrote:
| Not to mention that there are pockets of English speakers
| in Great Britain whose everyday speech isn't very far from
| 17th century English. The hypothetical time traveler might
| be asked, "So you're from Yorkshire then, are you?"
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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.
| reader9274 wrote:
| At around 1200, Godzilla had a stroke
| b112 wrote:
| Don't get the reference compared to the text in the article for
| that timeframe.
|
| Is there something specific in there?
| doctor_blood wrote:
| "Godzilla Had a Stroke Trying to Read This and Fucking Died"
| is a meme frequently posted in response to
| incomprehensible/extremely dumb posts.
| Dwedit wrote:
| 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:
| Orthography is probably the biggest stumbling block going back
| to the 1500s or 1400s , but that's 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:
| 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:
| so replace the long s with just s and the thorn (th) with
| th? others?
| leoc wrote:
| 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZhlWdVvZfw . Your
| dream of learning Old English has never been closer: get _Osweald
| Bera_ https://colingorrie.com/books/osweald-bera/ today.
| guerrilla wrote:
| 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:
| The link above mentions Orberg 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 Orberg method after him.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| The Orberg method is great, I wish more languages had media
| utilizing it.
| fpsvogel wrote:
| There are actually several similar books for modern European
| languages, available as PDFs (in the public domain and/or out
| of print): https://blog.nina.coffee/2018/08/27/all_nature_met
| hod_books....
|
| Orberg may be the best, though.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| 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. AEthelstan Mus is my spirit
| animal.
| Podrod wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| The "locakly" typo is perfectly placed in the comment
| thread of this article!
| aeve890 wrote:
| > No cap, that lowkey main character energy is giving skibidi
| rizz, but the fanum tax is cooked so we're just catching strays
| in the group chat, fr fr, it's a total skill issue, periodt.
|
| I'd say around 2020
| BadBadJellyBean wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
| dhosek wrote:
| Or as I've heard it described humorously, the Big Vowel
| Movement.
| BadBadJellyBean wrote:
| I'd assume I'd be able to adapt. Might take a little while
| bit seems comprehensible.
| jmclnx wrote:
| 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:
| > 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:
| I'd say we've already partly lost separate then/than. It's
| sort of like how you can sometimes tell second-language
| speakers of a language because their grammar is much more
| precise than a native speaker's 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 I'm too lazy to open another tab and
| google for the sake of an HN comment).
| teo_zero wrote:
| You can tell second-language speakers because they know
| when to use "its" and "it's".
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| and knowing how to count to 1 to not use "they" xD
| dhosek wrote:
| "they" as a non-gendered singular pronoun dates back
| hundreds of years.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| ksenzee wrote:
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > 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).
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| thankfully, "the enemy can't disseminate bad grammar on
| the internet if you disable his hand!" =)
| dhosek wrote:
| 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 it's by comparing those to his vs
| he's.
| WillAdams wrote:
| 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
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21023409-the-wake
| inglor_cz wrote:
| There is an interesting review of _The Wake_ on the PSmiths
| literary substack:
|
| https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/guest-review-the-wake-by-paul-k...
| WillAdams wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| 1500 is the threshold I think. I don't understand 1400. I can go
| a bit further back in my mother tongue, but 1200 is definitely
| tough for me.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Shakespeare is a definite barrier.
| delecti wrote:
| 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.
| MBCook wrote:
| I can get to 1300, though it's harder there and there were a
| couple words that I just couldn't 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.
| throwaway3060 wrote:
| I can get through 1300 with some effort, but from 1200 I get
| nothing. Just a complete dropoff in that one time frame.
| antonvs wrote:
| 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.
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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".
| antonvs wrote:
| Also I loved this little discovery, from 1300:
|
| > "The euele man louy, whan that he sawe my peine, and it was
| a crueel louyter, withouten merci or pitee as of a man that
| hath no rewthe 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."
| coolcoder613 wrote:
| Same here, pretty much. I was able to get to 1200 without
| much difficulty but 1200 took a lot of effort to decipher.
| ajb wrote:
| 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:
| I think people see "The blog ends there. No sign-off, no
| "thanks for reading."" and stop reading everything after that
| xD
| ajb wrote:
| Yes, I nearly missed it myself
| MrDrDr wrote:
| 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 'Nature', 'Free' and 'Sense'.
| Would highly recommend a read.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_in_Words
| ilamont wrote:
| 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.
| fooker wrote:
| This is, roughly, a measure of how old your civilization is.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| 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.
| e-khadem wrote:
| 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] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh
|
| _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._
| idoubtit wrote:
| 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:
| > 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).
| cenamus wrote:
| 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)
| idoubtit wrote:
| 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 Moliere 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'oil" (terms for "oui" -- yes
| -- 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 a 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 -- I learned the
| declensions of Old French and a lot of vocabulary -- 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.
| riffraff wrote:
| 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] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronese_Riddle
| the_gastropod wrote:
| 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.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| 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.
| YZF wrote:
| 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.
| mmooss wrote:
| 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:
| Some early English translations of the Bible were
| unintentionally comical, e.g., "and Enoch walked with God and
| he was a lucky fellowe."
|
| Of course that's not limited to the 16th century. The Good News
| Bible renders what is most commonly given as "our name is
| Legion for we are many" instead as "our name is Mob because
| there are a lot of us." 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.
| npilk wrote:
| 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:
| [delayed]
| opengrass wrote:
| 1500
|
| Dutch is 1400s English.
| englishrookie wrote:
| 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.
| dboreham wrote:
| My experience traveling to the Netherlands as an English
| speaker is that people are speaking English, but they're drunk!
| phpnode wrote:
| When they seamlessly switch from English to Dutch I feel like
| I'm having a stroke: all the same intonation, the same
| accent, but nothing makes sense any more
| mattmanser wrote:
| 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.
| marssaxman wrote:
| 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.
| jakevoytko wrote:
| As someone who took German in high school, Dutch had my brain
| flailing for vocabulary to understand but nothing connected.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/english-to-dutch-translations
| ekr wrote:
| 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.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| What accent did you read it in? Vlaams? Gronings?
| englishrookie wrote:
| I don't have a voice in my head when I read. Knowledge of
| West-Fries helps though.
| vaylian wrote:
| 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.
| trueismywork wrote:
| I am Indian. I read easily to 1400. But then 1300 is suddenly
| difficult to read
| Gander5739 wrote:
| 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:
| 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_ [wraththe] _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.
| riffraff wrote:
| 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
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canticle_of_the_Sun
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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]4 _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.
|
| 4 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_.
| ajb wrote:
| 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:
| Yes, I found https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-
| dictionary/dicti... , 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.
| SilasX wrote:
| Wiktionary doesn't mention it for either word, but it
| looks to be cognate with German schweigen, "to be
| silent":
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schweigen
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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:
| In Limburgs, still today: Zwieg!: Shut up, zwiegen: Not
| saying anything.
| riffraff wrote:
| 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)
| Amezarak wrote:
| 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).
|
| https://www.digitalcollections.manchester.ac.uk/view/PR-
| INCU...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
|
| dinra 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-_.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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 schaltou dyen _Here shalt thou die_
|
| 2. non schal knowen thi name _none shall know thy name_
|
| 3. non schal the biwepe _none shall thee beweep_
|
| 4. with what boldenesse I miyte gaderen _with what
| boldness I might gather_
|
| 5. more than I miyte beren _more than I might bear_
|
| 6. I ne miyte 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 the
| biwepe_ , which is otherwise an exact grammatical match
| to _non schal knowen thi 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.
| sokols wrote:
| 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.
|
| "Swie!" is interesting, I understood it somehow naturally. In
| Gheg Albanian we say "Shuj!", which means "Be silent!".
| rapidfl wrote:
| 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.
| mmooss wrote:
| _Beowulf_ was discovered and translated by Grimur Jonsson
| Thorkelin, 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.
| marssaxman wrote:
| 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.
| trelane wrote:
| Probably not a coincidence:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxons
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Anglo-Saxon_England
| zingar wrote:
| Most of what I understood from that far back was because of
| Afrikaans, more than English.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| 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 "cwaed"? Or "Hlaford"? Or
| "sod"? "theah the"?
|
| 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).
| lbourdages wrote:
| 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.
| artyom wrote:
| Well, I 100%'d Dark Souls, so surprisingly (or not) I can
| understand a lot of it.
| sometimes_all wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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!
| pixelsub wrote:
| Ask an Indian haha :)
| WalterGR wrote:
| What would they say?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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.)
| n8cpdx wrote:
| 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 Alpha's kids are going to get lost at
| the 2000 paragraph.
| Arch485 wrote:
| fr fr, OP be cappin 2000 ain't English
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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, let's 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:
| Straight up
| logicchains wrote:
| "unc" can't be used as an adjective like that.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| 4 now imma trendsetter homie u b tripping
| SSLy wrote:
| memes about unc video games are galore
| arduanika wrote:
| Ugh, we've been slangmogged
| teo_zero wrote:
| 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.
| stego-tech wrote:
| 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 "worked out"
| just through gradual inference and problem-solving, and I'd be
| curious to see its results as a test for High Schoolers.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| 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:
| It exists! Showed up on HN a few months back:
| https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms
|
| Only from 1913-1946 though.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| Capital! That's one of the most interesting time periods.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's probably roughly Elizabethan English (1600s).
| rubee64 wrote:
| Thanks to RobWords [1] I at least remember thorn (Th)
| pronunciation and could mostly decipher 1400. Not much past that,
| though
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJxKyh9e5_A&t=36s
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| 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.
| BorisMelnik wrote:
| 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
| layer8 wrote:
| Since these occur primarily in ephemeral communication, it's
| unclear how much of a lasting influence there will be. It's
| also "only" vocabulary, to a limited degree orthography, and
| rarely grammar.
| 1bpp wrote:
| lowkey gives cultural collapse type vibes
| amarant wrote:
| 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?
| layer8 wrote:
| The 2000 sample was a bit exaggerated.
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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.
| constantcrying wrote:
| 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.
| guerrilla wrote:
| 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.
| brandall10 wrote:
| 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).
| coldtea wrote:
| > _The blog ends there. No sign-off, no "thanks for reading."
| 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
| zamadatix wrote:
| Not sure what you mean?
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| ironically, I think there's an epidemic of ai bots accusing
| everything of being ai-written here on hn
| coldtea wrote:
| That this kind of writing "The blog ends there. No sign-off,
| no "thanks for reading."" has tell-tale AI mannerisms
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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.
| poly2it wrote:
| My slopometer tells me an LLM would not by itself write
| something so concise, especially beginning with "the blog ends
| there".
| alamortsubite wrote:
| If you enjoyed TFA, check out this excellent BBC tv doc (and
| companion book) with Melvyn Bragg, _The Adventure of English_ :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1XQx9pGGd0
| aardvark179 wrote:
| 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.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Hmm, I thought it wafnt fo bad, myfelf
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| oh my god, you're right, they just used an f, no wonder I
| found it so bad! That is really annoying. Enraging even.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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.
| zamadatix wrote:
| It doesn't have such a bar in the article e.g. "swifter"
| https://imgur.com/a/XwsoVgB
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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:
| Heck, I still struggle scanning it properly at high
| resolution so no worries!
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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.
| rhdunn wrote:
| The text doesn't use an `f`. If you copy from e.g. the 1700
| passage you get `s` not `f`.
| poly2it wrote:
| Probably people are confused by ligatures. Indeed it is a
| long S.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| 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:
| thanks for the Baskerville recommendation.
|
| on edit: liked the Garamond better, since the font is a
| bit thicker, checked it on "spake" 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.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| hmm you're right, I guess my eyesight is worse than I
| thought
| krackers wrote:
| (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(/s/g, "s"); }
| })()
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| what?
| krackers wrote:
| That will replace the long-s with the standard s. You can
| do the same for the thorn.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| 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.
| downsplat wrote:
| Which LLM hallucinated this monstrosity? Just use a
| regex, it's a one-liner!
| BobAliceInATree wrote:
| 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.
| dataflow wrote:
| 1400 seems fine except for the one big hurdle being "Th", which I
| feel like I'd seen at some point but did not recall. ("y" is
| useful but that's somewhat easier to guess and not too critical.
| "s" 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.
| ajross wrote:
| > adrade(?)
|
| "adread", meaning afraid
|
| Still a recognizable archaic word, constructed from a still-in-
| use root. Just the spelling is different.
| dataflow wrote:
| 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!
| petesergeant wrote:
| > rauenes
|
| Ravens
| dataflow wrote:
| Amazing. Thanks!
| klondike_klive wrote:
| switch the double-u for a w. Uuhiles becomes "whiles" (or
| "while")
| krackers wrote:
| retvrn to tradition
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Damn I hate that I didn't catch on to why it made a w sound.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| I found it helped me to read it out loud in a pirate voice.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Fun fact: stereotypical "pirate speech" is actually a relic
| of the English West Country dialect.
| Podrod wrote:
| 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.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| 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:
| 1200 was my wall too.
| xorcist wrote:
| > 1400 seems fine except for the one big hurdle being "Th",
|
| Someone here needs to brush up on their Icelandic!
| Delk wrote:
| > 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:
| In current Limburgs, pinige: to torture. Mien herses pinige:
| Wrecking one's brains.
| xelxebar wrote:
| > Hit is muchel to seggen all that pinunge hie on me uuroyten,
| al thar sor and al that sorye. Ne scal ic nefre hit foryeten,
| 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!"
| jwrallie wrote:
| Agreed, I did quite well until around 1500. At 1400, I did
| decode Th 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.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Now now slow down - still struggling with modern English here ...
| dmurray wrote:
| > Somewhere in this section -- and if you're like most readers,
| it happened around 1300 or 1200 -- the language crossed a
| boundary. Up to this point, comprehension felt like it was
| dropping gradually, but now it's 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] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44070716
| strawhatguy wrote:
| 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| 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.
| SkyeCA wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| Defletter wrote:
| 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]
| https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/WillandMarSess2/1/2/enact...
|
| - [2] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Cha1/3/1/enacted
|
| - [3] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Edw1cc1929/25/9
| bradley13 wrote:
| 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:
| > 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:
| 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..
| tejohnso wrote:
| 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.
| Esn024 wrote:
| 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:
| audio would drop off slightly faster than text, due to vowel
| shift in 1400s
| strawhatguy wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| drdeadringer wrote:
| 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.
| snickerer wrote:
| Could they hunt down the werewolf wizard and defeat him or not??
| I need to know how this ended.
| Arubis wrote:
| Without even checking the article, presumably around 1067. Pre-
| Norman English was a VERY different language.
| loeg wrote:
| 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 "th" this
| article uses).
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| > of whom I hadde herd so muchel and knewe so litel.
|
| We need to bring muchel back
| retrac wrote:
| 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 ae and d 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:
|
| brodir "broh-wer" (brother), heyggjur "hoy-cher" (hill/height),
| brugv "brukf" (bridge), sjogvar/sjos "shekvar/shos" (sea), skyggj
| "skooch" (sky/cloud), djopur "cho-pur" (deep), vedirinn "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] https://annas-
| archive.org/md5/4d2ce4cd5e828bbfc7b29b3d03349b...
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSXu2fuJOTQ
|
| Repost of an earlier comment of mine.
| Oreb wrote:
| 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.
| bArray wrote:
| 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 we'd call English.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| 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.
| zingar wrote:
| 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.
| ajb wrote:
| Anyone wanting to hear the older language spoken, this is a
| performance of Beowulf:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/live/2WcIK_8f7oQ?si=NpXTrRjcHN09Zn56...
| KPGv2 wrote:
| 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.
| 7bit wrote:
| > 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.
| darkhorn wrote:
| 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.
| aswanson wrote:
| I dunno. I just learned what 'mogged' means 2 days ago. So
| probably not far.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| 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 thaet heo saegde waes eall soth. Ic wifode on hire, and heo
| waes ful scyne wif, wis ond waelfaest. Ne gemette ic naefre aer
| swylce wifman. Heo waes on gefeohte swa beald swa aenig mann, and
| theah hwaethere hire andwlite waes wynsum and faeger.
|
| Ac we nawiht freo ne sindon, for thy the we naefre ne mihton fram
| Wulfesfleote gewitan, nefne we thone Hlaford finden and hine
| ofslean. Se Hlaford haefth thisne stede mid searocraeftum
| gebunden, thaet nan man ne maeg hine forlaetan. We sindon her swa
| fuglas on nette, swa fixas on were.
|
| And we hine secath git, begen aetsomne, wer ond wif, thurh tha
| deorcan straeta thisses grimman stedes. Hwaethere 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)
|
| g = y, c = ch, sw = s, w = w, p = th, x = sk,
|
| we get:
|
| _And thaet heo saeyde waes eall soth. Ich wifode on hire, and
| heo waes ful shyne wif, wis ond waelfaest. Ne yemette ich naefer
| aer sylche wifman. Heo waes on gefeoghte sa beald sa aeniy mann,
| and theah waethere hire andlite waes wynsum and faeyer.
|
| Ac we nawight freo ne sindon, for thy the we naefer ne mighton
| fram Wulfesfleote yewitan, nefen we thone Laford finden and hine
| ofslean. Se Laford haefth thisne stede mid searocraeftum
| gebunden, thaet nan man ne maey hine forlaetan. We sindon her sa
| fuglas on nette, sa fiskas on were.
|
| And we hine sechath yit, beyen aetsomne, wer ond wif, thurgh tha
| deorcan straeta thisses grimman stedes. Waethere 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 "waelfaest"; it's like
| slaughter + firm/fast/stable. I guess it means she is calm while
| killing people :))
| cbdevidal wrote:
| 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.
| Refreeze5224 wrote:
| Kinda does a number on the whole "literal word of god" thing
| doesn't it?
| cbdevidal wrote:
| Hey, if the KJV was good enough for Paul and the Apostles,
| it's good enough for me
| illusive4080 wrote:
| 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.
| uhhhd wrote:
| There are towns in England and America where I can't understand
| them today.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| 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. https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
|
| For the prurient, Chaucer's Vulgar Tongue is a great place to dip
| a toe into it:
|
| https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2019/09/25/episode-129-c...
| rpicard wrote:
| I'm 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.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| 200? The website only goes to 187. Do I need to get on
| Patreon or something?
| rpicard wrote:
| I think there's a numbering difference. He went back and re
| did a bunch of earlier ones.
|
| I'm listening on Apple Podcasts. Season 5 episode 5
| "Printin and Perkin" if it helps.
| Uncorrelated wrote:
| 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:
| Oh that's funny. Yes you're right.
|
| He has actually mentioned the History of English before,
| but I've never listened to it. Great to hear though!
| xeromal wrote:
| 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.
| himlion wrote:
| His subsequent podcast: "revolutions" is also really good.
| Meegul wrote:
| 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.
| lqstuart wrote:
| 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:
| Acoustic picking 18 from garage band....
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Oh my God, are you serious? I don't know how to feel
| about this
| pests wrote:
| 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.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| huh I was looking through it again and I noticed what I think is
| a typo
|
| "The sayde Maister, what that hee apperid bifore me"
|
| I believe should be
|
| "The sayde Maister, what That 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.
| tgtweak wrote:
| It just gets more and more Scottish as it goes.
| baristaGeek wrote:
| 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.
| kinj28 wrote:
| As I read the article -- I was curious if there are any language
| museums. If any would love to visit.
| kinj28 wrote:
| Some random thoughts --
|
| why language would evolve ? Let's say to make it easier and
| better ? And if such a case then wouldn't 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:
| > Let's 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
| ojbyrne wrote:
| 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.
| arjie wrote:
| 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.
| hcfman wrote:
| Oh man. You really gotta love the unusual special interests of
| people.
|
| Super work!
| TheServitor wrote:
| There is a point where English becomes harder than Latin.
| blackhaz wrote:
| Anyone else feeling like Daffy Duck reading the 1700s?
| mmumo wrote:
| my girlfriend isn't ready for the mansplanning coming up tomorrow
| during dinner about this
| predkambrij wrote:
| I must admit that I didn't read the article in full.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Too bad because all the explanations are in the end.
| MrScruff wrote:
| Seems like some of the initial changes are reflecting more than
| just the evolving language. He's comparing someone using informal
| slang "not gonna lie" against someone writing extremely formally
| "Hunger, that great leveller, makes philosophers of us all, and
| renders even the meanest dish agreeable." which I'm not sure
| makes sense.
| jcul wrote:
| 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!
| Tor3 wrote:
| 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.
| Johnyjohnson123 wrote:
| Could barely understand the 1900 one
| caro_kann wrote:
| As a non-native and I could understand only down to 1500s. And it
| sounded (read?) like scottish for me.
| abc123abc123 wrote:
| Ah, finally!
|
| "If you've ever seen a pub called "Ye Olde" anything, that ye is
| actually the, an attempt by early printers to write a thorn
| without having to make an expensive new letter".
|
| Now I know.
| ogogmad wrote:
| 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%.
| clbrmbr wrote:
| AmaZing job. My 6 and 8 yo could understand back to 1400.
| pavlov wrote:
| 1300 was a breeze but then I got stuck. (What did the strong and
| stiff wife do in 1200? I'll never know... Edit - on second
| reading, I'm 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.
| treebeard901 wrote:
| 2026: Emojis, Reaction Gifs, and AI
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-02-22 16:00 UTC)