How far back in time can you understand English?
deadlanguagesociety.com276 points by spzb 3 days ago
276 points by spzb 3 days ago
Should be "how far back in time can you read English?" The language itself is what is spoken and the writing, while obviously related, is its own issue. Spelling is conventional and spelling and alphabet changes don't necessarily correspond to anything meaningful in the spoken language; meanwhile there can be large changes in pronunciation and comprehensibility that are masked by an orthography that doesn't reflect them.
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).
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.
> 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 ?
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.
Having interpreted for a guy speaking with a broad Glaswegian accent on the east coast main line, I can totally believe this.
You can try this video to see how far back you can understand spoken English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic
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.
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.
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 Ōsweald Bera https://colingorrie.com/books/osweald-bera/ today.
The Ørberg method is great, I wish more languages had media utilizing it.
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.
The link above mentions Ørberg 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 Ørberg method after him.
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.
Probably not a coincidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Anglo-Saxon_England
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.
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.
My experience traveling to the Netherlands as an English speaker is that people are speaking English, but they're drunk!
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
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
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.
As someone who took German in high school, Dutch had my brain flailing for vocabulary to understand but nothing connected.
I am Indian. I read easily to 1400. But then 1300 is suddenly difficult to read
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!”.
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
> 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.
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.
Beowulf was discovered and translated by Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín, 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.
What accent did you read it in? Vlaams? Gronings?
I don't have a voice in my head when I read. Knowledge of West-Fries helps though.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Simon Roper has a spoken equivalent for Northern English -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Zqn9_OQAw.
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"
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.
for a very specific dialect of Northern English. I struggled to understand much beyond 1950, and I had a good ear
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.
(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");
}
})()what?
That will replace the long-s with the standard s. You can do the same for the thorn.
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.
Hmm, I thought it wafnt fo bad, myfelf
oh my god, you're right, they just used an f, no wonder I found it so bad! That is really annoying. Enraging even.
The text doesn't use an `f`. If you copy from e.g. the 1700 passage you get `ſ` not `f`.
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.
It doesn't have such a bar in the article e.g. "swifter" https://imgur.com/a/XwsoVgB
1400 seems fine except for the one big hurdle being "Þ", which I feel like I'd seen at some point but did not recall. ("ȝ" 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.
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.
> adrade(?)
"adread", meaning afraid
Still a recognizable archaic word, constructed from a still-in-use root. Just the spelling is different.
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!
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.
audio would drop off slightly faster than text, due to vowel shift in 1400s
I recently skimmed a grammar of Faroese [0]. Not much has been written about the language in English; only a few books, and an English-Faroese dictionary was only first published in the 1980s.
It's spoken by about 50,000 people in the Faroe Islands, which are between Iceland and Scotland. The isles were settled by Viking-era Norse about a thousand years ago and then largely forgotten by the rest of the world. But they kept speaking their version of Old Norse and it became its own language. There are many dialects and the writing system was designed to cover all of them, so it is is etymologically informed by Old Norse and it is very conservative. It's not at all indicative of how it's really pronounced. The written form is somewhat even mutually intelligible with Icelandic / Old Norse, but the spoken language is not.
Underneath those æ and ð is a language that is oddly similar to English, like parallel convergent evolution. It's a North Germanic language not a West Germanic language so the historical diversion point is about 1500 years ago.
But it has undergone an extensive vowel shift (but in a different pattern). And also like English, it has also undergone extensive affrication (turned into ch/j) of the stop consonants and reduction of final stops and intervocalic stops. It has the same kind of stress - vowel reduction interaction that English has. That further heightens the uncanny effect.
I came away with the impression that it is English's closest sibling language, aside from Dutch. Some vocabulary:
broðir "broh-wer" (brother), heyggjur "hoy-cher" (hill/height), brúgv "brukf" (bridge), sjógvar/sjós "shekvar/shos" (sea), skyggj "skooch" (sky/cloud), djópur "cho-pur" (deep), veðirinn "ve-vir-uhn" (weather). Rough pronunciations given between quotes; all examples are cognate with English!
There's an extended story reading by a native speaker here [1] if you want an example of what it sounds like. No idea what they're saying. The intonation reminds me a bit of the northern British isles which also had a Norse influence.
[0] https://annas-archive.org/md5/4d2ce4cd5e828bbfc7b29b3d03349b...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSXu2fuJOTQ
Repost of an earlier comment of mine.
I can just about comprehend the 1500 stuff (that was also my experience attempting to read Chaucer during jury duty, though I don't remember Canterbury Tales having the 1400s "þ" this article uses).
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
Shakespeare is a definite barrier.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It exists! Showed up on HN a few months back: https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms
Only from 1913-1946 though.
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...
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.
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.
Thanks to RobWords [1] I at least remember thorn (Þ) pronunciation and could mostly decipher 1400. Not much past that, though
Without even checking the article, presumably around 1067. Pre-Norman English was a VERY different language.
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.
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).
Could they hunt down the werewolf wizard and defeat him or not?? I need to know how this ended.
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
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.
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.
I'd assume I'd be able to adapt. Might take a little while bit seems comprehensible.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it depends a lot on the history of the language. My native language is French, and since long ago various authorities try to normalize and "purify" the language. This is why the gap between spoken French and written French is so wide. Now my experience as an avid reader...
Books written in the 17th century or later are easy to read. Of course, the meaning of some words can change over time but that's a minor trouble. I believe Molière and Racine are still studied in school nowadays, but the first name that came to my mind was Cyrano de Bergerac (the writer, not the fictitious character).
Books from the 16th need practice, but I think anyone who tries hard will get used to the language. I enjoyed Rabelais's Pantagruel and Gargantua a lot, and I first read them by myself when I was in highschool (I knew a bit of Latin and Greek, which helped).
Before that, French was much more diverse; the famous split into "langue d'oc" and "langue d'oïl" (terms for "oui" — 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 à la charette".
"La chanson de Roland" (11th century, Old French named anglo-normand) is one of my favorite books of all times. Reading it for the first time was a long process — 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Well, I 100%'d Dark Souls, so surprisingly (or not) I can understand a lot of it.
an audible example:
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.
At around 1200, Godzilla had a stroke
Don't get the reference compared to the text in the article for that timeframe.
Is there something specific in there?
"Godzilla Had a Stroke Trying to Read This and Fucking Died" is a meme frequently posted in response to incomprehensible/extremely dumb posts.
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?
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.
> of whom I hadde herd so muchel and knewe so litel.
We need to bring muchel back
> 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
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.
1500
Dutch is 1400s English.
I can get through 1300 with some effort, but from 1200 I get nothing. Just a complete dropoff in that one time frame.
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.
I think people see "The blog ends there. No sign-off, no “thanks for reading.”" and stop reading everything after that xD
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.
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".
Also I loved this little discovery, from 1300:
> "Þe euele man louȝ, whan that he sawe my peine, and it was a crueel louȝter, wiþouten merci or pitee as of a man þat haþ no rewþe in his herte."
"The evil man laughed, when he saw my pain, and it was a cruel laughter, without mercy or pity as of a man that has no rewthe in his heart."
In other words, a rewthe-less man.
We've retained the word "ruthless" but no longer use the word "ruth", "a feeling of pity, distress, or grief."
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.
It's probably roughly Elizabethan English (1600s).
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.
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.
I am an ESL, but I can easily comprehend 1600. 1500 with serious effort.
At 1400, they add in the thorn "þ". If you don't know that's supposed to be "th", you'll get stuck there.
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.
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?”
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.
Now now slow down - still struggling with modern English here ...
How far into the future is my concern
Ask an Indian haha :)
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.)
>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
My slopometer tells me an LLM would not by itself write something so concise, especially beginning with "the blog ends there".
Not sure what you mean?
That this kind of writing "The blog ends there. No sign-off, no “thanks for reading.”" has tell-tale AI mannerisms
ironically, I think there's an epidemic of ai bots accusing everything of being ai-written here on hn
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
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.
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
Knowing that W is a late addition to the alphabet and would have been written UU or VV suddenly makes uuif obvious.
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.
"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".
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.
Also French femme. It isn't limited to Italic languages either. There's also German Frau, Dutch vrouw, Irish bean.
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 ?
> 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.
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).
You can tell second-language speakers because they know when to use "its" and "it's".
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.
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.
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