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Comment by wtbob | Hacker News Reader

> Similar to the differences between Olde English and today's English.

I think that you're thinking of the Modern English of Shakespeare's era or Middle English (e.g. 'Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote'), not Old English (e.g. 'Hwæt we Gar-dena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon').

Middle English is very similar to Modern English, and can be read with relative ease. Old English has to be studied as a foreign language.

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My understanding is that Church Slavonic is nearly indecipherable to someone who knows modern Russian, which would make Old English the correct comparison. However, I am not fluent in Russian and am relying on others' characterization.

OCS is not as completely foreign to Russian speakers as Old English is to English speakers; I would compare it more to Chaucer than to Beowulf, although whether you can understand a specific text depends very much on the subject and the context. Since Biblical quotes and expressions are so common, OCS terms may be familiar to even secular Russians.

Note, however, that OCS does not have an ancestral relationship to Russian - it is a Southern Slavic language, most similar to ancestors of today's Bulgarian. Old Russian texts (such as The Tale of Igor) are written in a different language - Old Russian (which existed long before the split into Russian, Ukrainian and so on, so the name "Old East Slavic" is sometimes used).

> Earlier versions had a few more characters

The comparison to Old English with ash ⟨æ⟩, eth ⟨ð⟩, thorn ⟨þ⟩ and wynn ⟨ƿ⟩ sounds appropriate.

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