Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhellan | Hacker News Reader

Interesting how stable French has been over the centuries - at least when judging from these four lines.

By no means the same, but much closer to modern French than the language of the sagas is to modern Scandinavian. Not to mention how far English has drifted.

View on HN

French orthographic and grammatical history has been non-linear and it's not uncommon for texts from the 16th century to be harder to read than from the 13th c., while at the same time the Medieval texts have sometimes confusing syntax for modern French speakers because of the declensions. For example in the sample given by the article :

    Mauuoisement li quiens Bertram ad dit

It's not something that a modern native French speaker would understand at first sight. Li quiens (or li cuens in more standard Old French) is the cas sujet of "count", the form that survived in French is the cas régime, le conte.

For what it's worth, I understood at first sight "Mauvaisement, le <honorific title> Bertram a dit" which happend to be the intended meaning.

I actually had more trouble with "Bacin" starting with a capital B which would indicate a proper name. That's the only line I wasn't sure of.

I was surprised by the fact I could understand that while I know I can hardly understand anything from the 16/17th century old french. Thanks for your input for clarifying that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com