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Comment by lofatdairy | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I imagine it'd be like reading Latin, I even struggle with English texts written only 4 centuries ago, forget 14 centuries ago. Access is a good point too, I think Medieval and Renaissance texts tend to accumulate at Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, etc, at least in the Anglosphere.

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the cool thing is that written Arabic, for the most part, does not suffer from that. A speaker can pick up a book written in the 11th century and find that the grammar, words, structure are all consistent and understandable.

it isn't like English and something like the The Canterbury Tales

It goes even further than that to a certain extent.

In a past wikipedia rabbit hole I was surprised to recognize and understand some (transliterated) sumerian words! Suddenly being thrown 8000 years in the past is not the catastrophic scenario I was worrying about.

(native arabic speaker here)

True, What i find hard is reading or figuring out the word, it's really easy to read the published book of a manuscript, but only people with experience can read the manuscript. For example these words: Fine, Fun and Fan are all written as Fn, we understand the 3 words but which one they mean depend on the context of speaking

Latin is largely similar due to an obsession with preserving the language dating all the way back to antiquity.

I think the big difference with English (and European vernacular at large) is that spelling was standardized surprisingly late, no earlier than the the 16th century, but with many languages several hundred years later. Before that you had the weird-looking "Thys boke is myne"-style spelling.

Sounds weird when you point it out, but the first English dictionary (the "Table Alphabeticall") was printed around the same time Shakespeare died.

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