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Comment by recursive | Hacker News Reader

> Shakespeare is modern English and perfectly comprehensible

My personal experience is inconsistent with this. I'm not an English expert, but I'm a native speaker. I generally am able to communicate with people using the language.

Despite these qualifications, I was hard-pressed to find any lines that I could make sense of in Shakespeare. This is not a criticism of the material. Also it's not really a self-criticism either. I believe that there is a large group of alleged "English speakers" that would have the same experience as me.

You can't claim that it's "perfectly comprehensible" without acknowledging that many (most?) are not able to comprehend the material.

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It is modern English, it is generally comprehensible, but it isn't easy for the modern speaker. The main reason is that Shakespeare is full of familiar words that have secondary meanings that are uncommon or unusual for us now. So we find it hard to parse because a word we tend to use as a verb might be a noun, for instance.

An example off the time of my head would be the word "fast", which we usually use to mean "quick", but Shakespeare uses to mean "held tight". Speaking of "quick", he would use that to mean "alive".

If you really think about each line you might be able to work it out without notes, but that doesn't make it very easy to read.

That meaning of fast is still current in phrases such as 'hold fast to'.

Similarly for quick. There is a relatively recent film called The Quick and the Dead based on a 1973 novel of the same name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quick_and_the_Dead_(1987_f...

If you are moderately well read most such words should not pose more than momentary difficulties.

I guess I'm not moderately well read.

>I guess I'm not moderately well read.

At least you're honest about it. Assuming you aren't just being sarcastic. A lot of people never read much beyond whatever is required for their schooling but pretend otherwise.

Hmm, I always interpreted the title of the movie with the current/conventional meaning of 'quick'.

There are two kinds of people. Those who are quick on the trigger. And those who are dead (because they were not quick enough ..)

It was an entertaining movie! Several big name stars.

I love going to theaters when we visit London and over the years I've seen tens of plays if not over a hundred. Shakespeare's are the only ones I had problems following so we stopped seeing them.

Like you I don't think this is a problem of Shakespeare or me. My English is not perfect, but since I don't seem to have problems communicating otherwise or following plays or movies even in dialects (within reason) I take this as a substantial proof that it is generally good enough.

My personal take is that it is a combination of language that is just unfamiliar enough and old references and idioms that I don't get because I haven't been taught them in school while learning about plays.

I find this very interesting. I'm not a native English speaker but I would say I have native level proficiency. I just finished (literally yesterday) going through about 20 of Shakespeare's plays. Moreover, I did it in the audiobook format, where I didn't just have to follow the story, but also constantly figure out who's speaking. This wasn't a walk in the park and I had to familiarize myself with each play before listening to it. But - I found most of it perfectly understandable and often relatable. A fascinating difference in experience.

This matches my experience too.

I am also not a native English speaker, but I did not find Shakespeare hard to understand. The same happened for other non-native speakers that I know.

However, I am used to reading texts in many foreign languages and I am familiar with the etymology of many English words, i.e. with the evolution of their meanings in time. This is much more typical for non-native English speakers than for native English speakers and it might explain the difference.

In any case it is inappropriate to claim that Shakespeare's language is not Modern English.

The differences between Shakespeare's language and the current language are orders of magnitude smaller than for example the differences between French as taught officially and the language in which the novels of Frédéric Dard (the San-Antonio series) have been written (in the sixties and seventies of the 20th century). Those novels can really be hard to understand for native and non-native French speakers alike, before learning the specific slang used in them.

I thin you are right (and this is reflected in other comments) that some people find Elizabethan language hard and others do not.

There are lots of things that prevent some English speakers understanding others. Dialect, vocabulary and culture for a start. I often hear or read (and use) words in some places that I would not use in others (a huge range from lakh to orthogonal). I often read things that other people might have a problem reading, or things that contain words I need to look up.

Short of using only very simple language all the time it is impossible to find anything that is not going to present difficulties to some significant group of people.

> Despite these qualifications, I was hard-pressed to find any lines that I could make sense of in Shakespeare

Really. Take a look at the first few exchanges in the play I know best:

https://shakespeare.mit.edu/midsummer/full.html

The word I can find that has had a change of meaning is "revenue" and that is slight. You can read a long way down without seeing anything that is hard to understand.

My children have been able to enjoy Shakespeare from before before they were teenagers. I think it is because they read a variety of books so are not confused by unfamiliar language.

The first line looks more approachable than in R&J. But in addition to revenue, I'm at least unfamiliar with step-dame and dowager. My phone's autocomplete also thinks that latter one is not a word.

Dowager is essentially widow, I think it comes up in UK english still. I wasn't familiar with step-dame, but understand step from stepfather and other step relations, and obviously knew dame was a female, so assumed it was stepmother or similar. I feel like most people would have similar thought processes to figure those words out.

I am also a native english speak and didn't find Shakespeare difficult to read in High School, thought I did read books on my own time--more than most.

It helps to have an annotated version that explains the occasional phrase that is no longer used.

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