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One of the fascinating things about middle English for modern readers is that spelling was somewhat arbitrary. I suppose the literacy rate so low back then that the community of people blessed with the skill of reading and writing got to make up their own rules.

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Books were expensive, because they were hand made. That’s probably the reason for low literacy.

When the printing press was invented, there arose a huge appetite for books of all kinds. People learned to read, because they could afford books now. With so many books in print, people could compare spellings of words, and this led to standardisation of spelling.

Spelling became uniform because of printing.

It'd be nice to have this translated to Modern English. To read side-by-side, at least. I'm interested in reading but it's quite a chore.

Google Translate get on to this please. kthnx.

sent it through ministral (llm) running locally on my pc with a prompt to translate from old english to modern english and it seems to do a pretty good job at making it so. just a neat exercise

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