How far back in time can you understand English?
deadlanguagesociety.com
deadlanguagesociety.com
Accents have diverged a lot over time and as I recall, American English (particularly the mid-Atlantic seaboard variety) is closer to what Shakespeare and his cohort spoke than the standard BBC accent employed in most contemporary Shakespeare productions).
I was also taught a bit of Chaucer (died 1400) in English at school. Although not any of the naughty bits.
like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc ?
Are you sure this is because of their accent? I have the same experience with French (the non-native speakers are easier to understand), but I always thought that was because they use fewer and simpler words.
I wonder what they thought of my Russian accent.
A lot of Indians have English that's influenced by the specific region they come from and the native language. A couple examples:
- Specific regions of Northwestern India have the "e-" prefixing (e.g. "stop" turns into "estop") while speaking English
- Southern Indians tend to y-prefix due to their native languages having more of that sound (e.g. "LLM" can turn into "yell-ell-em").
I only learned recently that the vowel shift and non-rhotic R's in Britain happened after the colonization of America. Americans still talk "normally" whereas the English got weird. Also why Irish accents sound closer to American than British I think. Linguistics is cool
There is a "dialect" called General American English, which is essentially how national news anchors and some actors are trained, so that they don't sound like they are too obviously from anywhere in particular to the public.
A large percentage of Midwesterners and Canadians speak _mostly_ General American, if you allow for the occasional drawl or shifted vowel.
But I think they would both be easier to decipher for someone speaking Swedish than English.
On the contrary, spelling is highly idiosyncratic until the 18th century, and until then it was tightly correlated to the sounds of spoken language. Shakespeare didn't even HIMSELF have one way of spelling his own last name. That's how non-conventional spelling was until pretty recently.
You can even see it in these examples, words like "maiſter" in IIRC the 1300s example. Which becomes "master" later in English, but remains Mäster in Frisian (the closest Germanic language to English) and is also mäster in Swedish.
In this particular case, there are several glyphs used in the older texts which we don't use any more today, which makes the older text both appear more "different" and, for most people, harder to read. But this is an artificial source of difficulty in this case. I acknowledge your point that some other spelling differences track pronunciation differences but this isn't always true.
As far as pronunciation changes that aren't captured in spelling changes, this is true most obviously for a lot of words whose spelling standardized during or before the Great Vowel Shift, like "day".
That said: phonetic spelling now. We have spent 500 years turning English into something closer to Egyptian hieroglyphs than a language with an alphabet.
Do you mean that since English isn't phonetically spelled, that which we call the alphabet is rather arbitrary?
English has 45 sounds and 26 letter. There are basically no words over three letter long that are written as they are spoken.
Serbian has an alphabet, as does Italian. All other European languages I'm aware of don't.
...ok, it occurs to me now that a smart-alec might declare each individual word to be a "grouping of letters with its own phonetic pronounciation", whereupon phoneticism as-defined is achieved trivially because pronounciation is universal over the singleton universe of words spelt exactly like that word. You know what I _mean_ - "sufficiently small groups of letters", hand-wave.
People often say that the English spelling is weird or illogical. As a non-native speaker, I disagree. The English spelling makes perfect sense. It’s the English pronunciation which is really strange and inconsistent.
BS. Phonetic alphabets are _much_ easier to learn for everyone. In Russia and Ukraine pretty much every child can read by the time they enter the first grade. It's _that_ easy because both alphabets are phonetic (although it's only one-way in case of Russian).
Meanwhile, when I was learning English there basically was one spelling rule: memorize. It was not at all helpful. I also ended up learning English as a mostly written language, so after moving to the US, I kept getting surprised by how familiar written words are actually pronounced.
E.g. it took me a while to explain to a nurse over the phone that I may have pneumonia and need an appointment. Why the heck that leading "p" is completely silent?!?
I used to be able to jot down notes during lectures almost as fast as the normal spoken speed. We often traded notebooks when preparing for the exams, and I rarely had problems reading other people's notes.
It's also really nice to write, once you learn it. I was surprised after moving to the US that almost nobody here knows how to write in cursive anymore.
A part of this is a really terrible cursive variant that schools in the US used to teach ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method ). Modern Russian (and Ukrainian) cursives are closer to the older Spencerian script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencerian_script
I also find the hand-wringing about English accents somewhat surprising. Yes, different accents exist, and yes, English has a much wider variation than (urban) Russian (there are things in the countryside that urban dwellers haven’t heard for a century), but phonemic orthographies are a thing, and though children in e.g. Moscow may perpetually struggle with orthographic distinctions that no longer correspond to anything in their accent, the idea of a spelling competition remains about as laughable as that of a shoelace-tying one. Nobody makes you represent the many mergers of English with a single letter in your new orthography (though it would be funny).
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cyrillic_alternates...., rightmost column
In the US too, reading is generally handled in Kindergarten, the year before first grade. If your parents didn't teach you before that, like mine did.
> Meanwhile, when I was learning English there basically was one spelling rule: memorize.
There are rules though, that we're ad-hoc taught as kids, or just absorb through exposure. Just because there's a lot of exceptions doesn't mean they don't exist. Here's an attempt at listing them out: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html
I keep hearing that students in the US struggle with reading. With something like 60% of students not being able to read proficiently.
Inlcuding a truly stunning case of a valedictorian high school graduate who couldn't read: https://www.kktv.com/2025/02/28/former-high-school-honors-st... Or the "whole language" approach to reading, which sounds completely bonkers to me.
BS yourself: The English -- e.e. Latin -- alphabet is just as phonetic as any other.
As long as you don't fuck up your pronounciation as thoroughly as English has done.
I've created a Firefox Add-on for it as well.
besides, pronunciation continues to evolve, so any phonetic spelling would continue to gradually diverge from the spoken language
There is no such thing as spelling in phonetic writing systems because they render what is said, not some random collection of glyphs that approximated how a word was pronounced 500 years ago, in the best case.
If two people with different accents can speak to each other, they can also write to each other under a phonetic writing system.
For example, Spanish has a fairly consistent spelling system standardized by RAE, based in Madrid. But, for instance, even though much of Latin America doesn't have a distinction between s and soft c (seseo), they still keep the distinction in its spelling.
Foreign accents don't come from any inherent inability to learn language after X years of age. They come from people pronouncing languages as they are written, and virtually no language is like that in reality.
It's true that when studying a foreign language, learning to read too early can harm your pronunciation. However, it is very difficult to learn new sounds that have no equivalent in your native language, and some languages have very restrictive phonology (like Italian and Japanese requiring a vowel at the end of every word) that their native speakers struggle to break out of.
That's one example, from a language with ~70M native speakers, in a geographically tight region.
Likewise, all your other languages (sans Turkiye) are very compact geographically with small speaker bases. And Turkish undoubtedly has large aspects of forced standardization and dialect extinction.
English is spoken by 1.5 billion, by ESL speakers from basically every language tree, across the world. Try to get folks from Boston, Brooklyn, Philly, and Albany in a room and get them to agree on a phonetic spelling.
The point is that if anyone wanted to reform English spelling, they would have to choose a particular dialect to standardize around.
There is no standard English dialect. There is a relatively standard version of American English ("Walter Cronkite English"), and there is Received Pronunciation in England, but then there are all sorts of other dialects that are dominant elsewhere (Scotland, Ireland, India, etc.).
Which one should we choose to base our orthography on? Or should we allow English spelling to splinter into several completely different systems? Yes, there are already slight differences in British vs. American spelling, but they're extremely minor compared to the differences in pronunciation.
And after this spelling reform, will people still be able to read anything written before the reform, or will that become a specialized ability that most people don't learn?
That would make reading anything extremely slow and difficult.
You're proposing to make reading just as difficult as understanding every other dialect of spoken English - something even most native speakers have difficulty with.
Your proposal would also eliminate whole-word recognition, which is what makes reading fast. It would slow us all down to the speed of young children just learning to sound out the letters.
American English isn’t the only spelling of English.
English is probably overdue on that, tbh.
Yet people who speak those dialects can write anything down and I'll understand it perfectly with no effort.
You don't understand the value of standardization. It's what makes reading fast and independent of dialect. People who read English don't literally sound out the letters. They recognize the whole word instantly. Sounding out the letters is only a fallback mechanism.
What you're proposing might work for a tiny language with only one main dialect. English is a global language with a huge number of dialects. Major languages like this need standardized writing systems, and to no one's surprise, they all have them.
English is intelligible enough that someone from Vancouver can easily talk to someone from Sydney and every other major population center in between.
That someone in a two sheep village in Scotland might have trouble reading War and Peace isn't a reason to abuse every child for a decade before they too develop the same brain damage as the adults who abused them.
But you don't have to go all the way to "English should switch to hieroglyphs" to see that keeping a uniform but imperfect phonetic system is far superior to having everyone write their own partially intelligible dialect however they want.
> English is intelligible enough that someone from Vancouver can easily talk to someone from Sydney and every other major population center in between.
I assume you mean going East from Vancouver, because there are practically no major population centers practically in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
But no, the dialects spoken in the major English-speaking population centers are not mutually intelligible. An American exposed to Cockney, a major English dialect, for the first time will have no idea that is being said.
Here's the future you want:
"Ai fink va braan kye-ao iz ow-va ve-ya bai va waw-ʔuh."
How many Americans do you think will understand that at first sight?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
> Around 1809, ... Sequoyah began work to create a writing system for the Cherokee language. ... He worked on the syllabary for twelve years before completion and dropped or modified most of the characters he originally created.
> After the syllabary was completed in the early 1820s, it achieved almost instantaneous popularity and spread rapidly throughout Cherokee society.[4] By 1825, the majority of Cherokees could read and write in their newly developed orthography. ...
> Albert Gallatin ... believed [the syllabary] was superior to the English alphabet in that literacy could be easily achieved for Cherokee at a time when only one-third of English-speaking people achieved the same goal.[6] He recognized that even though the Cherokee student must learn 85 characters instead of 26 for English, the Cherokee could read immediately after learning all the symbols. The Cherokee student could accomplish in a few weeks what students of English writing might require two years to achieve.
Where are you going to find the spoken word from centuries ago?
Made a version with modern glyphs to help separate language familiarity from writing familiarity:
https://gist.github.com/terretta/5be1e14b42cf62ec9c235c7cd88...
All credit to original, just agreed with your point this munged two things as presented and preferred to focus on the language.
For the prurient, Chaucer's Vulgar Tongue is a great place to dip a toe into it:
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2019/09/25/episode-129-c...
I absolutely agree. This has become my comfort podcast when I just want to decompress.
I’m listening on Apple Podcasts. Season 5 episode 5 “Printin and Perkin” if it helps.
He has actually mentioned the History of English before, but I’ve never listened to it. Great to hear though!
That acoustic guitar riff followed by "Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome" is how I'll know I'm dead and I've arrived at the gates of heaven
Around 1000, English and Dutch must have been mutually understandable.
Dutch doesn't have the same intonation, has harsher pronunciations, and has a whole extra sound most English people struggle with (a rolled r).
The older generations also can't pronounce -thew very well as it's not a thing in Dutch, so struggle to pronounce my name, calling me Matchoo instead of Matthew. It still boggles my mind that my Mum would pick a name the Dutch can't pronounce.
The Dutch accent is also extremely noticeable to a native English speaker.
Ultimately, they're not the same at all as English is Germanic/Latin hybrid where half the words are French/Italian words, and half the words are Germanic/Dutch words.
Dutch is not.
You can usually tell by looking at the word and the end of the word.
Words like fantastic, manual, vision, aquatic, consume are all from -ique, -alle, -umme and will have similar words in French/Italian. The tend to be longer words with more syllables.
Words like mother, strong, good, are Germanic in root. The -er, -ong, -od words will all be similar to the German/Dutch words. Shorter, quicker to pronounce.
Maybe she meant for you to go by Mathias (or whatever the local equivalent is) when in the Netherlands?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/english-to-dutch-translations
The connection between Dutch and English languages is far more minimal in comparison. In fact, when I first faced the language, I would have said it was a combination of ~80% German, 10% English, 5% French, +5% Others.
> In fact, when I first faced the language, I would have said it was a combination of ~80% German, 10% English, 5% French, +5% Others.
But the vocabulary of English itself is majority of Germanic origin. So while Dutch is often closer to the modern German, there's definitely far more than 10% that has a common origin with English as well as German.
...Nor shall I never it forget, not while I live!
... and that was a wife [= woman], strong and [stith]! She came in among the evil men and me [nerede] from their hands.
She slew the heathen men that me pinned, slew them and felled them to the ground. There was blood and [bale] enough. And they fell [and] lay still, for they [] might no more stand. And the Master, the [wraþþe] Master, he flew away in the darkness and was seen no more.
I said [to] her, "I thank thee, [leove] wife, for thou hast me [ineredd] from death and from all mine [ifoan]!"
Interestingly, nerede/ineredd has no descendant in modern English, but it's not difficult to understand in the passage, while leove and ifoan do have descendants, and in the case of ifoan the meaning hasn't changed, but they are harder to read.
In 1100 the idea of "just substitute the modern word in for the old word" starts to break down.
Which is interesting cause 1200 italian[0] seems pretty readable by everyone who can read italian (and likely every other romance language), you have to go further back to have a shift.
[0] E.g. Saint Francis' Canticle of the Sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canticle_of_the_Sun
The language in section 1300 isn't much different from section 1400. Almost all of it is still good English today if you give the words their modern spelling:
Then after much time spoke the Master, and his words were cold as winter is. His voice was as the crying of ravens, sharp and shrill, and all that heard him were adread and durst not speak.
"I deem¹ thee to the death, stranger. Here shalt thou die, far from thy kin and far from thine own land, and none shall know thy name, nor none shall thee beweep."
And I said to him, with what boldness I might gather, "Why farest thou with me thus? What trespass have I wrought against thee, that thou deemst¹ me so hard a doom?"
"[Swie!]"² quoth he, and smote me with his hand, so that I fell to the earth. And the blood ran down from my mouth.
And I [swied],² for the great dread that was come upon me was more than I might bear. My heart became as stone, and my limbs were heavy as lead, and I []³ might no more stand nor speak.
The evil man laughed, when that he saw my pain, and it was a cruel laughter, without mercy or pity as of a man that hath no [rewthe]⁴ in his heart.
Alas! I should never have come to this town of Wolvesfleet! Cursed be the day and cursed be the hour that I first set foot therein!
¹ We still have this word in modern English, but the meaning is different.
² No idea what this word is.
³ I assume the ne in the text here is required by some kind of grammatical negative agreement with the rest of the clause. In more modern (but still fairly archaic) English, nothing goes here. In actual modern-day English, the grammar of this clause isn't really available for use, but it's intelligible.
⁴ This turns out to be the element ruth in ruthless, and a man with no ruth in his heart is one who is literally ruthless, without "ruth". It literally means "regret", but the use in the text clearly matches the metaphorical sense of the modern word ruthless.
Here the text says "I swied", so it has to be a verb, but the meaning "be silent" makes sense in the passage.
Something to think about in this exercise is that the shortness of the passages adds difficulty.
Consider section 1200, where a verb with the root ner is used. It's given so much focus and contextual elaboration that you can easily tell what it means, even though the word is unfamiliar.
If you read longer passages of Middle English, this same phenomenon will occur with more words.
Old English swige < proto-West-Germanic swiga ; German schweigen < proto-West-Germanic swigen < swiga
(Following the links around on wiktionary may, in general, lead to self-contradictory results.)
"Swie!" from "swien" looks kind of exactly like "Schweige!" from "zu Schweigen" in modern German. Must go back to the same root (closer to "swie" than "schweigen", I'd guess) in Proto-Germanic.
Also, you say spelling but e.g. "speken" feels more a grammatical than orthographic difference.
By comparison, Dante's incipit to the Divine Comedy is 100% the same spelling and grammar as modern Italian (nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita/mi ritrovai per una selva oscura/che la diritta via era smarrita)
When I look up ealry manuscript scans of the Comedy, I get:
*Nel mezo delcamin dinra uita / mi trouai puna(?) felua (long s letter) ofcura / che la diricta (some bizarre letter in there) uia era fmarrita (long s).
https://www.digitalcollections.manchester.ac.uk/view/PR-INCU...
Note that the p is struck through below its loop; that is probably an abbreviation for "per". That would be an example of the spelling being the same as modern Italian, but the manuscript is written in a kind of shorthand because writing takes a lot of time and effort.
dinrã is probably also an abbreviation, given the diacritic.
> diricta (some bizarre letter in there)
No, the letters are exactly what you've just typed. There is a ligature between the c and the t. You could call this a difference in font, but not in spelling. (Though diricta for modern diritta is a real difference.)
> Nel mezo delcamin
This is a real spelling difference. There's a really glaring one in stanza 3, where poco is spelled pocho in contravention of the rules of Italian spelling. I don't know what an Italian today would think if confronted with -cho-.
> Note that the p is struck through below its loop; that is probably an abbreviation for "per".
Aha, so "peruna".
How the heck did Dante know what "potato" would come to be called, centuries later, in Finnish???
Doesn't make a difference if you're reading it.¹ If you were trying to produce correct Middle English, you're correct that this would cause difficulties.
(And to me it looks like it has caused difficulties for the author. The passage has several verbs introduced by auxiliary modals. Check out the list:
1. Here ſchaltou dyen Here shalt thou die
2. non ſchal knowen þi name none shall know thy name
3. non schal þe biwepe none shall thee beweep
4. wiþ what boldenesse I miȝte gaderen with what boldness I might gather
5. more þan I miȝte beren more than I might bear
6. I ne miȝte namore stonden ne spoken I [] might no more stand nor speak
Three examples use shall and three examples use might. Five of them have an -n suffix (must be infinitive or subjunctive; not to be confused with the 3rd person plural -n suffix that we also see) on the verb, but that suffix is missing from non schal þe biwepe, which is otherwise an exact grammatical match to non ſchal knowen þi name)
¹ The reason it doesn't make a difference is that the sentence structure is still that of modern English and there's only one permissible form of the verb in the modernized sentence. So it's sufficient to know (a) what verb is being used; plus (b) what the sentence it's being used in is.
"Be silent" (or "shut up"). Feels like it must be a cognate of Ger. "Schweige[n]".
“Swie!” is interesting, I understood it somehow naturally. In Gheg Albanian we say “Shuj!”, which means “Be silent!”.
Assuming that translation was done a while ago (100+ yrs?)... It is hard to read. I can understand it if I try. But the phrasing is not current. 100 pages will take double the time at the least.
Almost think AI needs to rephrase it into current English.
Probably has these double negatives, long sentences, etc.
[0] Or at the time promised the post, I don't remember the details.
You may want lol into that, since you are realizing and noticing things, but you are seemingly still not connecting the dots correctly. Another hint, Dutch comes from Deutsche, how the “Germans” refer to themselves, which is also where the “English” came from, Angles and Saxony, the latter still being a region of “Germany” today.
In other words, you really should be referring to themselves Germans as the Deutsche of you wanted to differentiate them from the Dutch, which are basically the same Deutsche people who just live on the coast, the lowlands, i.e., the Nether-lands.
I am generally even just sad writing this because even my proposal invariably means the total destruction of many languages, traditions, cultures, and true and healthy diversity that has defined Europe over all of recorded history; but at least if this effort of trying to mash Europe into a kind of neo-communist of uniform sludge, at least try to create something new and beautiful out of it, not some disgusting brown mush where the non-english EU speaks English, while by the end of the century the majority of people will not even be indigenous Europeans anymore.
It is sad realizing that what we are all currently witness to is a cataclysmic collapse and destruction of civilization in Europe on an order that humanity has not witness since the civilizational collapse of the Americas or even the Bronze Age collapse and minor cultural collapses and ethnocides that were perpetrated through the French proto-communist Revolution, the Russian communist revolution and the Chinese communist revolutions. It is astonishing knowing that I am living through a historical event that may even never be recorded, let alone well, because the likelihood that it will be recorded at all, let alone accurately is very low.
If a common German language could be created, along with maybe a common Romance language for Hispania and Italy, etc. at least there would be a kind of remaining legacy akin to how the Egyptian icons are enigmatic, even if their culture did not survive.
Firstly, you're conflating German and Germanic, while ignoring that the common ancestor here dates to before the High German consonant shift between the 3rd and 5th centuries, that further split the German* languages, that had already long since split from the other Germanic languages.
Secondly, my point was merely that there is a closer relationship between the Germanic languages historically spoken around the North Sea, than with modern standard German that has carried with it the consonant shift, and so if you take into account Low German/Plattdeutsch, the similarities are more visible and obvious.
I see no reason to try to mush them together, but it would be interesting to see German take the approach of Norway: Norwegian have had a few fairly successful reforms actually moving it further away from Danish in some respect, but which also in some respects have mean allowing older forms closer to Norse in the majority form of Bokmål, that were retained/included in Nynorsk.
If German did the same thing and started encouraging and allowing those of the forms of minority Low German dialects that are closer to the older Germanic forms (e.g. Dag instead of Tag, for dag/day), it might over time restore some of the continuum.
It was Germanic, derived from a common ancestor with German but absolutely distinct separate lineage and your weird ethonationalist quasi-fascist soup of of thoughts here and below is both factually incorrect and incoherent.
Actual scholars of Germanic languages don't share your bizarre biases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Anglo-Saxon_England
Like does Dutch have anything like "cƿæð"? Or "Hlaford"? Or "soð"? "þeah þe"?
I know Dutch should be a little closer to Old English than German, but if you truly can pick up words like that leaning on Dutch, maybe I should learn to read it. (I can read the 1000 Old English sentence pretty well).
The orthography of Anglo-Saxon can make it look easier to read for a modern German or Dutch speaker, but to actually hear it could be confusing. Specifically around the words written with the past tense marker "ge" -- or other words using "ge", which is pronounced like modern English "ye" (hence English 'yester[day]' instead of German 'gestern'), not hard "ge" like in modern high German.
And yes Dutch (or modern Low Saxon dialects or Frisian) could be closer but the orthography is very different and also Anglo-Saxon had a palette closer to the front of the mouth than the back like Dutch.
Also other West Germanic (and North) languages lost the dental fricatives ("thorn" (þ) and "eth" (ð)) while English (and Icelandic) kept it. And Anglo Saxon used them heavily. Old Franconian and Old Saxon had this sound, too, but lost it (hence "the" vs der/die/das etc)
Actually knowing Tolkien well has been helpful because the way he writes is very anglo-saxon, not so even his word choices but just the rhythm or syntax.
But yeah I went into Old English thinking it would be more like German, but really it is much more like English than people think IMO.
In English class at school in Norway, I went through a phase after reading LOTR in Eglish for the first time, where I'd frustrate my teacher by using words that were archaic enough that my teacher had to look them up.
> Old English thinking it would be more like German, but really it is much more like English than people think IMO.
Compare it to Old Norse, and Old Dutch, though, and there are many similarities that stand out. My Norwegian lessons very brief foray into Old Norse definitely made it easier for me to dechipher parts of Old English and Old Dutch (the latter also helped a lot by my halting German). I think a lot of the similarities comes down to learning to recognise a few of the key sound and ortography shifts, at which point they start to look a lot more similar than it looks at first glance.
I felt like it helped to use an "old english" accent in my inner voice when reading.
The unfortunate history of Europe is that the indigenous people of Central Europe are essentially all German people who have been divided and conquered by a ruling parasitic class that we all know moved around the continent, marrying into each other’s families and becoming the people’s aristocratic slave masters over centuries, which included linguistic divisions in things like naming, and even language “reforms”. Heck the English ruling class itself are Germans and they just changed their names when it was expedient to do so in order to continue filling the English people by not drawing attention to the fact that they were being set to fight their item bothers and sisters in WWI so that the British ruling class could remain their parasitic masters.
> ...all German people who have been divided and conquered by a ruling parasitic class that we all know moved around the continent, marrying into each other’s families and becoming the people’s aristocratic slave masters over centuries
...is a weasel-worded way of saying "Jews". That is, this is just a re-spewing of the same old racist talking points from the original Nazis (and earlier).
Just in case anyone didn't see this for what it (almost certainly) is.
https://youtu.be/OeC1yAaWG34?si=lkoQ--uZNN8Ntpqy
As a Norwegian who speaks English and school-German, Dutch is fairly easy to read but sounds like you're speaking a mix of English, Norse and German with a mouthful of gravel (similar to the Danish, who Norwegians like to say speaks Norwegian with a potato in their mouth)
Ørberg may be the best, though.
The first chapter is like a book for toddlers in Old English (with questions and loads of repeated vocab), and each chapter gets a bit harder. Half way in its like a Young Adults Novel level of difficulty. But each step up is relatively small.
The actual story is great too. Æthelstān Mūs is my spirit animal.
1300 is noticeably harder and needs some iterative refinement, but once you rewrite it, it's surprisingly not too bad:
> Then after much time spoke the master, his words were cold as winter is. His voice was the crying of rauenes(?), sharp and chill, and all that heard him were adrade(?) and dared not speak.
> "I deem thee(?) to the(?) death, stranger. Here shall you die, far from thy kin and far from thine own land, and none shall known thy name, nor non shall thy biwepe(?)."
> And I said to him [...]
1200 is where I can't understand much... it feels like where the vocabulary becomes a significant hurdle, not just the script:
> Hit(?) is much to saying all that pinunge(?) hie(?) on me(?) uroyten(?), all that sore(?) and all that sorry. No scar(?) is never hit(?) forgotten, not uuhiles(?) is libbe(?).
It gets exhausting to keep going after these :-) but this was very fun.
"adread", meaning afraid
Still a recognizable archaic word, constructed from a still-in-use root. Just the spelling is different.
Ravens
Someone here needs to brush up on their Icelandic!
Probably beweep; lament, weep over.
> pinunge(?)
This is explained later on the page. "Where a modern writer would say he underwent torture, a 1200-era writer must say that he suffered pinunge instead."
I also couldn't understand this one although the word "pining" did come to mind, apparently not totally off, as that has apparently come from the same ancestor. Didn't help me figure out the intended meaning, though.
> No scar(?) is never hit(?) forgotten, not uuhiles(?) is libbe(?).
I guessed this meant something along the lines of "[?] shall I never [?] forget, not while I live". I didn't figure out that "uu" is actually "w" until that was explained, so it escaped me that "uuhiles" is "while[s]", though.
Since it's explained further down the page that it comes from an earlier loan from Latin "peona", "punishment", I suppose there is kind of a cognate in English itself from the later loan of the same word that has lead to "penalizing".
My reading was "There is (too) much to say all that pain he wrought on me, all there sour and all that sorryness. Not shall I never forget, not while I live!"
> all there sour and all that sorryness.
"all those sores and all that sorrow"?
1300 started to get hard because I was missing the meaning of some words completely. 1200 was where I gave up.
Now, English is my 2nd language so I was surprised I could go that far.
- rauenes: ravens
- “all that heard him were adrade”: I’m guessing it means “were filled with dread”, maybe “were adread”
- I think deme is actually a conjugation of the archaic verb “to doom”, as in “I doom thee to the death”
- “none shall thy biwepe” would be roughly “none shall beweep thee”
Aside: typing this is hard on my phone, it’s so close to modern English that nearly every word gets autocorrected.
The way to remember thorn: "Ye Oldee Shoppe". The "Ye" there is "þe" (the), written with "Y" standing in for þ - historically for typographic reasons, and in modern times just repeating that change.
> "ſ" is also easy to guess and I'd seen it before.
It's in use as a long s[1] in other languages too when using Fraktur style fonts in particular. One of Norways largest papers [2] still insists on using it in their header, which led someone I went to school with to insist the name was "Aftenpoften" instead of "Aftenposten" ("Evening Post").
I really got into reading Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" (about 1497) about a year ago, and I suspect that really helped me with this exercise, since he uses some language that was archaic even back then.
I really wish there was an audio recording of this story. I found the spellings in the earlier years more and more confusing.
Do you know if there any other such language related eastereggs in other of Lovecraft's writing? should I chose to revisit them, in English this time around.
I'm sure S. T. Joshi might have a bit to say about the topic. Personally speaking from very limited exposure and knowledge of language games, and me not being from an environment which has European language roots, I might have missed quite a bit of such easter eggs in the atmosphere and writing. Like, for example, your comment prompted me to find out what "rue d'auseil" (from The Music of Erich Zann) meant, I didn't bother to find out until today.
I do recommend rereading Lovecraft in English either way, since you never know what gets lost in translation!
I remember my father and I having to enable the subtitles for Rab C Nesbitt when I was a kid. There are areas of Scotland (especially the isles) which are probably still unintelligible to most of the British population I would wager.
"From Olde English to Modern American English in One Monologue"
Anyway as I know from my reading history at 1400 it gets difficult, but I can make it through 1400 and 1300 with difficulty, but would need to break out the middle English dictionaries for 1200 and 1100. 1000 forget it, too busy to make that effort.
on edit: this was probably where my problem generally was, in lest and Maister and anything where the long s is next to a t it looks very like an f to me, although if I zoom to 170% then it is clear, however at that size it introduces its own reading problems; unfortunately my reading glasses are broken so I just struggled at a lower resolution.
document.body.style.fontFamily = "Baskerville";
Baskerville has a nice long-s. TNR is also not bad. Garamond is passable.
on edit: liked the Garamond better, since the font is a bit thicker, checked it on "ſpake" and was obviously a long S whereas on the thinner Baskerville still looked like an f to me. Although the original text was perhaps too thick for me.
(function() {
const SKIP_PARENTS = new Set(["SCRIPT", "STYLE", "NOSCRIPT", "TEXTAREA"]);
const walker = document.createTreeWalker(
document.body,
NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT,
{
acceptNode(node) {
const p = node.parentNode;
if (!p || SKIP_PARENTS.has(p.nodeName)) return NodeFilter.FILTER_REJECT;
if (p.nodeName === "INPUT") return NodeFilter.FILTER_REJECT;
return NodeFilter.FILTER_ACCEPT;
}
}
);
let node;
while ((node = walker.nextNode())) {
node.nodeValue = node.nodeValue.replace(/ſ/g, "s");
}
})()To me, it is nearly like trying to look at a picture book of fashion but the imagery is degraded as you go back. I'd like to see the time-traveler's version with clean digital pictures of every era...
(Sorry, can't recall for sure, returning to this thread a couple days after reading TFA.)
The author Colin Gorrie, "PhD linguist and ancient language teacher", obviously knows their stuff. From my experience, much more limited and less informed, the older material looks like a modern writer mixing in some archaic letters and expression - it doesn't look like the old stuff and isn't nearly as challenging, to me.
Of course that’s not limited to the 16th century. The Good News Bible renders what is most commonly given as “our name is Legion for we are many” instead as “our name is Mob because there are a lot of us.” In my mind I hear the former spoken in that sort of stereotypical demon voice: deep with chorus effect, the latter spoken like Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Of course you do, not only to read but write: English still is a Germanic language.
I'd say around 2020
Great fun, and helped a little perhaps by the fact that I've visited Iceland and that language uses the thorn for the sound we make in 'thin' and eth for the sound we make in 'then' so I mimicked that.
Background: Fully understands Scandinavian languages (native), can read a bit of German and Dutch, proficient in English, and can read a fair bit of Icelandic. All of this seems to help.
English is cooked fam. Gen Alpha’s kids are going to get lost at the 2000 paragraph.
Lowkey though, let’s keep it 100 and check it. Back in the day Millennials got totally ragged on for sounding all extra like this n' usin all sort of txting abbreviations early on 2. Yet they can still peep oldskool English just the same - talk about insane in the membrane, for real.
- [1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/WillandMarSess2/1/2/enact...
For me 1200 is off a cliff, just like the author describes. I can get a few words here or there but comprehension is just gone.
P1: Unclear, but I think it's basically saying there is much to say about all that happened to him.
[Edit: the more I stare at it, the more sense it makes. "There is much to say about all that ? was wrought on me, ???. I shall never forget it, not while I live!"]
P2: Unexpectedly, a woman ("uuif", wife) appeared at "great speed" to save him. "She came in among the evil men..."
P3: "She slaughtered the heathen men that pinned me, slaughtered them and felled them to the ground. There was blood and bale enough and the fallen lay still, for [they could no more?] stand. As for the Maister, the [wrathe?] Maister, he fled away in the darkness and was seen no more."
P4: The protagonist thanks the woman for saving him, "I thank thee..."
On first reading, I didn't know what "uuif" was. I had to look that one up.
Had the word been written "wif", I don't think that there would have been any need for you to search the word, as the relationship with "wife" would have been obvious.
Between then and now, in this word only the pronunciation of "i" has changed, from "i" like in the European languages to "ai".
> "Þe euele man louȝ, whan that he sawe my peine, and it was a crueel louȝter, wiþouten merci or pitee as of a man þat haþ no rewþe in his herte."
"The evil man laughed, when he saw my pain, and it was a cruel laughter, without mercy or pity as of a man that has no rewthe in his heart."
In other words, a rewthe-less man.
We've retained the word "ruthless" but no longer use the word "ruth", "a feeling of pity, distress, or grief."
Only for this the font stays the same size, and it gets harder to interpret as is deviates further from modern English.
For me, I can easily go back to about when the printing press got popular.
No coincidence I think.
___
[*]: I guess, from what I've understood -- absolutely no expert, just interested.
I'm expecting that's true of a lot of people who meet my description, and my guess is university graduates not in STEM can read 1300 without issue (same as me), and certainly every native speaker with a college degree can read 1400. (Edit: FWIW I'm thinking here of how I can read Chaucer, and how I couldn't in 9th grade when I was introduced to him)
1200 I had to focus insanely hard and make guesses and circle back once I'd gotten more context to the words I couldn't read.
This is generous to his readers. Most American college students majoring in English can't read Dickens, according to a study discussed here last year [0].
People reading a post on a blog about dead languages are self-selected to be better at this task. But so are people who've decided to spend four years of their life studying English literature.
In some sense, it's better these days, competition has led to care for the reader that probably didn't exist as much then, since so few people can read.
To those who enjoyed it so much as to come here and read these comments, I'd suggest to fetch a copy of David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas", and appreciate the multiple style changes between the various sections.
It's spoken by about 50,000 people in the Faroe Islands, which are between Iceland and Scotland. The isles were settled by Viking-era Norse about a thousand years ago and then largely forgotten by the rest of the world. But they kept speaking their version of Old Norse and it became its own language. There are many dialects and the writing system was designed to cover all of them, so it is is etymologically informed by Old Norse and it is very conservative. It's not at all indicative of how it's really pronounced. The written form is somewhat even mutually intelligible with Icelandic / Old Norse, but the spoken language is not.
Underneath those æ and ð is a language that is oddly similar to English, like parallel convergent evolution. It's a North Germanic language not a West Germanic language so the historical diversion point is about 1500 years ago.
But it has undergone an extensive vowel shift (but in a different pattern). And also like English, it has also undergone extensive affrication (turned into ch/j) of the stop consonants and reduction of final stops and intervocalic stops. It has the same kind of stress - vowel reduction interaction that English has. That further heightens the uncanny effect.
I came away with the impression that it is English's closest sibling language, aside from Dutch. Some vocabulary:
broðir "broh-wer" (brother), heyggjur "hoy-cher" (hill/height), brúgv "brukf" (bridge), sjógvar/sjós "shekvar/shos" (sea), skyggj "skooch" (sky/cloud), djópur "cho-pur" (deep), veðirinn "ve-vir-uhn" (weather). Rough pronunciations given between quotes; all examples are cognate with English!
There's an extended story reading by a native speaker here [1] if you want an example of what it sounds like. No idea what they're saying. The intonation reminds me a bit of the northern British isles which also had a Norse influence.
[0] https://annas-archive.org/md5/4d2ce4cd5e828bbfc7b29b3d03349b...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSXu2fuJOTQ
Repost of an earlier comment of mine.
"If you’ve ever seen a pub called “Ye Olde” anything, that ye is actually þe, an attempt by early printers to write a thorn without having to make an expensive new letter".
Now I know.
Honestly not a bad critical thinking exercise in general, for someone with language fluency. Much of it can be “worked out” just through gradual inference and problem-solving, and I’d be curious to see its results as a test for High Schoolers.
Only from 1913-1946 though.
1200 is much harder but I can get maybe 60-75%:
Hit is muchel to seggen all þat pinunge hie on me uuroȝten, al þar sor and al þat sorȝe. Ne scal ic nefre hit forȝeten, naht uuhiles ic libbe!
There is much to say of all that paining he wrought upon me. All that soreness and sorryness. Not shall I ever forget it, not while I live!
Ac þer com me gret sped, and þat was a uuif, strong and stiþ! Heo com in among þe yuele men and me nerede fram heore honden.
Here is where I lose the thread.
A wiff ... wife? witch? waif? woman? ... who is strong and perhaps stiff or some similar word, comes to him with great speed. She comes in among the evil men/man and saves him with her hand. Although I could be way off
Heo sloȝ þe heþene men þat me pyneden, sloȝ hem and fælde hem to þe grunde. Þer was blod and bale inouȝ And hie feollen leien stille, for hie ne miȝten namore stonden. Ac þe Maister, þe uuraþþe Maister, he flaȝ awei in þe deorcnesse and was iseon namore.
Here I can gather a lot more but I'm guessing a lot:
She slayed the heathen man who pained me, slayed him and felled him to the ground. There was a lot of blood and bile and he fell and lay still. For he had no more might to stand. And the maister, the wrathful maister, he fled into the darkness and I saw him no more.
Ic seide hire, “Ic þanke þe, leoue uuif, for þu hauest me ineredd from dæðe and from alle mine ifoan!”
I said to to her "I thank you, lovely waif/wife/witch, for you have saved me from death and from all my (?)"
And then from 1100 I can gather that the waif/witch/woman replies to his thanks and introduces herself as Aelfgifu, which I incidentally know is an old English female name meaning Elf Gift
Any further help?
Steady or stout (which used to mean more "steady" than "thickset" as now), perhaps.
> Heo sloȝ þe heþene men ... sloȝ hem and fælde hem to þe grunde
> She slayed the heathen man ... slayed him and felled him to the ground.
Them, not him, I thought? The Master had several henchmen.
> ...from alle mine ifoan!”
> ...from all my (?)"
Foes, fiends? (Ger. "Feind" and Swe. "fiende" both mean "enemy", so I've always thought that's the original meaning of Eng. "fiend" too.)
> Aelfgifu, which I incidentally know is an old English female name meaning Elf Gift
Spouse -- almost wrote "wife" there, but that could have been confusing in this context -- of some old king of Wessex or something, innit?
I'll admit part of the difficulty there was that I'd skipped the ends of earlier chapters because they were too easy, so I was missing some context like this
>Foes, fiends? (Ger. "Feind" and Swe. "fiende" both mean "enemy", so I've always thought that's the original meaning of Eng. "fiend" too.)
Foes sounds right yeah. I think there was another word at some point where a prefixed "I" seemed to indicate that the thing was "to me", and -an feels right to be an old plural form. I can't think of any straight away but instinctively I feel like there are words in modern English that pluralise similarly, perhaps in the names of some old organisations?
>Spouse -- almost wrote "wife" there, but that could have been confusing in this context -- of some old king of Wessex or something, innit?
That's the one. I don't remember exactly who they were but my memory is that she managed to be the spouse of two Anglo-Saxon kings, sometime not too long before William arrived
___
The original:
And þæt heo sægde wæs eall soþ. Ic ƿifode on hire, and heo ƿæs ful scyne ƿif, ƿis ond ƿælfæst. Ne gemette ic næfre ær sƿylce ƿifman. Heo ƿæs on gefeohte sƿa beald swa ænig mann, and þeah hƿæþere hire andƿlite wæs ƿynsum and fæger.
Ac ƿe naƿiht freo ne sindon, for þy þe ƿe næfre ne mihton fram Ƿulfesfleote geƿitan, nefne ƿe þone Hlaford finden and hine ofslean. Se Hlaford hæfþ þisne stede mid searocræftum gebunden, þæt nan man ne mæg hine forlætan. Ƿe sindon her sƿa fuglas on nette, swa fixas on ƿere.
And ƿe hine secaþ git, begen ætsomne, ƿer ond ƿif, þurh þa deorcan stræta þisses grimman stedes. Hƿæþere God us gefultumige!
___
Applying the following changes mechanically (which I often do in my head when I see a un-familiar word in old english)
ģ = y, ċ = ch, sw = s, ƿ = w, p = th, x = sk,
we get:
And thæt heo sæyde wæs eall soth. Ich wifode on hire, and heo wæs ful shyne wif, wis ond wælfæst. Ne yemette ich næfer ær sylche wifman. Heo wæs on gefeoghte sa beald sa æniy mann, and theah wæthere hire andlite wæs wynsum and fæyer.
Ac we nawight freo ne sindon, for thy the we næfer ne mighton fram Wulfesfleote yewitan, nefen we thone Laford finden and hine ofslean. Se Laford hæfth thisne stede mid searocræftum gebunden, thæt nan man ne mæy hine forlætan. We sindon her sa fuglas on nette, sa fiskas on were.
And we hine sechath yit, beyen ætsomne, wer ond wif, thurgh tha deorcan stræta thisses grimman stedes. Wæthere God us yefultumige!
__
My translation attempt:
And that which she said was all true. I made her my wife, she was a very beautiful woman, wise and steadfast when dealing death[0]. I had never met such a woman before. She was as brave in a fight as any person, yet her appearance was winsome and fair.
But we were no longer free, because we could neaver leave Wulfleet, even though we found the lord and slew him. The lord had bound this town with sorcery, such that no one could leave it. We were trapped like birds on a net, like fishes are by a man.
And we searched yet, being together, man and wife, through the dark streets of this grim town. God help us!
___
[0] my best attempt at translating "ƿælfæst"; it's like slaughter + firm/fast/stable. I guess it means she is calm while killing people :))
https://www.youtube.com/live/2WcIK_8f7oQ?si=NpXTrRjcHN09Zn56...
Medieval French, Middle High German, Ancient Greek, Classical Arabic or Chinese from different eras, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh
The Shahnameh is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 CE and is the national epic of Greater Iran. Shahnameh is one of the world's longest epic poems, and the longest epic poem created by a single author.
I one met a visiting Iranian academic just after I'd learned about the Shahnameh. I'd also read the opinion of a French scholar who thought its language was, for a modern Iranian, like Montaigne for a modern French. The Iranian woman told me that very few people in Iran actually read the book. It's very long, and hard to grasp for untrained readers. But most people know some of its stories and characters, because they are often mentioned in everyday life, and because the abridged prose books are widespread.
BTW, I don't know which editions are the most popular in Iran. Wikipedia says the Shahnameh was heavily modified and modernized up to the 14th century, when its most famous illustrated edition was created. The book most read today is probably not a scholar edition.
She makes a fair point. Reading and fully understanding Shahnameh is not straightforward. The difficulty does not primarily stem from drastic linguistic change, although the language has evolved and been somewhat simplified over time, but rather from the nature of Persian poetry itself, which is often deliberately layered and intricate *.
That said, Iranian students are introduced to selected passages and stories from Shahnameh throughout their schooling. Teachers typically devote considerable time to these texts, as the work is closely tied to cultural identity and a sense of historical pride.
* Persian, in particular, is often described as highly suited to poetic expression. Its flexible grammar and word order allow for a degree of intentional ambiguity, and this interpretive openness is frequently regarded as a mark of sophistication (difficult to master at a high-level for a layperson). A single ghazal by Hafez, for instance, can be read as a dialogue with God, a beloved man, or a beloved woman, with each interpretation leading to a different emotional and philosophical resonance. This multiplicity is the core part of the artistry.
Personally, I did not truly understand Hafez until I fell in love for the first time. My vocabulary and historical knowledge remained the same, yet my experience of the poetry changed completely. What shifted was something more inward and spiritual and only then did I begin to feel the full force of the verses.
For example, consider the following (unfortunately) translated lines:
O cupbearer, pass the cup around and offer it to me --
For love seemed easy at first, but then the difficulties began.
In general, language changes around at the same rate all over history and geography, barring some things (migration, liturgical languages)
Books written in the 17th century or later are easy to read. Of course, the meaning of some words can change over time but that's a minor trouble. I believe Molière and Racine are still studied in school nowadays, but the first name that came to my mind was Cyrano de Bergerac (the writer, not the fictitious character).
Books from the 16th need practice, but I think anyone who tries hard will get used to the language. I enjoyed Rabelais's Pantagruel and Gargantua a lot, and I first read them by myself when I was in highschool (I knew a bit of Latin and Greek, which helped).
Before that, French was much more diverse; the famous split into "langue d'oc" and "langue d'oïl" (terms for "oui" — yes — at the time) is a simplification, because there were many dialects with blurry contours over space and time.
I've read several 11th-12th novels about the Round Table, but I was already experienced in Old French when I started, and I think most readers would struggle to make sense of it. It may depend on the dialect; I remember "Mort Artur" was easier than "Lancelot, le chevalier à la charette".
"La chanson de Roland" (11th century, Old French named anglo-normand) is one of my favorite books of all times. Reading it for the first time was a long process — I learned the declensions of Old French and a lot of vocabulary — but it was also fun, like deciphering some mystery. And the poesy is a marvel, epic, incredibly concise, surprising and deep.
Before that (9th-10th), Old French was even closer to Latin.
There's not much literature older than that, cause people preferred to write in Latin, the oldest bit in "volgare" is the Indovinello Veronese[0] which is from the 8th or 9th century and at that point it's almost latin spelling-wise, it's understandable if you're well educated but wouldn't be understandable by everyone.
Resiliency is one of the weird beneficial side-effects of having a writing system based on ideas instead of sounds. Today, you've got a variety of Chinese dialects that, when spoken, are completely unintelligible to one another. But people who speak different dialects can read the same book just fine. Very odd, from a native English speaking perspective.
Of course, typical modern readers may not be able to string a full sentence of modern Hebrew, with clauses and everything, together these days, so maybe I'm overstating my point.
(Also: Free Palestine.)
I managed fine all the way through 1400. I was missing a word here and there, and by 1500 I deduced the semantics of some words from the context, roots, similar words, and other European languages.
1300 was quite challenging; I understood more than half the words, but there was not enough context to fill in the gaps. I got the gist of the story, but not enough of the details.
1200 and onwards were inscrutable to me.
> Before the mid 1700s, there was no such thing as standardized spelling.
It felt like it was become more Germanic, and that appears true:
> The farther back you go, the more the familiar Latinate layer of English is stripped away, revealing the Germanic core underneath: a language that looks to modern eyes more like German or Icelandic than anything we’d call English.
For example "grymme" as "cruel" (possibly related to modern English "grim"?)
Also: after reading the notes below about how the unusual symbols should be pronounced it becomes easier, if you slowly read it aloud to yourself. The 1300s is now mostly clear except a few unusual words.
"Þe sayde Maiſter, what that hee apperid bifore me"
I believe should be
"Þe sayde Maiſter, what Þat hee apperid bifore me"
Or were there situations in the 1400s when the thorn would not be used for representing th?
on edit: or is it a representation of the changeability of spelling choices in individual texts, which admittedly this text seems a bit less changeable and random than many authors of that time period.
What's interesting is the one in use today - from the early 17th century - is not the most modern variant. There was another revision from the mid-19th century that fell out of favor because it sounded a bit off, less rhythmic, less sacred (ie. Kingdom -> Government).
I thought my Swedish and basic knowledge of Icelandic spelling would have been more helpful than it was. From 1300 on it feels like the influence of French is making the language more familiar.
Language changes. It's weird to see it happening in front of you...
That happens even if you live in the country where you are a native speaker though. I have seen this in my native Swedish too. Some are easy to adapt to, some I find really grating. But there is little point in being angry over it.
Thus I regard KJV-onlyism to be a passing fad; for if another 400 years passes, the writing in the 1611 will go from being strange to our eyes, to being unreadable in the future by anyone but trained scholars.
It is a pretty translation, but harder to follow in my experience. I only use the KJV when talking with other denominations because it is more readily accepted than my favorite (NASB85).
[1] https://www.chapter3min.org/bible-translations-comparison-ch...
Language changes in the time axis but also in the location and social axes. The best we can probably hope for is one snapshot in time. However this is meant to be a blogger, journalist, writer etc., through time this may have been the expected style for writing of this sort.
Especially in medieval times, I understand it may have been impossible to understand people a few towns away as the dialect could change so dramatically.
Disclaimer, I'm no expert, but I find linguistics fascinating.
Still, I really enjoyed this and I commend the effort!
I.e. the 2000s one is a casual travel blog style intended normally intended for any random quick reader and the 1900s one is more a mix of academic sounding/formal conversation intended for longer content. If you assume a more casual voice in the 1900s one and a more formal voice in the 2000s one I bet they'd even almost seem to be placed backwards chronologically.
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/guest-review-the-wake-by-paul-k...
Makes me wonder what J.R.R. Tolkien would have thought of this.
There will be changes of course. Yet we are also more connected than ever, whereas the next town over would be a whole day trip in the past. The separation allows for more divergence.
Well, maybe if we get to Mars, differences might crop up again.
window unseal nite no log. odd.
Is there something specific in there?
I wonder how much our understanding of past language is affected by survivorship bias? Most text would have been written by a highly-educated elite, and most of what survives is what we have valued and prized over the centuries.
For instance, this line in the 1800s passage:
> Hunger, that great leveller, makes philosophers of us all, and renders even the meanest dish agreeable.
This definitely sounds like the 1800s to me, but part of that is the romance of the idea expressed. I wonder what Twitter would have been like back then, for instance, especially if the illiterate had speech-to-text.
Good for thee, ackcherly.
Dutch is 1400s English.
why language would evolve ? Let’s say to make it easier and better ? And if such a case then wouldn’t that be applicable to all languages? If yes then I am a native kutchi speaker and it just a dialect. How would its history of change could even be found? But I do speak other languages like Gujarati and Hindi and I wonder if there was any evolution if those languages which have a
I hope not
Better for it to grow layers that are new and exciting, accessible only to the cultures that create them (and whatever comes after) and those who make the effort to continue learning
Maybe called the "teleological fallacy" or something.
Past that, I'm not familiar with Old English enough to understand and follow the text.
I posted my amateur translation of 1200 here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47102874
At first it stumped me, but I spent some time on it and it started to become intelligible. I didn't look up any words until after I was done, at which point I looked up "uuif" (woman/wife) since I wanted to know what manner of amazing creature had saved the protagonist :D
Man changed to mean only a male person, and we lost wer except in the word "werewolf".
So someone who is a modern German or Dutch speaker will have an easier time reading Anglo-Saxon than an English speaker, perhaps. But that's a bit deceiving. Many of the sounds written there had a very different spoken sound than their modern German or Dutch counterparts, and are actually closer to their modern English variants. (ge in particular pronounced "ye" not hard-g, so words like yesterday were spelled with "gest" similar to modern German, but not spoken that way at all).
Simon Roper on YouTube does a better job of this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic
It is not that I am incapable to understand old English, it is that 1600 is dramatically closer to modern than 1400 one; I think someone from 1600 would be able to converse at 2026 UK farmers market with little problems too; someone from 1400 would be far more challenged.
I have read many printed books from the range 1450 to 1900, in several European languages. In all of them the languages are much easier to understand than those of the earlier manuscripts.
Super work!
We need to bring muchel back
*than.
Which I realize is an ironic correction in this context. I wonder if we'll lose a separate then/than and disambiguate by context.
I suppose one could go back and look at popular style guides from the 1980s and 1990s and see if they endorsed it.
⸻
1. While in most languages, this class of verbs becomes apparent when the base noun is irregular or has special conjugation rules, in Greek,² it’s especially noticeable thanks to the fact that the aorist causes a morphological change to the beginning of the verb as well as the end. Except for these verbs, the morphological change ends up happening in the middle of the verb.
2. I don’t know modern Greek beyond what I can discern from my classical Greek knowledge, so I don’t know if modern Greek has retained this feature.
And your teacher would presumably have marked down Shakespeare for the same thing. If it was good enough for Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Austin, you'd think it would be good enough for your teacher, but we went through a particularly prescriptive period in the early to mid 20th century (though your teacher was maybe slightly behind the times even in the 80s).
For example, Bill W speaks about being trapped or surrounded by quicksand. Apparently, nobody today understands quicksand. So they remove the word quicksand.
I'm 44, and this makes me feel like an old man yelling at clouds.
It's weird when an "s" that's written in cursive is translated like that.
Is this about recognizing letters. Then show original scans.
Or is this about understanding the spoken word. Then write "first".
Don't do both and fail at everything.
To me this made it clear that the German Nation has been clearly defined over the last thousand years and just how similar the people who wrote and enjoyed that work are to the native Germans right now. Can only recommend people do something like that if they want to dispel the delusion that people of your Nation who lived a thousand years ago were in any way fundamentally different from you.
Fucking AI slop, even this
If you mean "the usage of that voice implies the article itself is written by LLMs" then I strongly disagree. I'd eat my shoe if an article written this well were made by today's LLMs. Doubly so for an article from a linguistics PhD who was written similar content prior to LLMs.