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Just reading text isn’t really a fair representation of the English language as you go back to beyond the 14th century. The grammar remains pretty similar if you sound it out and most vocab is similar (or can be figured out by context clues).
The non-standardized spelling and premodern characters make it feel alien but it’s mostly someone with a heavy accent using phonetics to write [approximately] what they’re sounding like. I bet most people wouldn’t struggle if the text was massaged a bit.
Written English has been remarkably stable over the last 300 years
And yet the College Board will use the most incoherent journal entry that makes the westing game look like a picture book
About to 1400, then it starts to look more like Dutch or something. A few hundred years more and it starts to look like Danish or something. I bet it’s harder to understand verbally.
Yeah, I said it looked like Dutch in the 1300 and before period. Maybe that’s a bias because I can speak danish (okay, anyway) but dutch is like a random bunch of nonsense to me
Yeah same. I wonder how related were English and Dutch around that time period. It seems like the latter is still somewhere in that time period in speech and grammar style.
That was great, thanks for sharing! The þorn guy around Lemmy might learn from it a few more ways to be archaically misunderstood.
You mean Sân?
Dear lord I did poorly lol. And I use to read some middle English books for school!
I got back to 1300 alright, but not 1200. But I had a bit of an odd upbringing - our houshold library for some reason had lots of British fiction from the 1700s/1800s and so I got a jump in obscure vocabulary. heh
At a certain point it feels like reading math
Anyone else hate the 1900 section. It felt like it was trying to be harder to understand on purpose. 1800 was perfectly clear and required so much less processing than 1900, imo.
This was fun! Anyone know about the ſ character? How come in the 1600s it only sometimes seemed to take the place of s?
Some of the rules for the use of the long s from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
Long s was always used (ſong, ſubſtitute), except:
- Upper-case letters are always the round S; there is no upper-case long s.
- A round s was always used at the end of a word ending with ⟨s⟩: his, complains, ſucceſs
- However, long s was maintained in abbreviations such as ſ. for ſubſtantive(substantive), and Geneſ. for Geneſis(Genesis).
- Before an apostrophe (indicating an omitted letter), a round s was used: us’d and clos’d.
- Before or after an f, a round s was used: offset, ſatisfaction.
It’s purely stylistic, but here are the rules - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s#Rules
It looks almost like the old german “S”.
I muddled through the 1200s with context clues, and was still catching words in the 1100s, but gave up on the 1000s. It was too brutally yuele.
I would love to find an audio version to see how far I could get on spoken word alone. Being from the Appalachians, I’ve always been told our dialect is older.
Here is a similar thing in audio monologue:
This is all quite interesting, but did the farmer really offer the traveler his lusty hens?
I did better than I thought I would but by 1300 it was starting to get confusing.
And that’s just the reading part. Phonetic changes will make the spoken word unintelligible a bit ways before that.
Good thing I’m not a time traveler.
Around 1200, I start having a little trouble, but I can still read most of it fairly well. 1100 is when I start to lose a lot of it, struggling through. 1000 is what I remember from trying to write papers on this stuff in University wherein I’d use translated copies side by side.
Maybe I can go back further than some others because I’m so damned old. 🤣
1300 was the end for me, at least reading at a reasonable pace. I might have squeezed out another century or two, parsing together context and other clues, but that is only through the benefit of knowing the story being told.
How far north of London can you go and still understand English?
As an American looking at a map of the UK I’d say probably Hatfield or St Albens. I’m really shit with accents though.
It was a good thread here too: https://lemmy.world/post/43447694
I guess the nature of the fediverse means that some post duplication is necessary for exposure coverage, lol, so who am I to accuse a repost of not suitably linking the source.
I was able to make it all the way to 1500 with no issues. I was lost at 1400 due to the unfamiliar lettering.
