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One of the absolute treasures of our time is The History of English Podcast. 186 episodes in, and he's just gotten past Shakespeare. The first 30 or so episodes might run a little slow for you for lack of written sources, but it really does pick up and has been hours of joy. https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
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’m just ahead of you on episode 200! Just getting into the rise of printing in English.
I absolutely agree. This has become my comfort podcast when I just want to decompress.
To suggest another decompression / interesting podcast, "The Fall of Civilizations" by Paul Cooper. I do like the visual episodes he releases later on YT - its not just random stock photos but directly relevant to what's being discussed, but they release awhile after the audio. The audio is splendid as well though.
I haven't listened to this podcast, but if you want another one, the history of rome podcast by Mike Duncan holds a similar place in my heart. He's kind of monotone but I was entranced and would you believe that I couldn't listen to the episode for the final emperor because I didn't want the roman empire to fall. lol. What a good series.
His subsequent podcast: "revolutions" is also really good.
The revolutions podcast is perhaps one of my favorite podcasts of all time. The American, French, and Russian revolution seasons are all incredibly enlightening to the world that we live in, while plainly also being just so entertaining.
I've only listened to the French revolution, but it was absolutely electrifying. I would listen on my car ride home -- one day I burst through the door to my house and yelled "CHARLOTTE CORDAY MURDERED MARAT!!!" at my wife like it was breaking news.
I love this podcast, I've listened to it all the way through probably ten times.
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
Acoustic picking 18 from garage band....
Username checks out.
Oh my God, are you serious? I don't know how to feel about this
Yeah he says so in a Q&A episode.
200? The website only goes to 187. Do I need to get on Patreon or something?
I think there’s a numbering difference. He went back and re did a bunch of earlier ones.
I’m listening on Apple Podcasts. Season 5 episode 5 “Printin and Perkin” if it helps.
You're thinking of the The History of England podcast, not The History of English. The History of English Podcast does cover English history, often going deeper than is strictly necessary for tracing the evolution of English, but its primary focus is language. It's also very cozy, something you could listen to while sipping tea by a warm fire, and its consistency, clarity, and depth has made it my favorite podcast.
Oh that’s funny. Yes you’re right.
He has actually mentioned the History of English before, but I’ve never listened to it. Great to hear though!
Should be "how far back in time can you read English?" The language itself is what is spoken and the writing, while obviously related, is its own issue. Spelling is conventional and spelling and alphabet changes don't necessarily correspond to anything meaningful in the spoken language; meanwhile there can be large changes in pronunciation and comprehensibility that are masked by an orthography that doesn't reflect them.
Indeed, I remember being in Oxford in the 90s and an older man approached me and spoke to me in English and I couldn’t understand a word he said. My ex-wife, who’s an ESL speaker who speaks fluently and without an accent has trouble with English accents in general. Similarly, in Spanish, I find it’s generally easier for me to understand Spanish speakers than Mexican speakers even though I learned Mexican Spanish in school and it’s been my primary exposure to the language. Likewise, I generally have an easier time understanding South American speakers than Caribbean speakers and both sound little like Mexican Spanish. (The Spanish I understand most easily is the heavily accented Spanish of non-native Spanish speakers.)
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).
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I live in London, I can drive a little over an hour from where I live and hardly understand the people working at the petrol station. A few more hours and they start to speak French.
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I have had to interpret between an Ulsterman and a South African, who were both speaking English. I think those accents have vowel shifted in opposite directions.
I was also taught a bit of Chaucer (died 1400) in English at school. Although not any of the naughty bits.
My funniest moment working in Singapore was translating between an Indian and a Chinese co-worker. The translation was repeating what each said in English in English.
Having interpreted for a guy speaking with a broad Glaswegian accent on the east coast main line, I can totally believe this.
This sounds like a Hot Fuzz scene.
I imagine a current generation high school English class would be giggling right from the first line about gooning while on pilgrimages.
I think I read it's more "hillbilly" English that sounds like Shakespeare? Like coal mining towns where words like "deer" and "bear" are two syllables. Probably a combination of that and eastern seaboard.
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
Also why the non-rhotic American accents are all by the East Coast, they were influenced by the non-rhotic British visitors while the inland areas were spared.
> older man approached me and spoke to me in English and I couldn’t understand a word he said
like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc ?
I was expecting the hooligans from Eurotrip.
> The Spanish I understand most easily is the heavily accented Spanish of non-native Spanish speakers.
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.
As an ESL I'd say it depends on the native language of who's speaking. I'll have no trouble with a thick spanish, italian or romanian language (I'm french), but indians speaking english are completely incomprehensible to me.
It took months of being exposed to Indian English on a regular basis for me to start to understand it (and I still find it requires significant mental effort). Context: I'm a Swede who regularly thinks and dreams in English (and when I did an English language test for exchange student purposes I got top marks in all categories).
If you want to be able to understand them, you should probably stop thinking of them as a monolithic groupd of "Indians". Individual states in India are comparable in size and greater in population than Spain or Italy; and some cities and their suburbs are comparable to Romania. Overall, India's population is more than 3x that of Europe.
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").
as a native English speaker in California, this is funny to read. I was standing in a crowd of undergraduates at UC Berkeley, shoulder to shoulder, during a break in a movie. Two guys were talking Very Fast right next to me, I mean 0.5 meter in a crowd. I decided to run an experiment because I could not pick out any of what they said. So I turned and spoke slowly in an ever so slight British formal version of California English "excuse me, do you know what time it is?' . One stopped and answered -- almost exactly as I spoke -- the current time (around 18:00). Then they went back to their talk! it was English!
I didn't think it was possible to speak "without an accent."
It depends on who you ask.
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.
This is certainly at least an American accent, and would sound out of place in e.g. the UK.
Who taught you Mexican Spanish in school? Im always hearing about how Spanish speakers not from Spain struggle with Spanish in school. You didn't learn vosostros?
Different person, but I learned Mexican Spanish in school. The teacher taught us vosotros “for the test, and it’s not any harder than the others once you learn it, so might as well, but you’ll never need this again unless you go to Europe”. She seems to have been right. To this day, I’ve never needed vosotros.
Anecdata, but I took Spanish all four years in high school in Southern California—I knew of vosotros, but was never really taught it
You can try this video to see how far back you can understand spoken English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic
I came here to post the same video. I couldn't understand it until 1600-ish. My wife immediately recognized swinu as pigs early in the video.
> Should be "how far back in time can you read English?"
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.
I use a screen reader and in managed quite well until 1200.
That said: phonetic spelling now. We have spent 500 years turning English into something closer to Egyptian hieroglyphs than a language with an alphabet.
Phonetic spelling would perhaps make the language easier to learn for native speakers, but it would make it harder to learn for foreigners, at least those of us who come from Europe. Most words in written English resemble words in Germanic or Romance languages. If English was spelled phonetically, the resemblance would be significantly smaller.
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.
The other big problem would be the lack of intelligibility of English written by native speakers from different places.
> Phonetic spelling would perhaps make the language easier to learn for native speakers, but it would make it harder to learn for foreigners, at least those of us who come from Europe.
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?!?
> In Russia and Ukraine pretty much every child can read by the time they enter the first grade.
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
To be technical: the term is phonemic, not phonetic. If we spelled phonetically, we'd have different symbols for the p in 'spin' and the p+h in 'pin'. Similarly for 'tick' and 'stick', and 'scale' and 'kale'. Native English speakers generally don't notice the differences, just like speakers of many oriental languages don't easily recognize the difference between English /l/ and /r/.
OTOH, I’ve seen what y’all call cursive, and want no part of it.
The usual pictures of и / п / т / ш ambiguity that you see are exaggerated in that they show forms that are nominally “standard” but basically impossible to reproduce without a fountain (or, even better, dip) pen (think round hand or, as 'cyberax mentions, Spencerian script), yet use a constant stroke width that such an implement wouldn’t produce. For the latter two, people who actually write m and not т will often resolve the ambiguity with ш with an over- resp. underbar (the same ones that Serbian uses even in print[1]). It’s also pretty normal to exaggerate letter joins when they come out looking too similar to parts of other letters, etc. Overall, modern Russian cursive is about as legible as the modern French one, and I don’t think people complain much about the latter.
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
It depends on a writer, but it can be very legible.
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
phonetic spelling based on whose dialect? should "merry" "marry" and "Mary" be spelled the same?
besides, pronunciation continues to evolve, so any phonetic spelling would continue to gradually diverge from the spoken language
You suffer from the typical brain damage caused by using a language without an alphabet.
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.
Then under your definition there must not be any widely used written language with an alphabet. Most of the world's alphabetic writing systems aren't phonetic transcriptions, they're standardized. They're usually based on the prestige dialect, at the cost of diminutizing other dialects.
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.
One I can say for sure is Serbian. Italian looks like it does. Finnish, Hungarian, Georgian, Armenian, Albanian, Turkish and Korean are all ones I've heard are to a lesser or greater degree, but I don't know enough to say either way.
People always overestimate how 'phonetic' their language is, because nobody actually uses phonemes in regular speech. In Korean in particular, there doesn't even seem to be any obvious correspondence between what is written, and what is actually said.
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.
Foreign accents come from both.
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.
Standard Italian speakers in Rome struggle to understand Ciociaro dialect, which is from the region on the outskirts of Rome. Take "n'coppa" - spelled with a "c" but very much pronounced /ŋgopa/ with a voiced [g]. I dont even have a reference point for Sicilian but that really pushes the bounds of the dialect/language distinction.
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.
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That's kind of a mean and not very relevant response.
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?
You don't standardise. That's the point. If you can understand how people speak you will understand how they write.
So you want a thousand different writing systems, or everyone just winging it as they go along?
That would make reading anything extremely slow and difficult.
Worked for thousands of years with other phonetic written languages. Words change spelling over time, instead of pronounciation drifting without the spelling changing.
Define "worked."
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.
And yet we manage it with speaking. This is why I call it brain damage. It's like trying to explain red to a blind woman.
The best case is a syllabary with how the word was pronounced a few years previous.
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.
I've been thinking about this problem for quite awhile, and recently coded up something that allows for easy conversion between today's written English, and a phonetic spelling convention.
I've created a Firefox Add-on for it as well.
I'm a bit confused by what you mean by that, unless you're talking about emoji, but those weren't around 500 years ago.
Do you mean that since English isn't phonetically spelled, that which we call the alphabet is rather arbitrary?
I think he means the latter. This makes learning the spelling harder because you have to learn each word individually, as you would have with hieroglyphs, as opposed spelling it out based on phonemes (that you would have learned from learning how words sound when spoken) and a limited alphabet.
That's not how I learned to read or spell in the 1970s. "Sounding it out" was the main strategy. You learned a few rules for how different combinations of letters sounded, and the exceptions to those, as you went along. But most words are spelled as they sound.
>But most words are spelled as they sound.
English has 45 sounds and 26 letter. There are basically no words over three letter long that are written as they are spoken.
That's why kids start with "Run Spot Run" and other simple 3 and 4 letter words. They then learn the more complicated rules and exceptions as they go. It's really not a problem.
Chinese kids manage with 6,000 character. Just because we normalize child abuse doesn't mean its right.
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Spelling can still be phonetic even if groups of letters have differing sounds from those letters' sounds serially in isolation. The key criterion is that the rules must be universal, applying to every instance of those groupings, rather than having exceptions for their appearances in certain words.
...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.
The issue is that the language can never render that collection of letters. Sh in English can render the sh in sheep. It can't render any word with the sounds s and h together.
Perhaps you misheard.
The Latin alphabet variant modern English uses has uses only ~11 kinds of strokes, where is this 26 coming from?
An alphabet assigns a letter to a sound. No more no less. English no longer has an alphabet because the Latin alphabet, designed for Latin languages, replaced the native Runic alphabet.
Serbian has an alphabet, as does Italian. All other European languages I'm aware of don't.
Interesting! So what’s the abc’s we learn then?
> Spelling is conventional and spelling and alphabet changes don't necessarily correspond to anything meaningful in the spoken language
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.
Screw these modern sensibilities, I am totally renaming my default git branch to "maiſter".
I think you are missing my point. Just because spelling can be inconsistent doesn't mean it's not conventional. We agree that certain letters and combinations of letters correspond to certain sounds--that's a convention. We could just as easily remap the letters in our alphabet to entirely different sounds from the ones they represent today and the resulting written text would be, on the surface, entirely incomprehensible, because we no longer understand the conventions being used.
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".
Yeah it’s really just the glyphs that are changing here, and occasionally the spelling, otherwise the words themselves are still fairly recognizable if you’re well-read.
This is true through 1300 or so. If you transliterate the 1200, 1100, and 1000 sections to modern glyphs, it's still a foreign language with the occasional recognizable word (such as "the"). Learning Old English in college was a lot like learning Latin: lots of recognizable vocabulary, totally unfamiliar case endings, mostly unfamiliar pronouns, arbitrary word order.
Agree, I've linked (above) a transliteration to help make this more apparent:
there'd be a discontinuity around 1066 since Normans brought over Latin-derived vocabulary aplenty, and overlayed germanic vocabulary. it's super evident if you learn Swedish (for example...very related to pre-1066 English) and have learned Latin (or French), while speaking English.
Yeah. Try comparing texts written in Old English and Old Norse. It's basically the same language. (I'm not surprised at all that Beowulf takes place in Scandinavia.)
But I think they would both be easier to decipher for someone speaking Swedish than English.
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We have the written word from centuries ago available today.
Where are you going to find the spoken word from centuries ago?
Languages can change in many different ways. Pronunciation changes impede you a lot more the first time you meet someone with a different pronunciation than they do as you interact over time. Grammatical changes are trickier.
Well, for a native speaker of Dutch who doesn't speak English at all (not many left since my grandmother died in 2014), I'd say old English is actually easier to read than modern - starting around 1400.
Around 1000, English and Dutch must have been mutually understandable.
Eddie Izzard speaking old English to a Frisian farmer:
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)
I've often had the same thought coming from the other direction, as an English speaker learning Dutch for the past couple of years: I hear many little echoes in Dutch of archaic or poetic English forms.
That’s because English and Dutch are basically German dialects that the ruling aristocrat classes worked hard to differentiate and abstract from their ruling aristocrat class competitors in other places.
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.
The continuum of the North Sea languages is much more apparent if you undo the High German consonant shift... (and of course if you minimise the use of the words English have imported from France)
That seems to me like a really worthwhile effort, especially for the continental Europeans if they want to keep the EU alive, even if it needs major, structural reform that I am not confident it can implement without total deconstruction first. If the EU wants to survive it simply cannot allow English to dominate it, nor is even French ideal, making Dutch the official language is of course silly for obvious reasons (regardless of my affinity for it), contemporary German seems to be self-deleting in many different way for many different reasons, and nonsense like Esperanto speaks for itself. But a kind of merging or integration of the German languages of central Europe would be an ideal candidate to bring about European unity in a sustainable and healthy manner... a meeting in the middle, maybe a restoration of old high German even that is the common node.
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.
The Anglo-Saxons were not Germans, and their language was not a "German" language.
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.
My experience traveling to the Netherlands as an English speaker is that people are speaking English, but they're drunk!
When they seamlessly switch from English to Dutch I feel like I’m having a stroke: all the same intonation, the same accent, but nothing makes sense any more
I had a strange experience during one episode of the show "Amsterdam Empire", which is spoken in Dutch. There's a scene where one of the characters addresses some foreign tourists: the (Dutch) subtitles continued to make sense, but his speech was just absolute gibberish. It was startling to realize that he had been speaking English, my native language: in the moment, I did not recognize it at all.
That doesn't jive with my experience at all. I'm half-dutch, raised in England.
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.
The intonation is different, there are harsher sounds, but there are diphtongs everywhere in Dutch, and to me thisbis what makes it sound like English. French, Spanish, German etc don’t have diphtongs ( or they’re quite rare )
There's a meme about how Dutch doesn't seem like a serious language to English speakers, and what's funnier is Dutch speakers trying to figure out why it's so funny to English speakers.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/english-to-dutch-translations
That's strange (i.e. different from my experience). I've been living in the Netherlands since 2021, speak some (~ B1) Dutch, but good English and German. Dutch language was from day one comprehensible due to German similarity. Many/most words either sound like the German equivalent to the point where you naturally match them in your thought, or they are written (mostly) like the German equivalent.
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.
As someone who took German in high school, Dutch had my brain flailing for vocabulary to understand but nothing connected.
A native Frisian speaker would probably have an even easier time, given that Frisian is the closest language to English. However, Frisian is still more similar to other west-germanic languages than English.
Probably not a coincidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Anglo-Saxon_England
Native French speaker here. 1300s I could still kinda follow the story with difficulty but from the 1200s I just couldn't anymore.
I felt like it helped to use an "old english" accent in my inner voice when reading.
That’s because Dutch is close to the original old german that it is derived from, just like English and modern German. English or as it is also known as Anglish, the language of the German tribe of the Angles, also known as the Anglo-Saxon group of Germanic people, are essentially Germans just like the indigenous ethnic people of modern Germany, as well as the ethnically German people of the Netherlands, aka the Dutch. That is of course also why the Netherlands is called the Nederlande in “Dutch” which is a reference to the lowland Germans. This becomes far clearer when you understand that the Germans refer to themselves as die Deutsche, which is where the “Dutch” get their English name, i.e., Nederland Deutsch, which means… self-referential… the lowland German people.
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.
Most of what I understood from that far back was because of Afrikaans, more than English.
Beowulf was discovered and translated by Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín, an Icelander who was National Archivist [0] in Denmark, researching Danish history in the British Library.
[0] Or at the time promised the post, I don't remember the details.
I am Indian. I read easily to 1400. But then 1300 is suddenly difficult to read
Italian here, and it was the same for me, the language feels very different by 1300.
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
> it was the same for me, the language feels very different by 1300.
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.
Yeah but the spelling is part of how the language feels :)
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)
Are you sure you haven't been victimized by manuscripts with modernized spellings?
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...
> puna(?)
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-.
> Also, you say spelling but e.g. "speken" feels more a grammatical than orthographic difference.
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.
From some random googling it seems like "swie" could be "silence", but it doesn't seem to be quite that meaning. There may be some religious overtones .
Yes, I found https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dicti... , which glosses "swie" as "silence".
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.
Wiktionary doesn't mention it for either word, but it looks to be cognate with German schweigen, "to be silent":
Well, wiktionary does call them cognates, if you follow the links around.
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.)
In Limburgs, still today: Zwieg!: Shut up, zwiegen: Not saying anything.
Albanian, managed to understand till 1300. Then it gets more germanic i think, though I speak a bit of German as well, the characters make it a bit difficult to parse.
“Swie!” is interesting, I understood it somehow naturally. In Gheg Albanian we say “Shuj!”, which means “Be silent!”.
I speak English natively. I read to 1400 without difficulty, read 1400 and 1300 with some sruggle, and found beyond that it was largely unintelligible; I can understand maybe 1 in 3 words.
1200 looks harder than it is because of the change in pronouns.
...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.
What accent did you read it in? Vlaams? Gronings?
I don't have a voice in my head when I read. Knowledge of West-Fries helps though.
Really? I read German (not at a very high level anymore admittedly), and I find that while Old English is closer to German than modern English is, I would still say a deep knowledge of Modern English helps me more, and that most things have be learned frlm scratch.
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).
As a native English speaker who also knows some German and has studied some Anglo-Saxon... I'd say the High German sound shift can really mess up hearing Anglo-Saxon for German speakers but reading it is easier than it might be for a modern English speaker...
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)
I dont think reading will be much easier. A modern English speaker - assuming he is well read, will know things like "sooth", "quoth", "art thou", "ere", "sayeth"... I feel knowing this stuff helps me a lot more than cognates of high german "schön" or "wohnen".
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.
tried to read Prince and I assume it is a translation to English from Italian or whatever.
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.
If you want to improve your score, the blog author (Dr. Colin Gorrie) has just the thing: a book which will teach you Old English by means of a story about a talking bear. Here's how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZhlWdVvZfw . Your dream of learning Old English has never been closer: get Ōsweald Bera https://colingorrie.com/books/osweald-bera/ today.
Yes. I could get over the 1300 hump and at least make general sense of everything past there because I have read about half of Ōsweald Bera
Shame that it only seems to be available in physical form and only from the US. The price is already quite high and with postage to the UK it adds up to be quite expensive.
My friend from the UK bought it and it got sent from somewhere locakly. I am in NZ and mine was sent from AU. So I think you should be covered.
The "locakly" typo is perfectly placed in the comment thread of this article!
Man, I really needed this when I was studying OE. I was trying to do the Alice in Wonderland book and an Oxford textbook but it was really a lot of work compared to other language learning (even compared to Latin). This would have made it a lot more fun.
The link above mentions Ørberg who did something similar for Latin (Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, ebook and audiobook), which I've read through with good success. It's known as the immersive Ørberg method after him.
The Ørberg method is great, I wish more languages had media utilizing it.
There are actually several similar books for modern European languages, available as PDFs (in the public domain and/or out of print): https://blog.nina.coffee/2018/08/27/all_nature_method_books....
Ørberg may be the best, though.
co-sign this. Oswald the Bear is an amazing book and taught me how to read Old English remarkably quickly.
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.
1400 seems fine except for the one big hurdle being "Þ", which I feel like I'd seen at some point but did not recall. ("ȝ" is useful but that's somewhat easier to guess and not too critical. "ſ" is also easy to guess and I'd seen it before.)
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.
> biwepe(?)
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.
In current Limburgs, pinige: to torture. Mien herses pinige: Wrecking one's brains.
A couple more I could decode from your question marks:
- 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.
> 1400 seems fine except for the one big hurdle being "Þ",
Someone here needs to brush up on their Icelandic!
Agreed, I did quite well until around 1500. At 1400, I did decode Þ after a while. I realized I was mostly reading though the sounds on my head as opposed to recognizing the word shapes anymore, which was quite interesting.
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.
> 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!
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!"
I found it helped me to read it out loud in a pirate voice.
Fun fact: stereotypical "pirate speech" is actually a relic of the English West Country dialect.
Not so much a relic as it was West County actor Robert Newton putting on an exaggerated accent in his depections of Long John Silver and Blackbeard in several films of the 1950s. His depictions were extremely influential on later pirates in film.
Ravens, adread (filled with dread), condemn you to your death (I think just an archaic usage of deem), beweep (none will weep for you, I think). I also hit a pretty hard wall at 1200.
1200 was my wall too.
> adrade(?)
"adread", meaning afraid
Still a recognizable archaic word, constructed from a still-in-use root. Just the spelling is different.
Ahh of course! Yeah I guess if I'd read the sentence a few more times it might have been possible to guess that too. Thanks!
switch the double-u for a w. Uuhiles becomes "whiles" (or "while")
Damn I hate that I didn't catch on to why it made a w sound.
retvrn to tradition
Comment was deleted :(
> rauenes
Ravens
Amazing. Thanks!
Comment was deleted :(
The other difficulties with older texts is not just the different spellings or the now arcane words - but that the meaning of some of those recognisable words changed over time. C.S. Lewis wrote an excellent book that describing the changing meanings of a word (he termed ramifications) and dedicated a chapter to details this for several examples including ‘Nature’, ‘Free’ and ‘Sense’. Would highly recommend a read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_in_Words
Very neat! My native language is Russian. I could understand it pretty well up to 1300, then only about 40% of the 1200 section (not at all the beginning, but the last paragraph was easier), then quite little after that - though I understood enough to glean that there was some woman who had showed up that caused the Master to flee.
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.
audio would drop off slightly faster than text, due to vowel shift in 1400s
Really interesting! Somewhat reminds me of the ending of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls", where the main character, a scion of a very old family which has done some really bad things, goes mad and progressively starts speaking in older and older versions of English after every sentence.
Thanks, that's such a great detail. I was reading Lovecraft during highschool in locally translated print editions. Where such details didn't come through.
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.
The Call of Cthulhu seemed to have a bit of language construction and world-building, if you are into that. But my knowledge of Lovecraft lore is limited, so I wouldn't know all details; I just read his short stories from Standard eBooks a few months ago, which was my first exposure to his work.
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!
Simon Roper has a spoken equivalent for Northern English -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Zqn9_OQAw.
He has a spoken one that isn't Northern English specific too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic
"From Olde English to Modern American English in One Monologue"
LOL I'm from Northern England and I tapped out ~1850.
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.
for a very specific dialect of Northern English. I struggled to understand much beyond 1950, and I had a good ear
Their long S is really annoying, although truthfully I generally am unfamiliar with the long s in modern fonts so I don't KNOW if it really looks worse than it needs to, but I feel it looks worse that it needs to and that makes it harder, for example I thought lest at first was left and had to go back a couple words after.
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.
(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");
}
})()what?
That will replace the long-s with the standard s. You can do the same for the thorn.
Which LLM hallucinated this monstrosity? Just use a regex, it's a one-liner!
The person you're talking to was wondering if there's a more elegant long-s font choice, not how to replace long-s with short-s.
Hmm, I thought it wafnt fo bad, myfelf
oh my god, you're right, they just used an f, no wonder I found it so bad! That is really annoying. Enraging even.
The text doesn't use an `f`. If you copy from e.g. the 1700 passage you get `ſ` not `f`.
hmm you're right, I guess my eyesight is worse than I thought
Probably people are confused by ligatures. Indeed it is a long S.
This is correct. And if you don't like that font's long-s, you can fix it with
document.body.style.fontFamily = "Baskerville";
Baskerville has a nice long-s. TNR is also not bad. Garamond is passable.
thanks for the Baskerville recommendation.
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.
I should have noticed, it has a full cross bar, I guess it's my fading eyesight and also the white text of green is perhaps not the best contrast.
It doesn't have such a bar in the article e.g. "swifter" https://imgur.com/a/XwsoVgB
just noted that in reply to my post but repeat here: yeah I was wrong, I happened to look back at Maiſter and my bad eyesight and the resolution made it look like the long s had a crossbar from the t next to it in the default font.
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.
Heck, I still struggle scanning it properly at high resolution so no worries!
yeah I was wrong, I happened to look back at Maiſter and my bad eyesight and the resolution made it look like the long s had a crossbar from the t next to it in the default font.
Interestingly I found the long s annoying and I had to think every time I saw it, but I quickly got used to and could read it naturally after a few paragraphs.
Interesting. Down through 1300 was pretty straight forward. 1200 slowed me down a lot. 1100 I could only get a couple of sentences from, at first straight read-through, but it looks like I should be able to read it by going carefully through it.
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.
Haha! That was remarkable! What an enjoyable experience! I read through and thought I must surely have done better than the average man, having only started stumbling in the 1200s on account of using my clever method of speaking out the words, only to find from the author that this is about the average place a native English speaker would find his way barred by Germans!
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.
English is my third language, although the one I used the most other than my first. I know a bit of Dutch, German and French.
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.
Seems to be heavily focused on orthography. In 1700s we get the long S that resembles an F. In 1600 we screw with the V's and U's. In 1400, the thorn and that thing that looks like a 3 appears. Then more strange symbols show up later on as well.
Orthography is probably the biggest stumbling block going back to the 1500s or 1400s , but that’s really because the rest of the language has changed in vocabulary and style, but is still understandable. If you think the 1200 or 1100 entry are mostly orthographical changes then you are missing the interesting bits.
I would prefer to see a version that was skillfully translated to modern orthography so that we could appreciate shifts in vocabulary and grammar.
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...
so replace the long s with just s and the thorn (þ) with th? others?
It's fairly easy when it's in print like this. When it's handwritten I have trouble just going back to 1900.
This was a fun exercise. I made it through 1300 by reading it in a Scottish accent and being familiar with some basic old Norse characters from a prior trip to Iceland. I watch Scottish shows like "Still Game", and for some reason that combo with the accent and their lingo made it simpler to read. By 1200 I was completely lost; it looks more Germanic to me, which I don't have the knowledge to read.
Ah, finally!
"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.
1500 is the threshold I think. I don’t understand 1400. I can go a bit further back in my mother tongue, but 1200 is definitely tough for me.
I can get to 1300, though it’s harder there and there were a couple words that I just couldn’t figure out.
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.
Shakespeare is a definite barrier.
I normally don't use a "voice" in my head when reading, but doing so is invaluable when reading Shakspeare. If I can't "hear" what I'm reading, it's much harder to parse.
no cap u need to b like so unc 2 read this I finna yeet my phone like who even reads I have siri English is lowkey chueggy anyway all my homies use emoji now bet
English is cooked fam. Gen Alpha’s kids are going to get lost at the 2000 paragraph.
Things like slang and casual registers always seem to move much faster but for some reason we assume it's always going to be the next set newer than how we'd write that will result in things going off the rails or resulting in it being the only speech understood by that generation.
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.
Straight up
fr fr, OP be cappin 2000 ain't English
Ugh, we've been slangmogged
"unc" can't be used as an adjective like that.
4 now imma trendsetter homie u b tripping
memes about unc video games are galore
> Somewhere in this section — and if you’re like most readers, it happened around 1300 or 1200 — the language crossed a boundary. Up to this point, comprehension felt like it was dropping gradually, but now it’s fallen off a cliff.
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.
Funny how I, as non native english speaker I lose it completely around 1200-1100's. But maybe that is because I know other languages like german, french, spanish and italian? I feel the biggest issue for me was keeping up with the letters changes rather than the new words.
In fairness , Dickens is quite dry. My mind would wonder off.
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.
This is a good quick example, almost like an eye test where the characters are harder to interpret when you go down the page because they are smaller.
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.
Excellent essay.
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.
1300 was a breeze but then I got stuck. (What did the strong and stiff wife do in 1200? I’ll never know… Edit - on second reading, I’m getting the picture, seems like medieval Tarantino.)
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.
I really think that the onset of mobile device communication will be a major pillar in the history of the English language. lol / crash out / unalive / seggs / aura
Since these occur primarily in ephemeral communication, it’s unclear how much of a lasting influence there will be. It’s also “only” vocabulary, to a limited degree orthography, and rarely grammar.
lowkey gives cultural collapse type vibes
This is something I struggle with on a semi-regular basis since I'm fairly interested in our constitutional history, so documents like the Bill of Rights 1688/9[1], the Petition of Right 1627[2], etc, are not old or illegible enough to have been given modern translations (like the Magna Carta 1297[3]). As such, they can be difficult reads, particularly with their endless run-on sentences. Punctuation seems to have not been invented yet either.
- [1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/WillandMarSess2/1/2/enact...
I read the whole thing and thought I had very little interest in this kind of thing. I'm not sure if the writing is exceptional, or if I was captured by the idea that the style would change as I read on. Maybe a bit of both, but either way, this was very interesting. I wonder, if a similar thing were done with hand writing, whether many of us would be lost a lot sooner.
Comment was deleted :(
Seems like some of the initial changes are reflecting more than just the evolving language. He’s comparing someone using informal slang “not gonna lie” against someone writing extremely formally “Hunger, that great leveller, makes philosophers of us all, and renders even the meanest dish agreeable.” which I’m not sure makes sense.
This struck me too, the fact that this task is so impossible.
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!
A delightful exercise. Inference and phonetics alone got me back to ~1200 with probably a 90% hit rate. Then it just collapsed under me around 1100.
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.
Something I look forward to, though it could take a few years, is for someone to train a family of state-of-the-art chatbots where each uses a corpus with a cut off date of 1950... 1900... 1850.. and so on. How fascinating it would be to see what words and concepts it would and would not understand. That would be as close to time travel as a person could get.
It exists! Showed up on HN a few months back: https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms
Only from 1913-1946 though.
Capital! That's one of the most interesting time periods.
Anyone wanting to hear the older language spoken, this is a performance of Beowulf:
https://www.youtube.com/live/2WcIK_8f7oQ?si=NpXTrRjcHN09Zn56...
I find that speaking the words (knowing the different sounds of the letters) allows me to understand way further back than if I try read them. I noticed this in undergrad linguistics which has a module on old English.
Thanks to RobWords [1] I at least remember thorn (Þ) pronunciation and could mostly decipher 1400. Not much past that, though
I recently skimmed a grammar of Faroese [0]. Not much has been written about the language in English; only a few books, and an English-Faroese dictionary was only first published in the 1980s.
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.
As a native speaker of Swedish and Norwegian, I can mostly understand spoken Faroese (if they speak slowly). In spoken Icelandic, I understand some words, but rarely a complete sentence.
Would be curious to know from other HN readers: how far back can you understand written prose of your own language, assuming the writing system uses mostly the same letter or characters?
Medieval French, Middle High German, Ancient Greek, Classical Arabic or Chinese from different eras, etc.
People read Shahname[1] regularly in Iran, and it was written at around 1000 CE, but there isn't much before 900 CE that is comprehensible to a modern day Persian speaker.
[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.
Most European people know about Odysseus, but few have read Homer, even in translation.
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.
> 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.
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.
I read Hebrew and I can more or less read the dead sea scrolls that I think are 250BCE. According to Google's AI from around 800BCE the alphabet was different enough that I won't be able to read those writings but given the translation between the letters you can still understand the words. While I haven't seen them or tried to read them supposedly the 600BCE Ketef Hinnom Silver Scrolls should be readable by a modern Hebrew reader.
Yes... while Hebrew has changed, it has been more of a shift in focus and an expansion and various directions - but the older stuff is still mostly usable. There was the long "Aramaic phase" though, which is weird given that we're talking about Hebrew. Bible Hebrew is, oh, 96-97% easily legible to moder readers I would say.
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 think it depends a lot on the history of the language. My native language is French, and since long ago various authorities try to normalize and "purify" the language. This is why the gap between spoken French and written French is so wide. Now my experience as an avid reader...
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.
In Italy we all study Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio in school, which are 1300, and it's quite easy to understand them beyond some unusual words. 1200 poetry is easy enough too.
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.
Written Chinese stayed the same while the spoken language evolved from the 5th century BC until the 1911 revolution, after which people began writing Chinese the way it's spoken in Beijing. So there's a sharp dividing line just over 100 years ago; Literary Chinese is still taught in school but without that you'd have trouble understanding it.
If you're interested you can read up on language change (and glottochronology, although that's a bit controversial now), and the Swadesh lists.
In general, language changes around at the same rate all over history and geography, barring some things (migration, liturgical languages)
For square Hebrew (Assyrian) you can go back for about 2000 years. So for example Dead Sea scrolls are fairly readable. But old classical Hebrew impossible.
This is, roughly, a measure of how old your civilization is.
I'm studying Chinese (Taiwanese style, so traditional characters), and my understanding is anything back to about the Han Dynasty (~200 BCE) is intelligible to an educated Chinese speaker.
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.
huh I was looking through it again and I noticed what I think is a typo
"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.
In Christian circles some people are KJV-only, only reading from the 1611 KJV. But articles like this demonstrate that languages change dramatically over time.
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.
Very true. The trueness to the original text is lacking in KJV, which is the major argument against that translation. It is more written to be old English proper prose than meaningfully translated. Modern translations like ESV are much closer to source, although hard to read compared against others like NIV and NLT which are written for comprehension.
Hmm I’ve always heard that the KJV isn’t perfect but it is closer to the ESV than the NIV. These three charts suggest this[1]. I do know there are places where the KJV isn’t faithful to the sources, such as in the use of the word Easter for Passover in Acts 12:4.
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...
Kinda does a number on the whole "literal word of god" thing doesn't it?
Hey, if the KJV was good enough for Paul and the Apostles, it’s good enough for me
I can read back to 1500, but 1400 reads like a different language. To be fair this quite remarkable, given:
> 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.
I found it was a gradual decline from "figuring out the overall gist from about half the words" in 1300, to "I have no idea" in 1100. Perhaps being a native Swedish speaker helped a bit. Some words definitely looked related and also made sense in context (but who know, false friend words do exist). I am curious as to what someone who can read Icelandic would make of this.
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.
Man when I read Adam Smith, that was a challenge. Not only is his Enlgish super archaic with all kinds of strange units, but he writes these incredibly long logically dense sentences.
Around 1300 to 1400. Some words were harder. But English isn't my first language either. So I guess that's alright. I guess I'd be fine in the 1500 in England. At least language wise.
In 1500 a lot of pronunciation would've been different too, it was in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift [1]. And of course while the UK is still (in)famous for its many accents and dialects, some nigh mutually unintelligible, the situation would've been even worse back then.
Or as I’ve heard it described humorously, the Big Vowel Movement.
I'd assume I'd be able to adapt. Might take a little while bit seems comprehensible.
This very interesting blog post got me thinking how English would look like in 2100 or 2200 driven by the changes of the internet and AI. Spelling matters less so alphabet gets reduced? Simpler grammar as it gets more spoken worldwide? Emojis as punctuation?
window unseal nite no log. odd.
I've been living in a non-English speaking country for 35 years or so. Although I read a lot, my English is still somewhat "frozen". I would still ask you if you have "mown" the lawn - a tense that is now almost lost. Many irregular verbs are becoming regular, I expect due to the large number of ESL speakers.
Language changes. It's weird to see it happening in front of you...
> 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.
Yep. The dialect I grew up with, and which I could actually read in older written works, which meant it was pretty stable in the past, is now completely gone from my town. Everything which made it special has disappeared. And nationally? Some pronunciations inherited all the way from PIE are now disappearing in certain areas. Oh well. Languages change. I just wish they didn't change is such a, to me, boring direction..
Reading Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct", and he has a section that shows how the Lord's Prayer has changed over the ages.
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).
Once upon a time I took a course where the prof read excerpts from Chaucer to us. Middle English was much more decipherable to this modern English speaker when it was spoken.
As a non-native and I could understand only down to 1500s. And it sounded (read?) like scottish for me.
Is it weird that the 1900 style is closer to how I typically write than the first 2000 style? I'm not that old, am I?
The difference between 1900 and 2000 seems to largely be the voice/intended audience changing rather than the language.
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.
The 2000 sample was a bit exaggerated.
I actually wonder about his conclusion that 50 years hence English will be unrecognizable.
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.
This isn't how I read his conclusion. He's saying English will be different in fifty years, but he's not saying it'll be unrecognizable. Look how little difference there is between the 1900 passage and the 2000 passage.
an audible example:
And here's the Simon Roper videos acknowledged in the article: "From Old English to Modern American English in One Monologue" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic (short version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_pS3_c6QkI ). This runs forward rather than back in time. However, Roper's "How Far Back Can You Understand Northern English?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Zqn9_OQAw does run backwards in time.
A recent book which looks at this in an interesting fashion is _The Wake_ which treats the Norman Conquest in apocalyptic terms using a language markedly different and appropriate
There is an interesting review of The Wake on the PSmiths literary substack:
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/guest-review-the-wake-by-paul-k...
That has moved it out of a wish list and into my cart for my next purchase.
Makes me wonder what J.R.R. Tolkien would have thought of this.
If you go far enough down the Psmiths' online rabbit hole, you'll find (via footnote 7) some speculation on that. Tolkien was apparently of the opinion that the Norman Conquest was a Very Bad Thing for English historical language and culture, hence his frequent references and allusions to Anglo-Saxon mythology. It sounds like he would have been a fan of The Wake as described here.
That was my thought as well, and it's an interesting thought exercise, but unless there is some note on this which I'm not aware of, it's just reasoned speculation.
I can read until the 1300s, which is about what I expected. I encourage people to go search up historical newspaper archives from the 1700s though, because it becomes significantly harder to parse when you have little to no knowledge of the events, people or even culture of the time.
The 1300s become significantly easier if you read it aloud to yourself (and you know how to pronounce the unusual symbols). The 1200s become very hard even with that method (I can make out occasional words and phrases) and then I'm completely lost after that.
If you enjoyed TFA, check out this excellent BBC tv doc (and companion book) with Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1XQx9pGGd0
I can just about comprehend the 1500 stuff (that was also my experience attempting to read Chaucer during jury duty, though I don't remember Canterbury Tales having the 1400s "þ" this article uses).
Comment was deleted :(
At around 1200, Godzilla had a stroke
Don't get the reference compared to the text in the article for that timeframe.
Is there something specific in there?
"Godzilla Had a Stroke Trying to Read This and Fucking Died" is a meme frequently posted in response to incomprehensible/extremely dumb posts.
This is cool, I love the concept.
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.
There's also a lot of historical writing out there that's more or less the shorthand scribblings of shopkeepers, foremen, and low-level clerks, so it's not all flowery prose. There's even surviving Egyptian hieroglyphics that are more or less just work logs, and they're quite different than the painted ones in the tombs. Then there's the graffiti that's all over Pompeii.
AmaZing job. My 6 and 8 yo could understand back to 1400.
Well, I 100%'d Dark Souls, so surprisingly (or not) I can understand a lot of it.
[dead]
Some random thoughts —
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
> Let’s say to make it easier and better ?
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
As I read the article — I was curious if there are any language museums. If any would love to visit.
> No cap, that lowkey main character energy is giving skibidi rizz, but the fanum tax is cooked so we’re just catching strays in the group chat, fr fr, it’s a total skill issue, periodt.
I'd say around 2020
I must admit that I didn't read the article in full.
Too bad because all the explanations are in the end.
2026: Emojis, Reaction Gifs, and AI
There is a point where English becomes harder than Latin.
Oh man. You really gotta love the unusual special interests of people.
Super work!
Anyone else feeling like Daffy Duck reading the 1700s?
That is superbly done. I can go further back than some here, 1300 is fine, 1200 I can mange okay, but 1100 takes real effort.
Could barely understand the 1900 one
There are towns in England and America where I can't understand them today.
1500
Dutch is 1400s English.
I can get through 1300 with some effort, but from 1200 I get nothing. Just a complete dropoff in that one time frame.
Yeah same. The explanation at the bottom is interesting, lots of the words imported from Normandy drop off then, and the grammar changes more significantly.
I think people see "The blog ends there. No sign-off, no “thanks for reading.”" and stop reading everything after that xD
Yes, I nearly missed it myself
I was able to get the gist of 1200, with some effort. By paragraph:
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.
That older spelling is the reason why "w" is called "double u".
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".
Same here, pretty much. I was able to get to 1200 without much difficulty but 1200 took a lot of effort to decipher.
Also I loved this little discovery, from 1300:
> "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."
Could they hunt down the werewolf wizard and defeat him or not?? I need to know how this ended.
SPOILERS: if you give the last section, from 1000 AD, some more modern orthography, and applying a few modern sound changes, it may start to look more understandable.
___
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 :))
It just gets more and more Scottish as it goes.
In AA, they are coming out with a new addition of the Big book, using modern language, because apparently people are having a difficult time understanding language used in the 1940s.
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.
I'd love to see actual, authentic material that was rewritten through the years. One possibility is a passage from the Bible, though that's not usual English. Another is laws or other official texts - even if not exactly the same, they may be comparable. Maybe personal letters written from or to the same place about the same topic - e.g., from or to the Church of England and its predecessor about burial, marriage, or baptism.
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.
Some early English translations of the Bible were unintentionally comical, e.g., “and Enoch walked with God and he was a lucky fellowe.”
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.
I am an ESL, but I can easily comprehend 1600. 1500 with serious effort.
At 1400, they add in the thorn "þ". If you don't know that's supposed to be "th", you'll get stuck there.
No, not that. The endings are different, the verbs are substantially different. AFAIK invention of printing had generally stabilizing effect on English.
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.
Not to mention that there are pockets of English speakers in Great Britain whose everyday speech isn’t very far from 17th century English. The hypothetical time traveler might be asked, “So you’re from Yorkshire then, are you?”
The invention of printing had a stabilizing effect on all languages, at least of their written form, because for some languages, especially for English, the pronunciation has diverged later from the written form, but the latter was not changed to follow the pronunciation.
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.
It's probably roughly Elizabethan English (1600s).
Never learnt much Dutch or German, however I understand virtually 100% of everything down to and including "1200". On 1100, my understanding collapses suddenly to 30%.
1200 is where I can't anymore. This was interesting. I expected it to be about there. I'm a highly educated native speaker (i.e., well above median vocabulary) with some French and a lot of German, plus understanding of orthographic changes.
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.
Without even checking the article, presumably around 1067. Pre-Norman English was a VERY different language.
my girlfriend isn't ready for the mansplanning coming up tomorrow during dinner about this
I dunno. I just learned what 'mogged' means 2 days ago. So probably not far.
1700s English is like 1200s Turkish. It looks like English has evolved very much. 1500s English is kind of underdtandable for me but 1400s English is not underdtandable.
> of whom I hadde herd so muchel and knewe so litel.
We need to bring muchel back
Now now slow down - still struggling with modern English here ...
How far into the future is my concern
I'm heading to Stornoway next week, I don't hold out much hope
Tha mi'n dòchas gu bheil iad gad thuigsinn, cove.
Reading it vs hearing is deceiving. The orthography shifted markedly after the Norman invasion when French speaking elites imposed a continental Romance / French language spelling system over top of the ordinary people's Germanic language. In actual spoken language there was likely far more continuity, we just don't have good records of it because the ruling elite was disdainful of English and used French at the court.
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
> firſt
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.
the experience of grendle in the original flashing between comprehensibility and jumbled letters is as far back as I have gone, but I read everything truely ancient that I can get my hands on from any culture in any language(translated) and try and make sense of it best as I can
I can comprehend most of the text back to 1300, if slower than Modern/Present Day English. It helps to know the old letter forms, and some of how Shakespearean (Early Modern), Middle, and Old English work. It also helps sounding it out.
Past that, I'm not familiar with Old English enough to understand and follow the text.
Knowing a bit of German or Dutch helps as well.
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
Knowing that W is a late addition to the alphabet and would have been written UU or VV suddenly makes uuif obvious.
I could intuit the pronunciation but I didn’t make the connection from “wif” to “woman” in general. In hindsight I should have, after all we have words like “midwife” which doesn’t refer to a person’s actual married partner.
"Wif" meant woman at the same time that "wer" meant man and "man" meant person.
Man changed to mean only a male person, and we lost wer except in the word "werewolf".
I’m a native English speaker and I think this is an easier jump if you know other Romance languages. In Spanish and Portuguese “woman” and “wife” are often the same word, “mujer” and “mulher” respectively.
Also French femme. It isn't limited to Italic languages either. There's also German Frau, Dutch vrouw, Irish bean.
Czech žena
It will be interesting on how texting will change things down the road. For example, many people use 'u' instead of 'you'. Could that make English spelling in regards to how words are spoken worse or better then now ?
> worse or better then now?
*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’d say we’ve already partly lost separate then/than. It’s sort of like how you can sometimes tell second-language speakers of a language because their grammar is much more precise than a native speaker’s would be (I have a vague notion that native French speakers tend to use third person plural where the textbooks inform French learners to use first person plural, but I’m too lazy to open another tab and google for the sake of an HN comment).
You can tell second-language speakers because they know when to use "its" and "it's".
Thanks to having kids, I ended up reliving lots of details from my own K-3 education and one of the things I clearly remember was coming up with my own mnemonic of remembering its vs it’s by comparing those to his vs he’s.
and knowing how to count to 1 to not use "they" xD
“they” as a non-gendered singular pronoun dates back hundreds of years.
People say that but I think it's gaslighting. I got marked down for using singular "they" in any writing I did in school in the 1980s. I didn't start to see it as a common "gender neutral" pronoun in professional writing (e.g. newspapers) until the last 20 years or so, and really not commonly until the past decade. It still trips me up when I see it used, I have to go back and make sure I didn't miss that more than one person was being discussed.
I suppose one could go back and look at popular style guides from the 1980s and 1990s and see if they endorsed it.
They were teaching us that in the 1980s, yes, but it was an overcorrection. They also taught us not to split our infinitives. That was BS as well. I see no need to maintain standards that were originally imposed by grammarians who undervalued English and overvalued Latin. These days we would call that linguistic insecurity.
> I got marked down for using singular "they" in any writing I did in school in the 1980s.
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).
thankfully, "the enemy can't disseminate bad grammar on the internet if you disable his hand!" =)
I have an edition of the Nibelungenlied, which presents a modern German translation right next to a version of the original text. While the original is somewhat difficult to understand there is an amazing continuity between the two.
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.
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I don't know what your problem is, your comments so far are all low effort and not really contributing to the conversation.
Your language is not acceptable here.
If you're not already shadow-banned I suspect that's the way you're heading.
Have a word with yourself. (A British idiom, meaning to consider what you're doing, particularly in terms of morality and cultural acceptability.)
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What would they say?
>The blog ends there. No sign-off, no “thanks for reading.” Just a few sentences in a language that most of us lost the ability to follow somewhere around the thirteenth century.
Fucking AI slop, even this
Congratulations, you are the very first person on this Earth to have a suspicion that something might have been written by AI. Thank you sincerely for conveying this stunning and novel insight to the rest of us, who were previously blind to this tremendous revelation. Keep up the great sleuthing work.
My slopometer tells me an LLM would not by itself write something so concise, especially beginning with "the blog ends there".
Not sure what you mean?
That this kind of writing "The blog ends there. No sign-off, no “thanks for reading.”" has tell-tale AI mannerisms
If you mean "The extremely modern style of voice used to provide contrast between the anachronistic end of the story and the review of the same is how LLMs also sound" the I agree. That style voice is, after all, exactly what most of the training content major LLMs are trained on will use.
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.
ironically, I think there's an epidemic of ai bots accusing everything of being ai-written here on hn
Crafted by Rajat
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