Mastodawn

“One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language”*…

Whitby at night, John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836–1893)

Our language is constantly evolving. Colin Gorrie offers a nifty illustration of the development of English…

A man takes a train from London to the coast. He’s visiting a town called Wulfleet. It’s small and old, the kind of place with a pub that’s been pouring pints since the Battle of Bosworth Field. He’s going to write about it for his blog. He’s excited.

He arrives, he checks in. He walks to the cute B&B he’d picked out online. And he writes it all up like any good travel blogger would: in that breezy LiveJournal style from 25 years ago, perhaps, in his case, trying a little too hard.

But as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger’s voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler.

By the middle of his post, he’s writing in what might as well be a foreign language.

But it’s not a foreign language. It’s all English.

None of the story is real: not the blogger, not the town. But the languageis real, or at least realistic. I constructed the passages myself, working from what we know about how English was written in each period.

It’s a thousand years of the English language, compressed into a single blog post.

Read it and notice where you start to struggle. Notice where you give up entirely. Then meet me on the other side and I’ll tell you what happened to the language (and the blogger)…

Read it and reap: “How far back in time can you understand English?” from @colingorrie.bsky.social.

* Emil Cioran

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As we travel through time, we might note that not every new emergence becomes sedimented into the evolutionary path, as we recall that on this date in 1980 that the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences awarded the first– and last– Grammy for Best Disco Recording. By the time that the Academy got around to it, disco was pretty much dead.

“I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor was the big winner that night. The other nominees were: Earth, Wind & Fire for “Boogie Wonderland,” Michael Jackson for “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough,” Donna Summer for “Bad Girls,” and Rod Stewart for “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” (In January 2020, Gaynor won her second Grammy Award in her career for her gospel album Testimony.)

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