YogthosIt’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.
https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-understand-english
David Megginson@yogthos Fun post. I notice the dialect shifts to West Saxon near the end.
Samuel Chase@yogthos I was able to manage until 1500. After that it was like reading a foreign language.
@samebchase I could still kinda make it out by 1400, but 1200 was where I hit a wall, it's like a whole different language all of a sudden
bituur esztreym@yogthos fantastic one. enlightening as well as sobering experiment.
would like that in other languages.
would like that in other languages.
Else, Someone@yogthos
1300 was like OK it takes time to map the letters, and then to read the word fast out loud to make out some sense, but 1200 totally killed me: I thought wait is there a second wolf now? Like, dude you literally just saw her and she's already a "uuif"? Cringe
1300 was like OK it takes time to map the letters, and then to read the word fast out loud to make out some sense, but 1200 totally killed me: I thought wait is there a second wolf now? Like, dude you literally just saw her and she's already a "uuif"? Cringe
Ferret
MissConstrue@yogthos That was great fun! I was good until about 1000, and then the Germanic structure was more than my Latin based brain could translate. (To be fair, I studied Middle English in uni, so I had an advantage.) Good to know our blogger is out there hunting the Master though. 🤘🏼🥳
echopapahttps://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-understand-english
schön! Das hätte ich jetzt gern auch mal in deutsch.
Weil wir in diesem Land ja so viele Sprachreinhalter haben, die bei der kleinsten Änderung losheulen, aber die meisten davon keinen blassen Schimmer davon haben, wie viel sich in unserer Sprache bewegt hat und sich weiter bewegen wird.
David de Groot
Elena ``of Valhalla''@david @yogthos yeah, beyond that I recognized a few words, but some of those I recognized from the time when I played a medieval nun on the internet :D
(I hand copied a text in Old English of which I had read a translation, so I had a vague idea of what was happening, but I couldn't exactly understand what I was copying in each individual sentence)
oblate@yogthos Really interesting. I noticed that you can pick up pronunciation clues from the later posts and apply them to the earlier ones.
So " miȝt" is "might".
1400 is reasonably readable.
1300 is quite fragmentary.
1200 is a mess.
Asakiyume
Celeste Ryder 🐾 🐀🏳️🌈@yogthos I gave up after 1400, which, as an ESL person who didn’t get the benefit of covering Chaucer in high school, I think is pretty good…
hanktank61@bougiewonderland @yogthos Interesting !
I am not a native English speaker. Am I ? Not ? From the Netherlands, with German border 2 hrs drive East, traffic permitting. Saxon phrases on farms, shops ,spoken language.Going North just 0.5 hour entering Frisian language. Travelling with Julius Ceasar brought that mix to the Anglo-Saxon -parts of England. That is where I started to speak English. Trying to sort out Scottish, Welsh, Irish dialects. Even more now in Amsterdam. Double Dutch...
I am not a native English speaker. Am I ? Not ? From the Netherlands, with German border 2 hrs drive East, traffic permitting. Saxon phrases on farms, shops ,spoken language.Going North just 0.5 hour entering Frisian language. Travelling with Julius Ceasar brought that mix to the Anglo-Saxon -parts of England. That is where I started to speak English. Trying to sort out Scottish, Welsh, Irish dialects. Even more now in Amsterdam. Double Dutch...
David B. 
@yogthos Meh. You can make the whole thing more or less difficult depending on graphic conventions. Why use "ſ" for "s" for example? That was not a rule and it's not a difference in language just in typography. Both co-existed depending on the publisher. Same with handwritten "u" and "v" before printing.
Finally, between the 11th and 15th Centuries, English was not standardized at all.
This whole thing is more clickbait than anything accurate or historical.
@David if you bothered reading the discussion at the end, you'd actually see why they used the typography and could've saved yourself embarrassment
@yogthos What embarrassment? Why should I read the thing til the end if I find it unsound?
Also, why the aggressive tone? Oh yes, sorry, we're on social media, where one can't disagree with someone without making it personal. I thought we were supposed to be better than that here. No?
@yogthos Okay, I read the part where they mention the use of "ſ" and there is no justification for it, it's an artifice to make the English look older than it is or something like this. Why use "ſ" and not "st" to only mention this one?
Världens bästa Kille™@yogthos back to the 1300s was ok. Then it got really hard. Helps being Scandinavian, it seems.
Dremmwel ar Vran Ruz@yogthos really struggled at 1200 but still got the message, didn't understand a thing at 1100.
(Non-native English speaker, though. Learned untill college)
(Non-native English speaker, though. Learned untill college)
Daniel
BartdeFietser@yogthos I lost track around 1300, but the Deepl automatic translator was able to make sense of all but the last sentence of the story.
europlus 
@yogthos @petrillic I was able to make it back to 1300, but 1200 really stumped me.
Chris Petrilli
Gurre Vildskägg@yogthos at about 1300 it started needing active thought to translate bits. 1200 felt like i was missing details & nuances even if I could follow along. 1100 the following along wasn't certain. 1000 I got it less than I thought I did.
Knowing Scandinavian, having taken a couple of years of German back in school, and having some interest in linguistics sure did help.
Annelies Kamran, Ph.D.@yogthos 1200 I had to work hard at it. 1100 I think I got the gist? 1000 was incomprehensible.
Incident Creator ❎@yogthos
I've met thorn and the like before, I speak several European languages, know a smattering of Latin, and oi speaks Wiltshire. That saw me through the 1200's and then it fell off a cliff.
I've met thorn and the like before, I speak several European languages, know a smattering of Latin, and oi speaks Wiltshire. That saw me through the 1200's and then it fell off a cliff.
Fritz leck Eier 🎗️@yogthos The border between where English is a distinguishable own language and where it is a variant of althochdeutsch is much more definite than I expected it to be. Funny enough my English relatives had to give in earlier than me, because my brain just switched back to German and continued reading. 😁
web scale robotboy@yogthos holy shit. this is really interesting
Trav / Theresa@yogthos I had to make note of the singular þei, right around where it was historically noted. :D