Natasha  🇪🇺Feb 22

How far back in time can you understand English?

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

"... 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."

https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-understand-english

#english #language

How far back in time can you understand English?

An experiment in language change

Dead Language Society
Show threadCiara

@Natasha_Jay Hard test! I'm reminded of this idea to warn people in 10,000 years, when our language has been lost, where we dumped nuclear waste.

“They proposed we genetically engineer a species of cat that changes color in the presence of radiation. We release it into the wild to act as living Geiger counters. Then we create folklore and write songs and tell stories about these 'ray cats', the moral being that when you see these cats change colors, run far, far away.”

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/

Feb 22 at 2:32pmWeb
Show threadLog 🪵Feb 22
@CiaraNi @Natasha_Jay Ray cats? Caves of Qud!
Show threadCiaraFeb 22
@log @Natasha_Jay 🙂
Show threadCyFeb 22
While I love the idea of biotech, honestly you only need to tell some Native Americans about it. They'll pass it along.

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