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 thread2somethingFeb 22
@Natasha_Jay I can read 1600 pretty easily, and mostly read 1500 slowly. For 1400 I can make out some sentence fragments, leading me to a very rough outline of what's happening in the story. For 1300 I can make out a few individual words and short phrases, but there's not nearly enough for me to understand what is happening. For 1200 I don't understand any of it.
Show threadDB Schwein

@2something @Natasha_Jay

Reading from present time backwards I was clear on the narrators voice through 1300, but not the statements from others.

If you'd just handed me a section from 1300 or 1400 I think I would have been lost, and struggled mightily with even the 1500s.

Though a search and replace of f for s would simplify quite a bit there 😝

I once painted a scroll using spelling from the mid 1100s and at the time I could read it clearly!

Feb 22 at 4:02pmWeb