How far back in time can you understand English? This site goes back by centuries allowing you to test yourself.

https://lemmy.ca/post/60857723

How far back in time can you understand English? This site goes back by centuries allowing you to test yourself. - Lemmy.ca

Lemmy

Just reading text isn’t really a fair representation of the English language as you go back to beyond the 14th century. The grammar remains pretty similar if you sound it out and most vocab is similar (or can be figured out by context clues).

The non-standardized spelling and premodern characters make it feel alien but it’s mostly someone with a heavy accent using phonetics to write [approximately] what they’re sounding like. I bet most people wouldn’t struggle if the text was massaged a bit.