AkshayThis short story, written in older and older English as it goes on, rightly went viral!
How far can you understand it?
https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-understand-english#_
David Monniaux@Akshay I start not understanding some sentences at all at 1300..
1300 is still slowly but fully translatable for me. (reading aloud, knowing some Dutch/German words)
At 1200, I too lose word sequences and sentences, but can guess the plot, and 1100 and 1000 I can't even guess without an Old English dictionary (with which you can recognise the Germanic root words!)
On the blog comments, it seems most native speakers sense the same cliff around 1250, as key French-derived words are replaced by archaic German ones with uncertain pronunciation