> The blog ends there. No sign-off, no “thanks for reading.” Just a few sentences in a language that most of us lost the ability to follow somewhere around the thirteenth century. Fucking AI slop, even this
Not sure what you mean?
How far back in time can you understand English?
101–110 of 432 posts
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#102Something I look forward to, though it could take a few years, is for someone to train a family of state-of-the-art chatbots where each uses a corpus with a cut off date of 1950... 1900... 1850.. and so on. How fascinating it would be to see what words and concepts it would and would not understand. That would be as close to time travel as a person could get.
It exists! Showed up on HN a few months back: https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms Only from 1913-1946 though.
Capital! That's one of the most interesting time periods.
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#103Seems to be heavily focused on orthography. In 1700s we get the long S that resembles an F. In 1600 we screw with the V's and U's. In 1400, the thorn and that thing that looks like a 3 appears. Then more strange symbols show up later on as well.
Orthography is probably the biggest stumbling block going back to the 1500s or 1400s , but that’s really because the rest of the language has changed in vocabulary and style, but is still understandable. If you think the 1200 or 1100 entry are mostly orthographical changes then you are missing the interesting bits.
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#104Is it weird that the 1900 style is closer to how I typically write than the first 2000 style? I'm not that old, am I?
The 2000 sample was a bit exaggerated.
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#105Well, for a native speaker of Dutch who doesn't speak English at all (not many left since my grandmother died in 2014), I'd say old English is actually easier to read than modern - starting around 1400. Around 1000, English and Dutch must have been mutually understandable.
I am Indian. I read easily to 1400. But then 1300 is suddenly difficult to read
I speak English natively. I read to 1400 without difficulty, read 1400 and 1300 with some sruggle, and found beyond that it was largely unintelligible; I can understand maybe 1 in 3 words.
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#106Well, for a native speaker of Dutch who doesn't speak English at all (not many left since my grandmother died in 2014), I'd say old English is actually easier to read than modern - starting around 1400. Around 1000, English and Dutch must have been mutually understandable.
I am Indian. I read easily to 1400. But then 1300 is suddenly difficult to read
Italian here, and it was the same for me, the language feels very different by 1300.
Which is interesting cause 1200 italian[0] seems pretty readable by everyone who can read italian (and likely every other romance language), you have to go further back to have a shift.
[0] E.g. Saint Francis' Canticle of the Sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canticle_of_the_Sun
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#107That is superbly done. I can go further back than some here, 1300 is fine, 1200 I can mange okay, but 1100 takes real effort.
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#108Their long S is really annoying, although truthfully I generally am unfamiliar with the long s in modern fonts so I don't KNOW if it really looks worse than it needs to, but I feel it looks worse that it needs to and that makes it harder, for example I thought lest at first was left and had to go back a couple words after.
Anyway as I know from my reading history at 1400 it gets difficult, but I can make it through 1400 and 1300 with difficulty, but would need to break out the middle English dictionaries for 1200 and 1100. 1000 forget it, too busy to make that effort.
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#109Would be curious to know from other HN readers: how far back can you understand written prose of your own language, assuming the writing system uses mostly the same letter or characters? Medieval French, Middle High German, Ancient Greek, Classical Arabic or Chinese from different eras, etc.
In Italy we all study Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio in school, which are 1300, and it's quite easy to understand them beyond some unusual words. 1200 poetry is easy enough too.
There's not much literature older than that, cause people preferred to write in Latin, the oldest bit in "volgare" is the Indovinello Veronese[0] which is from the 8th or 9th century and at that point it's almost latin spelling-wise, it's understandable if you're well educated but wouldn't be understandable by everyone.
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#110If you want to improve your score, the blog author (Dr. Colin Gorrie) has just the thing: a book which will teach you Old English by means of a story about a talking bear . Here's how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZhlWdVvZfw . Your dream of learning Old English has never been closer: get Ōsweald Bera https://colingorrie.com/books/osweald-bera/ today.
Man, I really needed this when I was studying OE. I was trying to do the Alice in Wonderland book and an Oxford textbook but it was really a lot of work compared to other language learning (even compared to Latin). This would have made it a lot more fun.