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How far back in time can you understand English?

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Re: How far back in time can you understand English?

#161

1400 seems fine except for the one big hurdle being "Þ", which I feel like I'd seen at some point but did not recall. ("ȝ" is useful but that's somewhat easier to guess and not too critical. "ſ" is also easy to guess and I'd seen it before.) 1300 is noticeably harder and needs some iterative refinement, but once you rewrite it, it's surprisingly not too bad: > Then after much time spoke the master, his words were col…

I found it helped me to read it out loud in a pirate voice.

Re: How far back in time can you understand English?

#162

Their 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 1…

Interestingly I found the long s annoying and I had to think every time I saw it, but I quickly got used to and could read it naturally after a few paragraphs.

Re: How far back in time can you understand English?

#163

Well, 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.

Beowulf was discovered and translated by Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín, an Icelander who was National Archivist [0] in Denmark, researching Danish history in the British Library.

[0] Or at the time promised the post, I don't remember the details.

Re: How far back in time can you understand English?

#164
post #84

Is 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 difference between 1900 and 2000 seems to largely be the voice/intended audience changing rather than the language.

I.e. the 2000s one is a casual travel blog style intended normally intended for any random quick reader and the 1900s one is more a mix of academic sounding/formal conversation intended for longer content. If you assume a more casual voice in the 1900s one and a more formal voice in the 2000s one I bet they'd even almost seem to be placed backwards chronologically.

Re: How far back in time can you understand English?

#166

Well, 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've often had the same thought coming from the other direction, as an English speaker learning Dutch for the past couple of years: I hear many little echoes in Dutch of archaic or poetic English forms.

Re: How far back in time can you understand English?

#168
post #15

If 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.

The link above mentions Ørberg who did something similar for Latin (Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, ebook and audiobook), which I've read through with good success. It's known as the immersive Ørberg method after him.

Re: How far back in time can you understand English?

#169
post #15

If 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.

The Ørberg method is great, I wish more languages had media utilizing it.

Re: How far back in time can you understand English?

#170

Well, 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.

My experience traveling to the Netherlands as an English speaker is that people are speaking English, but they're drunk!

There's a meme about how Dutch doesn't seem like a serious language to English speakers, and what's funnier is Dutch speakers trying to figure out why it's so funny to English speakers.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/english-to-dutch-translations

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