251–260 of 432 posts
1500 is the threshold I think. I don’t understand 1400. I can go a bit further back in my mother tongue, but 1200 is definitely tough for me.
For me 1200 is off a cliff, just like the author describes. I can get a few words here or there but comprehension is just gone.
Should be "how far back in time can you read English?" The language itself is what is spoken and the writing, while obviously related, is its own issue. Spelling is conventional and spelling and alphabet changes don't necessarily correspond to anything meaningful in the spoken language; meanwhile there can be large changes in pronunciation and comprehensibility that are masked by an orthography that doesn't reflect t…
I use a screen reader and in managed quite well until 1200. That said: phonetic spelling now. We have spent 500 years turning English into something closer to Egyptian hieroglyphs than a language with an alphabet.
I've created a Firefox Add-on for it as well.
why language would evolve ? Let’s say to make it easier and better ? And if such a case then wouldn’t that be applicable to all languages? If yes then I am a native kutchi speaker and it just a dialect. How would its history of change could even be found? But I do speak other languages like Gujarati and Hindi and I wonder if there was any evolution if those languages which have a
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I’m just ahead of you on episode 200! Just getting into the rise of printing in English. I absolutely agree. This has become my comfort podcast when I just want to decompress.
I haven't listened to this podcast, but if you want another one, the history of rome podcast by Mike Duncan holds a similar place in my heart. He's kind of monotone but I was entranced and would you believe that I couldn't listen to the episode for the final emperor because I didn't want the roman empire to fall. lol. What a good series.
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I'm a bit confused by what you mean by that, unless you're talking about emoji, but those weren't around 500 years ago. Do you mean that since English isn't phonetically spelled, that which we call the alphabet is rather arbitrary?
I think he means the latter. This makes learning the spelling harder because you have to learn each word individually, as you would have with hieroglyphs, as opposed spelling it out based on phonemes (that you would have learned from learning how words sound when spoken) and a limited alphabet.
Should be "how far back in time can you read English?" The language itself is what is spoken and the writing, while obviously related, is its own issue. Spelling is conventional and spelling and alphabet changes don't necessarily correspond to anything meaningful in the spoken language; meanwhile there can be large changes in pronunciation and comprehensibility that are masked by an orthography that doesn't reflect t…
Indeed, I remember being in Oxford in the 90s and an older man approached me and spoke to me in English and I couldn’t understand a word he said. My ex-wife, who’s an ESL speaker who speaks fluently and without an accent has trouble with English accents in general. Similarly, in Spanish, I find it’s generally easier for me to understand Spanish speakers than Mexican speakers even though I learned Mexican Spanish in s…
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and knowing how to count to 1 to not use "they" xD
“they” as a non-gendered singular pronoun dates back hundreds of years.
I suppose one could go back and look at popular style guides from the 1980s and 1990s and see if they endorsed it.
Some random thoughts — why language would evolve ? Let’s say to make it easier and better ? And if such a case then wouldn’t that be applicable to all languages? If yes then I am a native kutchi speaker and it just a dialect. How would its history of change could even be found? But I do speak other languages like Gujarati and Hindi and I wonder if there was any evolution if those languages which have a
I hope not
Better for it to grow layers that are new and exciting, accessible only to the cultures that create them (and whatever comes after) and those who make the effort to continue learning
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!
The connection between Dutch and English languages is far more minimal in comparison. In fact, when I first faced the language, I would have said it was a combination of ~80% German, 10% English, 5% French, +5% Others.
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I’m just ahead of you on episode 200! Just getting into the rise of printing in English. I absolutely agree. This has become my comfort podcast when I just want to decompress.
I haven't listened to this podcast, but if you want another one, the history of rome podcast by Mike Duncan holds a similar place in my heart. He's kind of monotone but I was entranced and would you believe that I couldn't listen to the episode for the final emperor because I didn't want the roman empire to fall. lol. What a good series.
That acoustic guitar riff followed by "Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome" is how I'll know I'm dead and I've arrived at the gates of heaven