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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?

#261

Post by halapro »

pjc50 wrote: post #72
dhosek wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have had to interpret between an Ulsterman and a South African, who were both speaking English. I think those accents have vowel shifted in opposite directions. I was also taught a bit of Chaucer (died 1400) in English at school. Although not any of the naughty bits.

This sounds like a Hot Fuzz scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cun-LZvOTdw

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

#262

Post by arduanika »

n8cpdx wrote: post #57

no cap u need to b like so unc 2 read this I finna yeet my phone like who even reads I have siri English is lowkey chueggy anyway all my homies use emoji now bet English is cooked fam. Gen Alpha’s kids are going to get lost at the 2000 paragraph.

Ugh, we've been slangmogged

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

#263

Post by noosphr »

SoftTalker wrote: post #255
ETH_start wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not how I learned to read or spell in the 1970s. "Sounding it out" was the main strategy. You learned a few rules for how different combinations of letters sounded, and the exceptions to those, as you went along. But most words are spelled as they sound.

>But most words are spelled as they sound.

English has 45 sounds and 26 letter. There are basically no words over three letter long that are written as they are spoken.

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

#264

Post by lqstuart »

dhosek wrote: post #37
dddgghhbbfblk wrote: post #8

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…

I think I read it's more "hillbilly" English that sounds like Shakespeare? Like coal mining towns where words like "deer" and "bear" are two syllables. Probably a combination of that and eastern seaboard.

I only learned recently that the vowel shift and non-rhotic R's in Britain happened after the colonization of America. Americans still talk "normally" whereas the English got weird. Also why Irish accents sound closer to American than British I think. Linguistics is cool

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

#265

Post by marssaxman »

phpnode wrote: post #88
dboreham wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When they seamlessly switch from English to Dutch I feel like I’m having a stroke: all the same intonation, the same accent, but nothing makes sense any more

I had a strange experience during one episode of the show "Amsterdam Empire", which is spoken in Dutch. There's a scene where one of the characters addresses some foreign tourists: the (Dutch) subtitles continued to make sense, but his speech was just absolute gibberish. It was startling to realize that he had been speaking English, my native language: in the moment, I did not recognize it at all.

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

#266

Post by Meegul »

himlion wrote: post #254
xeromal wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

His subsequent podcast: "revolutions" is also really good.

The revolutions podcast is perhaps one of my favorite podcasts of all time. The American, French, and Russian revolution seasons are all incredibly enlightening to the world that we live in, while plainly also being just so entertaining.

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

#268

Post by [deleted] »

noosphr wrote: post #263
SoftTalker wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how I learned to read or spell in the 1970s. "Sounding it out" was the main strategy. You learned a few rules for how different combinations of letters sounded, and the exceptions to those, as you went along. But most words are spelled as they sound.

>But most words are spelled as they sound. English has 45 sounds and 26 letter. There are basically no words over three letter long that are written as they are spoken.

[deleted]

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

#269

Post by arjie »

Haha! That was remarkable! What an enjoyable experience! I read through and thought I must surely have done better than the average man, having only started stumbling in the 1200s on account of using my clever method of speaking out the words, only to find from the author that this is about the average place a native English speaker would find his way barred by Germans!

Great fun, and helped a little perhaps by the fact that I've visited Iceland and that language uses the thorn for the sound we make in 'thin' and eth for the sound we make in 'then' so I mimicked that.

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

#270

Post by jwrallie »

dataflow wrote: post #114

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…

Agreed, I did quite well until around 1500. At 1400, I did decode Þ after a while. I realized I was mostly reading though the sounds on my head as opposed to recognizing the word shapes anymore, which was quite interesting.

1300 started to get hard because I was missing the meaning of some words completely. 1200 was where I gave up.

Now, English is my 2nd language so I was surprised I could go that far.

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