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How far back in time can you understand English?
271–280 of 432 posts
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#272Oh man. You really gotta love the unusual special interests of people.
Super work!
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#273Should 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…
Yeah it’s really just the glyphs that are changing here, and occasionally the spelling, otherwise the words themselves are still fairly recognizable if you’re well-read.
This is true through 1300 or so. If you transliterate the 1200, 1100, and 1000 sections to modern glyphs, it's still a foreign language with the occasional recognizable word (such as "the"). Learning Old English in college was a lot like learning Latin: lots of recognizable vocabulary, totally unfamiliar case endings, mostly unfamiliar pronouns, arbitrary word order.
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#274I actually wonder about his conclusion that 50 years hence English will be unrecognizable. There will be changes of course. Yet we are also more connected than ever, whereas the next town over would be a whole day trip in the past. The separation allows for more divergence. Well, maybe if we get to Mars, differences might crop up again.
This isn't how I read his conclusion. He's saying English will be different in fifty years, but he's not saying it'll be unrecognizable. Look how little difference there is between the 1900 passage and the 2000 passage.
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#275Earlier 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.
The Latin alphabet variant modern English uses has uses only ~11 kinds of strokes, where is this 26 coming from?
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
“they” as a non-gendered singular pronoun dates back hundreds of years.
People say that but I think it's gaslighting. I got marked down for using singular "they" in any writing I did in school in the 1980s. I didn't start to see it as a common "gender neutral" pronoun in professional writing (e.g. newspapers) until the last 20 years or so, and really not commonly until the past decade. It still trips me up when I see it used, I have to go back and make sure I didn't miss that more than o…
They were teaching us that in the 1980s, yes, but it was an overcorrection. They also taught us not to split our infinitives. That was BS as well. I see no need to maintain standards that were originally imposed by grammarians who undervalued English and overvalued Latin. These days we would call that linguistic insecurity.
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
The Latin alphabet variant modern English uses has uses only ~11 kinds of strokes, where is this 26 coming from?
An alphabet assigns a letter to a sound. No more no less. English no longer has an alphabet because the Latin alphabet, designed for Latin languages, replaced the native Runic alphabet.
Serbian has an alphabet, as does Italian. All other European languages I'm aware of don't.
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#278Should 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.
phonetic spelling based on whose dialect? should "merry" "marry" and "Mary" be spelled the same?
besides, pronunciation continues to evolve, so any phonetic spelling would continue to gradually diverge from the spoken language
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#279Earlier 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.
Spelling can still be phonetic even if groups of letters have differing sounds from those letters' sounds serially in isolation. The key criterion is that the rules must be universal, applying to every instance of those groupings, rather than having exceptions for their appearances in certain words.
...ok, it occurs to me now that a smart-alec might declare each individual word to be a "grouping of letters with its own phonetic pronounciation", whereupon phoneticism as-defined is achieved trivially because pronounciation is universal over the singleton universe of words spelt exactly like that word. You know what I _mean_ - "sufficiently small groups of letters", hand-wave.
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Phonetic spelling would perhaps make the language easier to learn for native speakers, but it would make it harder to learn for foreigners, at least those of us who come from Europe. Most words in written English resemble words in Germanic or Romance languages. If English was spelled phonetically, the resemblance would be significantly smaller. People often say that the English spelling is weird or illogical. As a no…
> Phonetic spelling would perhaps make the language easier to learn for native speakers, but it would make it harder to learn for foreigners, at least those of us who come from Europe.
BS. Phonetic alphabets are _much_ easier to learn for everyone. In Russia and Ukraine pretty much every child can read by the time they enter the first grade. It's _that_ easy because both alphabets are phonetic (although it's only one-way in case of Russian).
Meanwhile, when I was learning English there basically was one spelling rule: memorize. It was not at all helpful. I also ended up learning English as a mostly written language, so after moving to the US, I kept getting surprised by how familiar written words are actually pronounced.
E.g. it took me a while to explain to a nurse over the phone that I may have pneumonia and need an appointment. Why the heck that leading "p" is completely silent?!?