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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?

#311

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

noosphr wrote: post #282
sheept wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You suffer from the typical brain damage caused by using a language without an alphabet. There is no such thing as spelling in phonetic writing systems because they render what is said, not some random collection of glyphs that approximated how a word was pronounced 500 years ago, in the best case. If two people with different accents can speak to each other, they can also write to each other under a phonetic writing…

That's kind of a mean and not very relevant response.

The point is that if anyone wanted to reform English spelling, they would have to choose a particular dialect to standardize around.

There is no standard English dialect. There is a relatively standard version of American English ("Walter Cronkite English"), and there is Received Pronunciation in England, but then there are all sorts of other dialects that are dominant elsewhere (Scotland, Ireland, India, etc.).

Which one should we choose to base our orthography on? Or should we allow English spelling to splinter into several completely different systems? Yes, there are already slight differences in British vs. American spelling, but they're extremely minor compared to the differences in pronunciation.

And after this spelling reform, will people still be able to read anything written before the reform, or will that become a specialized ability that most people don't learn?

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

#312

Post by noosphr »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #311
noosphr wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You suffer from the typical brain damage caused by using a language without an alphabet. There is no such thing as spelling in phonetic writing systems because they render what is said, not some random collection of glyphs that approximated how a word was pronounced 500 years ago, in the best case. If two people with different accents can speak to each other, they can also write to each other under a phonetic writing…

That's kind of a mean and not very relevant response. The point is that if anyone wanted to reform English spelling, they would have to choose a particular dialect to standardize around. There is no standard English dialect. There is a relatively standard version of American English ("Walter Cronkite English"), and there is Received Pronunciation in England, but then there are all sorts of other dialects that are dom…

You don't standardise. That's the point. If you can understand how people speak you will understand how they write.

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

#313

Post by Tor3 »

Interesting. Down through 1300 was pretty straight forward. 1200 slowed me down a lot. 1100 I could only get a couple of sentences from, at first straight read-through, but it looks like I should be able to read it by going carefully through it.

Background: Fully understands Scandinavian languages (native), can read a bit of German and Dutch, proficient in English, and can read a fair bit of Icelandic. All of this seems to help.

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

#314

Post by [deleted] »

noosphr wrote: post #301
sheept wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then under your definition there must not be any widely used written language with an alphabet. Most of the world's alphabetic writing systems aren't phonetic transcriptions, they're standardized. They're usually based on the prestige dialect, at the cost of diminutizing other dialects. For example, Spanish has a fairly consistent spelling system standardized by RAE, based in Madrid. But, for instance, even though mu…

One I can say for sure is Serbian. Italian looks like it does. Finnish, Hungarian, Georgian, Armenian, Albanian, Turkish and Korean are all ones I've heard are to a lesser or greater degree, but I don't know enough to say either way.

[deleted]

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

#316

Post by Tor3 »

VorpalWay wrote: post #298
bradley13 wrote: post #128

I've been living in a non-English speaking country for 35 years or so. Although I read a lot, my English is still somewhat "frozen". I would still ask you if you have "mown" the lawn - a tense that is now almost lost. Many irregular verbs are becoming regular, I expect due to the large number of ESL speakers. Language changes. It's weird to see it happening in front of you...

> Language changes. It's weird to see it happening in front of you... That happens even if you live in the country where you are a native speaker though. I have seen this in my native Swedish too. Some are easy to adapt to, some I find really grating. But there is little point in being angry over it.

Yep. The dialect I grew up with, and which I could actually read in older written works, which meant it was pretty stable in the past, is now completely gone from my town. Everything which made it special has disappeared. And nationally? Some pronunciations inherited all the way from PIE are now disappearing in certain areas. Oh well. Languages change. I just wish they didn't change is such a, to me, boring direction..

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

#318

Post by quadrifoliate »

lefra wrote: post #284
Oreb wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Spanish I understand most easily is the heavily accented Spanish of non-native Spanish speakers. Are you sure this is because of their accent? I have the same experience with French (the non-native speakers are easier to understand), but I always thought that was because they use fewer and simpler words.

As an ESL I'd say it depends on the native language of who's speaking. I'll have no trouble with a thick spanish, italian or romanian language (I'm french), but indians speaking english are completely incomprehensible to me.

If you want to be able to understand them, you should probably stop thinking of them as a monolithic groupd of "Indians". Individual states in India are comparable in size and greater in population than Spain or Italy; and some cities and their suburbs are comparable to Romania. Overall, India's population is more than 3x that of Europe.

A lot of Indians have English that's influenced by the specific region they come from and the native language. A couple examples:

- Specific regions of Northwestern India have the "e-" prefixing (e.g. "stop" turns into "estop") while speaking English

- Southern Indians tend to y-prefix due to their native languages having more of that sound (e.g. "LLM" can turn into "yell-ell-em").

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

#319

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

noosphr wrote: post #312
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of a mean and not very relevant response. The point is that if anyone wanted to reform English spelling, they would have to choose a particular dialect to standardize around. There is no standard English dialect. There is a relatively standard version of American English ("Walter Cronkite English"), and there is Received Pronunciation in England, but then there are all sorts of other dialects that are dom…

You don't standardise. That's the point. If you can understand how people speak you will understand how they write.

So you want a thousand different writing systems, or everyone just winging it as they go along?

That would make reading anything extremely slow and difficult.

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