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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?

#341

Post by thaumasiotes »

Amezarak wrote: post #334
riffraff wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but the spelling is part of how the language feels :) Also, you say spelling but e.g. "speken" feels more a grammatical than orthographic difference. By comparison, Dante's incipit to the Divine Comedy is 100% the same spelling and grammar as modern Italian (nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita/mi ritrovai per una selva oscura/che la diritta via era smarrita)

Are you sure you haven't been victimized by manuscripts with modernized spellings? When I look up ealry manuscript scans of the Comedy, I get: *Nel mezo delcamin dinra uita / mi trouai puna(?) felua (long s letter) ofcura / che la diricta (some bizarre letter in there) uia era fmarrita (long s). https://www.digitalcollections.manchester.ac.uk/view/PR-INCU...

> puna(?)

Note that the p is struck through below its loop; that is probably an abbreviation for "per". That would be an example of the spelling being the same as modern Italian, but the manuscript is written in a kind of shorthand because writing takes a lot of time and effort.

dinrã is probably also an abbreviation, given the diacritic.

> diricta (some bizarre letter in there)

No, the letters are exactly what you've just typed. There is a ligature between the c and the t. You could call this a difference in font, but not in spelling. (Though diricta for modern diritta is a real difference.)

> Nel mezo delcamin

This is a real spelling difference. There's a really glaring one in stanza 3, where poco is spelled pocho in contravention of the rules of Italian spelling. I don't know what an Italian today would think if confronted with -cho-.

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

#342

Post by thaumasiotes »

riffraff wrote: post #285
thaumasiotes wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was the same for me, the language feels very different by 1300. The language in section 1300 isn't much different from section 1400. Almost all of it is still good English today if you give the words their modern spelling: Then after much time spoke the Master, and his words were cold as winter is. His voice was as the crying of ravens, sharp and shrill, and all that heard him were adread and durst not speak. "I…

Yeah but the spelling is part of how the language feels :) Also, you say spelling but e.g. "speken" feels more a grammatical than orthographic difference. By comparison, Dante's incipit to the Divine Comedy is 100% the same spelling and grammar as modern Italian (nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita/mi ritrovai per una selva oscura/che la diritta via era smarrita)

> Also, you say spelling but e.g. "speken" feels more a grammatical than orthographic difference.

Doesn't make a difference if you're reading it.¹ If you were trying to produce correct Middle English, you're correct that this would cause difficulties.

(And to me it looks like it has caused difficulties for the author. The passage has several verbs introduced by auxiliary modals. Check out the list:

1. Here ſchaltou dyen Here shalt thou die

2. non ſchal knowen þi name none shall know thy name

3. non schal þe biwepe none shall thee beweep

4. wiþ what boldenesse I miȝte gaderen with what boldness I might gather

5. more þan I miȝte beren more than I might bear

6. I ne miȝte namore stonden ne spoken I [] might no more stand nor speak

Three examples use shall and three examples use might. Five of them have an -n suffix (must be infinitive or subjunctive; not to be confused with the 3rd person plural -n suffix that we also see) on the verb, but that suffix is missing from non schal þe biwepe, which is otherwise an exact grammatical match to non ſchal knowen þi name)

¹ The reason it doesn't make a difference is that the sentence structure is still that of modern English and there's only one permissible form of the verb in the modernized sentence. So it's sufficient to know (a) what verb is being used; plus (b) what the sentence it's being used in is.

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

#343

Post by kortex »

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.

Standard Italian speakers in Rome struggle to understand Ciociaro dialect, which is from the region on the outskirts of Rome. Take "n'coppa" - spelled with a "c" but very much pronounced /ŋgopa/ with a voiced [g]. I dont even have a reference point for Sicilian but that really pushes the bounds of the dialect/language distinction.

That's one example, from a language with ~70M native speakers, in a geographically tight region.

Likewise, all your other languages (sans Turkiye) are very compact geographically with small speaker bases. And Turkish undoubtedly has large aspects of forced standardization and dialect extinction.

English is spoken by 1.5 billion, by ESL speakers from basically every language tree, across the world. Try to get folks from Boston, Brooklyn, Philly, and Albany in a room and get them to agree on a phonetic spelling.

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

#344

Post by mananaysiempre »

kstrauser wrote: post #303
cyberax wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

OTOH, I’ve seen what y’all call cursive, and want no part of it.

The usual pictures of и / п / т / ш ambiguity that you see are exaggerated in that they show forms that are nominally “standard” but basically impossible to reproduce without a fountain (or, even better, dip) pen (think round hand or, as 'cyberax mentions, Spencerian script), yet use a constant stroke width that such an implement wouldn’t produce. For the latter two, people who actually write m and not т will often resolve the ambiguity with ш with an over- resp. underbar (the same ones that Serbian uses even in print[1]). It’s also pretty normal to exaggerate letter joins when they come out looking too similar to parts of other letters, etc. Overall, modern Russian cursive is about as legible as the modern French one, and I don’t think people complain much about the latter.

I also find the hand-wringing about English accents somewhat surprising. Yes, different accents exist, and yes, English has a much wider variation than (urban) Russian (there are things in the countryside that urban dwellers haven’t heard for a century), but phonemic orthographies are a thing, and though children in e.g. Moscow may perpetually struggle with orthographic distinctions that no longer correspond to anything in their accent, the idea of a spelling competition remains about as laughable as that of a shoelace-tying one. Nobody makes you represent the many mergers of English with a single letter in your new orthography (though it would be funny).

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cyrillic_alternates...., rightmost column

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

#345

Post by [deleted] »

JasonADrury wrote: post #46
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 live in London, I can drive a little over an hour from where I live and hardly understand the people working at the petrol station. A few more hours and they start to speak French.

[deleted]

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

#346

Post by chuckadams »

KPGv2 wrote: post #197
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…

> Spelling is conventional and spelling and alphabet changes don't necessarily correspond to anything meaningful in the spoken language On the contrary, spelling is highly idiosyncratic until the 18th century, and until then it was tightly correlated to the sounds of spoken language. Shakespeare didn't even HIMSELF have one way of spelling his own last name. That's how non-conventional spelling was until pretty recen…

Screw these modern sensibilities, I am totally renaming my default git branch to "maiſter".

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

#347

Post by bityard »

ranger_danger wrote: post #340
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 didn't think it was possible to speak "without an accent."

It depends on who you ask.

There is a "dialect" called General American English, which is essentially how national news anchors and some actors are trained, so that they don't sound like they are too obviously from anywhere in particular to the public.

A large percentage of Midwesterners and Canadians speak _mostly_ General American, if you allow for the occasional drawl or shifted vowel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English

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

#348

Post by mistrial9 »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #318
lefra wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

as a native English speaker in California, this is funny to read. I was standing in a crowd of undergraduates at UC Berkeley, shoulder to shoulder, during a break in a movie. Two guys were talking Very Fast right next to me, I mean 0.5 meter in a crowd. I decided to run an experiment because I could not pick out any of what they said. So I turned and spoke slowly in an ever so slight British formal version of California English "excuse me, do you know what time it is?' . One stopped and answered -- almost exactly as I spoke -- the current time (around 18:00). Then they went back to their talk! it was English!

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

#349

Post by chuckadams »

npilk wrote: post #31

This is cool, I love the concept. I wonder how much our understanding of past language is affected by survivorship bias? Most text would have been written by a highly-educated elite, and most of what survives is what we have valued and prized over the centuries. For instance, this line in the 1800s passage: > Hunger, that great leveller, makes philosophers of us all, and renders even the meanest dish agreeable. This…

There's also a lot of historical writing out there that's more or less the shorthand scribblings of shopkeepers, foremen, and low-level clerks, so it's not all flowery prose. There's even surviving Egyptian hieroglyphics that are more or less just work logs, and they're quite different than the painted ones in the tombs. Then there's the graffiti that's all over Pompeii.

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

#350

Post by chuckadams »

coldtea wrote: post #93

> The blog ends there. No sign-off, no “thanks for reading.” Just a few sentences in a language that most of us lost the ability to follow somewhere around the thirteenth century. Fucking AI slop, even this

Congratulations, you are the very first person on this Earth to have a suspicion that something might have been written by AI. Thank you sincerely for conveying this stunning and novel insight to the rest of us, who were previously blind to this tremendous revelation. Keep up the great sleuthing work.
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