How far back in time can you understand English?

Post by mcswell » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 3:39 PM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #280

Oreb wrote: post #240

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. 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…

Post by Terretta » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 4:21 PM UTC

ksenzee wrote: post #273

mock-possum wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by cbdevidal » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

illusive4080 wrote: post #328

cbdevidal wrote: post #215

In Christian circles some people are KJV-only, only reading from the 1611 KJV. But articles like this demonstrate that languages change dramatically over time. Thus I regard KJV-onlyism to be a passing fad; for if another 400 years passes, the writing in the 1611 will go from being strange to our eyes, to being unreadable in the future by anyone but trained scholars.

Very true. The trueness to the original text is lacking in KJV, which is the major argument against that translation. It is more written to be old English proper prose than meaningfully translated. Modern translations like ESV are much closer to source, although hard to read compared against others like NIV and NLT which are written for comprehension.

Post by roysting » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 4:41 PM UTC

marssaxman wrote: post #166

englishrookie wrote: post #43

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.

I've often had the same thought coming from the other direction, as an English speaker learning Dutch for the past couple of years: I hear many little echoes in Dutch of archaic or poetic English forms.

Post by jlev1 » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

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…