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How far back in time can you understand English?

deadlanguagesociety.com

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

#381

Post by illusive4080 »

cbdevidal wrote: post #355
illusive4080 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hmm I’ve always heard that the KJV isn’t perfect but it is closer to the ESV than the NIV. These three charts suggest this[1]. I do know there are places where the KJV isn’t faithful to the sources, such as in the use of the word Easter for Passover in Acts 12:4. It is a pretty translation, but harder to follow in my experience. I only use the KJV when talking with other denominations because it is more readily accep…

Oh interesting I thought KJV was more like NIV. Looks like it’s closer to meaning than I assumed. Nice article.

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

#382

Post by ogogmad »

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.

The 1200 one is perfectly comprehensible to me, and I don't think it's that foreign at all.

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

#383

Post by withinboredom »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #360
withinboredom wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worked for thousands of years with other phonetic written languages. Words change spelling over time, instead of pronounciation drifting without the spelling changing.

Define "worked." You're proposing to make reading just as difficult as understanding every other dialect of spoken English - something even most native speakers have difficulty with. Your proposal would also eliminate whole-word recognition, which is what makes reading fast. It would slow us all down to the speed of young children just learning to sound out the letters.

Right. Because everyone gets confused when you write behavior instead of behaviour or license/licence or analyze/analyse. It’s so confusing that there are already different ways to spell the same thing.

American English isn’t the only spelling of English.

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

#384

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

withinboredom wrote: post #383
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "worked." You're proposing to make reading just as difficult as understanding every other dialect of spoken English - something even most native speakers have difficulty with. Your proposal would also eliminate whole-word recognition, which is what makes reading fast. It would slow us all down to the speed of young children just learning to sound out the letters.

Right. Because everyone gets confused when you write behavior instead of behaviour or license/licence or analyze/analyse. It’s so confusing that there are already different ways to spell the same thing. American English isn’t the only spelling of English.

There are exactly two ways to write license. What you're proposing is that there should be 20 different ways to write it, depending on what particular dialect of English you speak.

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

#385

Post by cyberax »

Izkata wrote: post #372
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…

> In Russia and Ukraine pretty much every child can read by the time they enter the first grade. In the US too, reading is generally handled in Kindergarten, the year before first grade. If your parents didn't teach you before that, like mine did. > Meanwhile, when I was learning English there basically was one spelling rule: memorize. There are rules though, that we're ad-hoc taught as kids, or just absorb through e…

> In the US too, reading is generally handled in Kindergarten, the year before first grade.

I keep hearing that students in the US struggle with reading. With something like 60% of students not being able to read proficiently.

Inlcuding a truly stunning case of a valedictorian high school graduate who couldn't read: https://www.kktv.com/2025/02/28/former-high-school-honors-st... Or the "whole language" approach to reading, which sounds completely bonkers to me.

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

#386

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

noosphr wrote: post #370
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet we manage it with speaking. This is why I call it brain damage. It's like trying to explain red to a blind woman.

We don't really manage it with speaking. I don't understand highland Scottish dialects at all. I have trouble understanding Cockney.

Yet people who speak those dialects can write anything down and I'll understand it perfectly with no effort.

You don't understand the value of standardization. It's what makes reading fast and independent of dialect. People who read English don't literally sound out the letters. They recognize the whole word instantly. Sounding out the letters is only a fallback mechanism.

What you're proposing might work for a tiny language with only one main dialect. English is a global language with a huge number of dialects. Major languages like this need standardized writing systems, and to no one's surprise, they all have them.

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

#387

Post by withinboredom »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #384
withinboredom wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Because everyone gets confused when you write behavior instead of behaviour or license/licence or analyze/analyse. It’s so confusing that there are already different ways to spell the same thing. American English isn’t the only spelling of English.

There are exactly two ways to write license. What you're proposing is that there should be 20 different ways to write it, depending on what particular dialect of English you speak.

Congrats. You just discovered how new languages get created!

English is probably overdue on that, tbh.

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

#388

Post by NoFunPedant »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #176
riffraff wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Italian here, and it was the same for me, the language feels very different by 1300. Which is interesting cause 1200 italian[0] seems pretty readable by everyone who can read italian (and likely every other romance language), you have to go further back to have a shift. [0] E.g. Saint Francis' Canticle of the Sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canticle_of_the_Sun

> 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…

"Rewthe" is ruth, an old word for mercy, which today only survives in the negative form "ruthless."

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

#389

Post by SoftTalker »

noosphr wrote: post #375
SoftTalker wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why kids start with "Run Spot Run" and other simple 3 and 4 letter words. They then learn the more complicated rules and exceptions as they go. It's really not a problem.

Chinese kids manage with 6,000 character. Just because we normalize child abuse doesn't mean its right.

And English speakers learn tens of thousands of words, and eventually read almost all of them by sight. I don't see where any abuse is happening.

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

#390

Post by noosphr »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #386
noosphr wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet we manage it with speaking. This is why I call it brain damage. It's like trying to explain red to a blind woman.

We don't really manage it with speaking. I don't understand highland Scottish dialects at all. I have trouble understanding Cockney. Yet people who speak those dialects can write anything down and I'll understand it perfectly with no effort. You don't understand the value of standardization. It's what makes reading fast and independent of dialect. People who read English don't literally sound out the letters. They re…

This is the argument that Chinese use for keeping their characters. It's ultimate expression is defending electric motor to be written as "lighting clouds power tree table" because if we didn't then it would be anarchy.

English is intelligible enough that someone from Vancouver can easily talk to someone from Sydney and every other major population center in between.

That someone in a two sheep village in Scotland might have trouble reading War and Peace isn't a reason to abuse every child for a decade before they too develop the same brain damage as the adults who abused them.

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