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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?

#401

Post by syspec »

dhosek wrote: post #37
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…

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…

Did you mean it is easier for you to understand Spaniards speaking Spanish than Mexican speakers?

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

#403

Post by dhosek »

ksenzee wrote: post #276
SoftTalker wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed, a lot of grammatical “rules” of English were a result of attempting to impose Latin grammatical rules upon English as part of the neoclassical movement of the 18th century. Split infinitives, dangling prepositions (English is somewhat of an outlier among Indo-European languages in that it lacks the practice of prefixing verbs with prepositions to form new verbs—consider e.g., Czech odjit (jit + od), Spanish contener (tener + con), Latin exeo (eo + ex), Greek καταστρέφω (στρέφω + κᾰτᾰ)¹) so arguably, phrase like “go with” fulfill that role and are not prepositions lacking an accompanying noun.

⸻

1. While in most languages, this class of verbs becomes apparent when the base noun is irregular or has special conjugation rules, in Greek,² it’s especially noticeable thanks to the fact that the aorist causes a morphological change to the beginning of the verb as well as the end. Except for these verbs, the morphological change ends up happening in the middle of the verb.

2. I don’t know modern Greek beyond what I can discern from my classical Greek knowledge, so I don’t know if modern Greek has retained this feature.

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

#404

Post by pavel_lishin »

VorpalWay wrote: post #292
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.

It took months of being exposed to Indian English on a regular basis for me to start to understand it (and I still find it requires significant mental effort). Context: I'm a Swede who regularly thinks and dreams in English (and when I did an English language test for exchange student purposes I got top marks in all categories).

My college had a lot of Indian & Pakistani students & instructors, and the first few semesters were rough, but by junior year, their accents were totally understandable to me. It was a very useful experience to have, as someone who became a software developer.

I wonder what they thought of my Russian accent.

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

#405

Post by pavel_lishin »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #108

Their long S is really annoying, although truthfully I generally am unfamiliar with the long s in modern fonts so I don't KNOW if it really looks worse than it needs to, but I feel it looks worse that it needs to and that makes it harder, for example I thought lest at first was left and had to go back a couple words after. Anyway as I know from my reading history at 1400 it gets difficult, but I can make it through 1…

Every time I see a long S, I am reminded of "House of Leaves", where one of the characters encounters it for the first time as well, and starts using it everywhere for awhile.

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

#406

Post by zadikian »

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…

I honestly didn't know English had so many non-Latin characters in those centuries. Like a modern English reader can more easily read (but not understand) a Roman inscription than some of these examples.

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

#407

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

noosphr wrote: post #390
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mi…

The Chinese have many good arguments for keeping their characters, which go far beyond mutual intelligibility.

But you don't have to go all the way to "English should switch to hieroglyphs" to see that keeping a uniform but imperfect phonetic system is far superior to having everyone write their own partially intelligible dialect however they want.

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

I assume you mean going East from Vancouver, because there are practically no major population centers practically in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

But no, the dialects spoken in the major English-speaking population centers are not mutually intelligible. An American exposed to Cockney, a major English dialect, for the first time will have no idea that is being said.

Here's the future you want:

"Ai fink va braan kye-ao iz ow-va ve-ya bai va waw-ʔuh."

How many Americans do you think will understand that at first sight?

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

#408

Post by CRConrad »

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…

> BS. Phonetic alphabets are _much_ easier to learn for everyone.

BS yourself: The English -- e.e. Latin -- alphabet is just as phonetic as any other.

As long as you don't fuck up your pronounciation as thoroughly as English has done.

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

#409

Post by CRConrad »

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.

OTOH, those 6,000 characters sound rather like child abuse to me.

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

#410

Post by CRConrad »

carlosjobim wrote: post #323
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…

We have the written word from centuries ago available today. Where are you going to find the spoken word from centuries ago?

In a crashed flying saucer, in the recordings of an old alien ethnographer?
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