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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?

#421

Post by CRConrad »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #145
Esn024 wrote: post #139

Very neat! My native language is Russian. I could understand it pretty well up to 1300, then only about 40% of the 1200 section (not at all the beginning, but the last paragraph was easier), then quite little after that - though I understood enough to glean that there was some woman who had showed up that caused the Master to flee. I really got into reading Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" (about 1497) about a year ago,…

audio would drop off slightly faster than text, due to vowel shift in 1400s

Paradoxically, that might help us speakers of Continental Germanic languages, since it could bring both pronounciation och word-roots closer to traits that have survived in Dutch, German, or the Nordic languages.

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

#422

Post by CRConrad »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #227
saltcured wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would prefer to see a version that was skillfully translated to modern orthography so that we could appreciate shifts in vocabulary and grammar. To me, it is nearly like trying to look at a picture book of fashion but the imagery is degraded as you go back. I'd like to see the time-traveler's version with clean digital pictures of every era...

so replace the long s with just s and the thorn (þ) with th? others?

Replace "that thing that looks like a 3" with, eh, "gh" I think.

(Sorry, can't recall for sure, returning to this thread a couple days after reading TFA.)

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

#423

Post by CRConrad »

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #81

This was a fun exercise. I made it through 1300 by reading it in a Scottish accent and being familiar with some basic old Norse characters from a prior trip to Iceland. I watch Scottish shows like "Still Game", and for some reason that combo with the accent and their lingo made it simpler to read. By 1200 I was completely lost; it looks more Germanic to me, which I don't have the knowledge to read.

> it looks more Germanic to me, which I don't have the knowledge to read.

Of course you do, not only to read but write: English still is a Germanic language.

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

#424

Post by CRConrad »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #2

This is a good quick example, almost like an eye test where the characters are harder to interpret when you go down the page because they are smaller. Only for this the font stays the same size, and it gets harder to interpret as is deviates further from modern English. For me, I can easily go back to about when the printing press got popular. No coincidence I think.

Yeah, I think[*] that's common for most languages: With much more material in writing, vocabulary and spelling stabilize.

___

[*]: I guess, from what I've understood -- absolutely no expert, just interested.

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

#425

Post by CRConrad »

permo-w wrote: post #394

For 1300 the only words I'm not sure of are "swie" and "rewth", although from context they presumably mean something like "silence" and "mercy" 1200 is much harder but I can get maybe 60-75%: Hit is muchel to seggen all þat pinunge hie on me uuroȝten, al þar sor and al þat sorȝe. Ne scal ic nefre hit forȝeten, naht uuhiles ic libbe! There is much to say of all that paining he wrought upon me. All that soreness and so…

> strong and perhaps stiff or some similar word

Steady or stout (which used to mean more "steady" than "thickset" as now), perhaps.

> Heo sloȝ þe heþene men ... sloȝ hem and fælde hem to þe grunde

> She slayed the heathen man ... slayed him and felled him to the ground.

Them, not him, I thought? The Master had several henchmen.

> ...from alle mine ifoan!”

> ...from all my (?)"

Foes, fiends? (Ger. "Feind" and Swe. "fiende" both mean "enemy", so I've always thought that's the original meaning of Eng. "fiend" too.)

> Aelfgifu, which I incidentally know is an old English female name meaning Elf Gift

Spouse -- almost wrote "wife" there, but that could have been confusing in this context -- of some old king of Wessex or something, innit?

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

#426

Post by CRConrad »

MrScruff wrote: post #304

Seems like some of the initial changes are reflecting more than just the evolving language. He’s comparing someone using informal slang “not gonna lie” against someone writing extremely formally “Hunger, that great leveller, makes philosophers of us all, and renders even the meanest dish agreeable.” which I’m not sure makes sense.

I think you can make it make sense if you think of it as "writing in a speech popular at the time". Nowadays we (sometimes, often?) write the slang we speak; in the 1800s, people wrote (and perhaps spoke?) in more flowery sentences. Romance novels might seem written in stilted language to us now, but in their day they were kind of like writing in slang is now.

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

#428

Post by permo-w »

CRConrad wrote: post #425
permo-w wrote: post #394

For 1300 the only words I'm not sure of are "swie" and "rewth", although from context they presumably mean something like "silence" and "mercy" 1200 is much harder but I can get maybe 60-75%: Hit is muchel to seggen all þat pinunge hie on me uuroȝten, al þar sor and al þat sorȝe. Ne scal ic nefre hit forȝeten, naht uuhiles ic libbe! There is much to say of all that paining he wrought upon me. All that soreness and so…

> strong and perhaps stiff or some similar word Steady or stout (which used to mean more "steady" than "thickset" as now), perhaps. > Heo sloȝ þe heþene men ... sloȝ hem and fælde hem to þe grunde > She slayed the heathen man ... slayed him and felled him to the ground. Them, not him, I thought? The Master had several henchmen. > ...from alle mine ifoan!” > ...from all my (?)" Foes, fiends? (Ger. "Feind" and Swe. "fi…

>Them, not him, I thought? The Master had several henchmen.

I'll admit part of the difficulty there was that I'd skipped the ends of earlier chapters because they were too easy, so I was missing some context like this

>Foes, fiends? (Ger. "Feind" and Swe. "fiende" both mean "enemy", so I've always thought that's the original meaning of Eng. "fiend" too.)

Foes sounds right yeah. I think there was another word at some point where a prefixed "I" seemed to indicate that the thing was "to me", and -an feels right to be an old plural form. I can't think of any straight away but instinctively I feel like there are words in modern English that pluralise similarly, perhaps in the names of some old organisations?

>Spouse -- almost wrote "wife" there, but that could have been confusing in this context -- of some old king of Wessex or something, innit?

That's the one. I don't remember exactly who they were but my memory is that she managed to be the spouse of two Anglo-Saxon kings, sometime not too long before William arrived

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

#429

Post by CRConrad »

kinj28 wrote: post #253

Some random thoughts — why language would evolve ? Let’s say to make it easier and better ? And if such a case then wouldn’t that be applicable to all languages? If yes then I am a native kutchi speaker and it just a dialect. How would its history of change could even be found? But I do speak other languages like Gujarati and Hindi and I wonder if there was any evolution if those languages which have a

You seem to be making the same error as many make about natural evolution: Assuming it does anything "to" anything, that it has a purpose. That's not how it works; it just happens.

Maybe called the "teleological fallacy" or something.

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

#430

Post by CRConrad »

7bit wrote: post #202

> firſt It's weird when an "s" that's written in cursive is translated like that. Is this about recognizing letters. Then show original scans. Or is this about understanding the spoken word. Then write "first". Don't do both and fail at everything.

It's just being accurate. There were two different written forms of the letter 's' back then.
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