Something I look forward to, though it could take a few years, is for someone to train a family of state-of-the-art chatbots where each uses a corpus with a cut off date of 1950... 1900... 1850.. and so on. How fascinating it would be to see what words and concepts it would and would not understand. That would be as close to time travel as a person could get.
How far back in time can you understand English?
71–80 of 432 posts
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#72Should 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…
I have had to interpret between an Ulsterman and a South African, who were both speaking English. I think those accents have vowel shifted in opposite directions.
I was also taught a bit of Chaucer (died 1400) in English at school. Although not any of the naughty bits.
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#73Should 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…
[deleted]
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#74no cap u need to b like so unc 2 read this I finna yeet my phone like who even reads I have siri English is lowkey chueggy anyway all my homies use emoji now bet English is cooked fam. Gen Alpha’s kids are going to get lost at the 2000 paragraph.
Things like slang and casual registers always seem to move much faster but for some reason we assume it's always going to be the next set newer than how we'd write that will result in things going off the rails or resulting in it being the only speech understood by that generation.
Lowkey though, let’s keep it 100 and check it. Back in the day Millennials got totally ragged on for sounding all extra like this n' usin all sort of txting abbreviations early on 2. Yet they can still peep oldskool English just the same - talk about insane in the membrane, for real.
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#75A recent book which looks at this in an interesting fashion is _The Wake_ which treats the Norman Conquest in apocalyptic terms using a language markedly different and appropriate https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21023409-the-wake
There is an interesting review of The Wake on the PSmiths literary substack: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/guest-review-the-wake-by-paul-k...
That has moved it out of a wish list and into my cart for my next purchase.
Makes me wonder what J.R.R. Tolkien would have thought of this.
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#76It's probably roughly Elizabethan English (1600s).
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#77Something I look forward to, though it could take a few years, is for someone to train a family of state-of-the-art chatbots where each uses a corpus with a cut off date of 1950... 1900... 1850.. and so on. How fascinating it would be to see what words and concepts it would and would not understand. That would be as close to time travel as a person could get.
It exists! Showed up on HN a few months back: https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms
Only from 1913-1946 though.
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#78Thanks to RobWords [1] I at least remember thorn (Þ) pronunciation and could mostly decipher 1400. Not much past that, though
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#79no cap u need to b like so unc 2 read this I finna yeet my phone like who even reads I have siri English is lowkey chueggy anyway all my homies use emoji now bet English is cooked fam. Gen Alpha’s kids are going to get lost at the 2000 paragraph.
"unc" can't be used as an adjective like that.
Re: How far back in time can you understand English?
#80Well, 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.
A native Frisian speaker would probably have an even easier time, given that Frisian is the closest language to English. However, Frisian is still more similar to other west-germanic languages than English.