glitchsoc - Link to source

How far back in time can you understand English?

It’s a thousand years of the English language, compressed into a single blog post.

"... as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger’s voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler."

deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-…

#english #language

How far back in time can you understand English?

An experiment in language change
Colin Gorrie (Dead Language Society)
#language #english
in reply to Natasha πŸ‡ͺπŸ‡Ί

mastodon - Link to source

Ciara

Hard test! I'm reminded of this idea to warn people in 10,000 years, when our language has been lost, where we dumped nuclear waste.

β€œThey proposed we genetically engineer a species of cat that changes color in the presence of radiation. We release it into the wild to act as living Geiger counters. Then we create folklore and write songs and tell stories about these 'ray cats', the moral being that when you see these cats change colors, run far, far away.”

99percentinvisible.org/episode…

Ten Thousand Years - 99% Invisible

In 1990,Β the federal government invitedΒ a group of Β geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, architects, artists, and writers to the New Mexico desert, to visit theΒ Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. They would beΒ there on assignment.
99% Invisible
in reply to Natasha πŸ‡ͺπŸ‡Ί

mastodon - Link to source

HarryMutt

Interestingly, as a German, I can understand quite a lot of the very old texts. But my mother had a PHD in English and French and knew a lot about old Germanic sagas and medieval German literature. So, that is nothing foreign to me.

If you read anything from Walther von der Vogelweide, you will clearly see the similarities to the oldest texts. Words and grammar are recognizable, and if you can read one, you can read the other.

But even in Shakespeare's time, you will find a lot of those common roots of our languages, and if you get used to the different spelling, the sound of it rings familiar. And as late as in Jane Austen's times, even the number format was still the same as in German, for instance, four-and-twenty and not twenty-four.

After all, with all the lost grammar and words, modern English is just a watered-down version of old German.
;-)

in reply to Natasha πŸ‡ͺπŸ‡Ί

mastodon - Link to source

Aki Moranaga

I am German, English is my third foreign language (after Latin).

In the 1800s, I had two words that seemed unusual to me or that I had to deduce from the context. In the 1600s, there were three. From 1500 onwards, it became a little more difficult, with one word unusual and three unknown: β€˜prees’, 'avys' and β€˜thyder’.
I had real difficulties with the 1400s.

in reply to Natasha πŸ‡ͺπŸ‡Ί

mastodon - Link to source

Cainmark Does Not Comply 🚲

Lost me at 1600 "thouing". First word I had to understand from the context.

1200 still understood half.

Thought I lost meaning completely at 1100 until I imagined it was a play being performed, then got an eighth of it.

1000 could only glean some meaning from the spacing of the words, might as well be a completely different language to me.

in reply to Natasha πŸ‡ͺπŸ‡Ί

mastodon - Link to source

Mason Loring Bliss

in reply to Natasha πŸ‡ͺπŸ‡Ί

mastodon - Link to source

StuartB

I managed to get as far as 1300 without too much difficulty, luckily I'm aware of the existence and usage of letters like thorn, eth, and wynn ( I'm a big fan of thorn, and would like to bring it back. I just wish the keyboard on my phone had it!), and managed to figure out the usage of that runic character without too many problems.
Parts of 1200 were just about readable, as were small bits of 1100, but anything beyond that was pretty much incomprehensible.
I think a lot of British people might find an audio version easier, as it would probably sound more like certain dialects that are still common today.
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