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.

> Somewhere in this section — and if you’re like most readers, it happened around 1300 or 1200 — the language crossed a boundary. Up to this point, comprehension felt like it was dropping gradually, but now it’s fallen off a cliff.

This is generous to his readers. Most American college students majoring in English can't read Dickens, according to a study discussed here last year [0].

People reading a post on a blog about dead languages are self-selected to be better at this task. But so are people who've decided to spend four years of their life studying English literature.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44070716

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.

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.

I dunno. I just learned what 'mogged' means 2 days ago. So probably not far.

Thanks to RobWords [1] I at least remember thorn (Þ) pronunciation and could mostly decipher 1400. Not much past that, though

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJxKyh9e5_A&t=36s

I can just about comprehend the 1500 stuff (that was also my experience attempting to read Chaucer during jury duty, though I don't remember Canterbury Tales having the 1400s "þ" this article uses).

I've been living in a non-English speaking country for 35 years or so. Although I read a lot, my English is still somewhat "frozen". I would still ask you if you have "mown" the lawn - a tense that is now almost lost. Many irregular verbs are becoming regular, I expect due to the large number of ESL speakers.

Language changes. It's weird to see it happening in front of you...

1700s English is like 1200s Turkish. It looks like English has evolved very much. 1500s English is kind of underdtandable for me but 1400s English is not underdtandable.