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Posted by spzb 3 days ago

How far back in time can you understand English?(www.deadlanguagesociety.com)
545 points | 292 commentspage 8
darkhorn 11 hours ago|
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.
7bit 12 hours ago||
> 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.

KPGv2 12 hours ago||
1200 is where I can't anymore. This was interesting. I expected it to be about there. I'm a highly educated native speaker (i.e., well above median vocabulary) with some French and a lot of German, plus understanding of orthographic changes.

I'm expecting that's true of a lot of people who meet my description, and my guess is university graduates not in STEM can read 1300 without issue (same as me), and certainly every native speaker with a college degree can read 1400. (Edit: FWIW I'm thinking here of how I can read Chaucer, and how I couldn't in 9th grade when I was introduced to him)

1200 I had to focus insanely hard and make guesses and circle back once I'd gotten more context to the words I couldn't read.

FergusArgyll 14 hours ago||
> of whom I hadde herd so muchel and knewe so litel.

We need to bring muchel back

shevy-java 16 hours ago||
Now now slow down - still struggling with modern English here ...
good-idea 20 hours ago||
How far into the future is my concern
iso1631 19 hours ago|
I'm heading to Stornoway next week, I don't hold out much hope
pixelsub 18 hours ago||
Ask an Indian haha :)
pbhjpbhj 18 hours ago||
I don't know what your problem is, your comments so far are all low effort and not really contributing to the conversation.

Your language is not acceptable here.

If you're not already shadow-banned I suspect that's the way you're heading.

Have a word with yourself. (A British idiom, meaning to consider what you're doing, particularly in terms of morality and cultural acceptability.)

decremental 17 hours ago||
[dead]
WalterGR 18 hours ago||
What would they say?
metalman 20 hours ago||
the experience of grendle in the original flashing between comprehensibility and jumbled letters is as far back as I have gone, but I read everything truely ancient that I can get my hands on from any culture in any language(translated) and try and make sense of it best as I can
rhdunn 20 hours ago|
I can comprehend most of the text back to 1300, if slower than Modern/Present Day English. It helps to know the old letter forms, and some of how Shakespearean (Early Modern), Middle, and Old English work. It also helps sounding it out.

Past that, I'm not familiar with Old English enough to understand and follow the text.

antonvs 18 hours ago||
Knowing a bit of German or Dutch helps as well.

I posted my amateur translation of 1200 here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47102874

At first it stumped me, but I spent some time on it and it started to become intelligible. I didn't look up any words until after I was done, at which point I looked up "uuif" (woman/wife) since I wanted to know what manner of amazing creature had saved the protagonist :D

dhosek 18 hours ago||
Knowing that W is a late addition to the alphabet and would have been written UU or VV suddenly makes uuif obvious.
antonvs 18 hours ago||
I could intuit the pronunciation but I didn’t make the connection from “wif” to “woman” in general. In hindsight I should have, after all we have words like “midwife” which doesn’t refer to a person’s actual married partner.
Symbiote 16 hours ago|||
"Wif" meant woman at the same time that "wer" meant man and "man" meant person.

Man changed to mean only a male person, and we lost wer except in the word "werewolf".

remyp 18 hours ago|||
I’m a native English speaker and I think this is an easier jump if you know other Romance languages. In Spanish and Portuguese “woman” and “wife” are often the same word, “mujer” and “mulher” respectively.
DonaldFisk 16 hours ago||
Also French femme. It isn't limited to Italic languages either. There's also German Frau, Dutch vrouw, Irish bean.
dhosek 14 hours ago||
Czech žena
jmclnx 19 hours ago||
It will be interesting on how texting will change things down the road. For example, many people use 'u' instead of 'you'. Could that make English spelling in regards to how words are spoken worse or better then now ?
antonvs 18 hours ago|
> worse or better then now?

*than.

Which I realize is an ironic correction in this context. I wonder if we'll lose a separate then/than and disambiguate by context.

dhosek 18 hours ago||
I’d say we’ve already partly lost separate then/than. It’s sort of like how you can sometimes tell second-language speakers of a language because their grammar is much more precise than a native speaker’s would be (I have a vague notion that native French speakers tend to use third person plural where the textbooks inform French learners to use first person plural, but I’m too lazy to open another tab and google for the sake of an HN comment).
teo_zero 18 hours ago||
You can tell second-language speakers because they know when to use "its" and "it's".
dhosek 14 hours ago|||
Thanks to having kids, I ended up reliving lots of details from my own K-3 education and one of the things I clearly remember was coming up with my own mnemonic of remembering its vs it’s by comparing those to his vs he’s.
NooneAtAll3 14 hours ago|||
and knowing how to count to 1 to not use "they" xD
dhosek 11 hours ago||
“they” as a non-gendered singular pronoun dates back hundreds of years.
SoftTalker 6 hours ago|||
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 one person was being discussed.

I suppose one could go back and look at popular style guides from the 1980s and 1990s and see if they endorsed it.

ksenzee 4 hours ago||
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.
NooneAtAll3 2 hours ago|||
thankfully, "the enemy can't disseminate bad grammar on the internet if you disable his hand!" =)
constantcrying 17 hours ago|
I have an edition of the Nibelungenlied, which presents a modern German translation right next to a version of the original text. While the original is somewhat difficult to understand there is an amazing continuity between the two.

To me this made it clear that the German Nation has been clearly defined over the last thousand years and just how similar the people who wrote and enjoyed that work are to the native Germans right now. Can only recommend people do something like that if they want to dispel the delusion that people of your Nation who lived a thousand years ago were in any way fundamentally different from you.

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