Top
Best
New

Posted by spzb 3 days ago

How far back in time can you understand English?(www.deadlanguagesociety.com)
572 points | 314 commentspage 9
shevy-java 18 hours ago|
Now now slow down - still struggling with modern English here ...
good-idea 21 hours ago||
How far into the future is my concern
iso1631 21 hours ago|
I'm heading to Stornoway next week, I don't hold out much hope
pixelsub 20 hours ago||
Ask an Indian haha :)
pbhjpbhj 19 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 19 hours ago||
[dead]
WalterGR 20 hours ago||
What would they say?
metalman 22 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 21 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 20 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 20 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 20 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 18 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 19 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 17 hours ago||
Also French femme. It isn't limited to Italic languages either. There's also German Frau, Dutch vrouw, Irish bean.
dhosek 16 hours ago||
Czech žena
jmclnx 21 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 20 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 20 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 20 hours ago||
You can tell second-language speakers because they know when to use "its" and "it's".
dhosek 16 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 16 hours ago|||
and knowing how to count to 1 to not use "they" xD
dhosek 13 hours ago||
“they” as a non-gendered singular pronoun dates back hundreds of years.
SoftTalker 8 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 6 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 4 hours ago|||
thankfully, "the enemy can't disseminate bad grammar on the internet if you disable his hand!" =)
constantcrying 19 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.

decremental 21 hours ago||
[dead]
coldtea 18 hours ago||
>The blog ends there. No sign-off, no “thanks for reading.” Just a few sentences in a language that most of us lost the ability to follow somewhere around the thirteenth century.

Fucking AI slop, even this

poly2it 17 hours ago||
My slopometer tells me an LLM would not by itself write something so concise, especially beginning with "the blog ends there".
zamadatix 18 hours ago||
Not sure what you mean?
coldtea 16 hours ago|||
That this kind of writing "The blog ends there. No sign-off, no “thanks for reading.”" has tell-tale AI mannerisms
zamadatix 14 hours ago||
If you mean "The extremely modern style of voice used to provide contrast between the anachronistic end of the story and the review of the same is how LLMs also sound" the I agree. That style voice is, after all, exactly what most of the training content major LLMs are trained on will use.

If you mean "the usage of that voice implies the article itself is written by LLMs" then I strongly disagree. I'd eat my shoe if an article written this well were made by today's LLMs. Doubly so for an article from a linguistics PhD who was written similar content prior to LLMs.

NooneAtAll3 16 hours ago|||
ironically, I think there's an epidemic of ai bots accusing everything of being ai-written here on hn
mmumo 4 hours ago|
my girlfriend isn't ready for the mansplanning coming up tomorrow during dinner about this