It’s a thousand years of the English language, compressed into a single blog post. Read it and notice where you start to struggle. Notice where you give up entirely.
https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-understand-english
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@yogthos at about 1300 it started needing active thought to translate bits. 1200 felt like i was missing details & nuances even if I could follow along. 1100 the following along wasn't certain. 1000 I got it less than I thought I did.
Knowing Scandinavian, having taken a couple of years of German back in school, and having some interest in linguistics sure did help.
@yogthos I lost track around 1300, but the Deepl automatic translator was able to make sense of all but the last sentence of the story.
@yogthos super intéressant, malheureusement je ne suis pas assez anglophone pour percevoir l'apparition des formules désuètes au XIX, XVIII, XVII siècles, ce serait bien d'avoir cela en français.
@yogthos back to the 1300s was ok. Then it got really hard. Helps being Scandinavian, it seems.
@yogthos Meh. You can make the whole thing more or less difficult depending on graphic conventions. Why use "ſ" for "s" for example? That was not a rule and it's not a difference in language just in typography. Both co-existed depending on the publisher. Same with handwritten "u" and "v" before printing.
Finally, between the 11th and 15th Centuries, English was not standardized at all.
This whole thing is more clickbait than anything accurate or historical.
@David if you bothered reading the discussion at the end, you'd actually see why they used the typography and could've saved yourself embarrassment
@yogthos Okay, I read the part where they mention the use of "ſ" and there is no justification for it, it's an artifice to make the English look older than it is or something like this. Why use "ſ" and not "st" to only mention this one?
@David the justification for it is to illustrate how things were commonly written, I think you really gotta work on that reading comprehension of modern English before criticizing their examples from 1500s 🤣
@yogthos What embarrassment? Why should I read the thing til the end if I find it unsound?
Also, why the aggressive tone? Oh yes, sorry, we're on social media, where one can't disagree with someone without making it personal. I thought we were supposed to be better than that here. No?
@David why should I read something I intemd to criticize says the intellectual in my replies
@yogthos I gave up after 1400, which, as an ESL person who didn’t get the benefit of covering Chaucer in high school, I think is pretty good…
@yogthos Studying Anglo-Saxon in college helps ;-)
https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-understand-english
schön! Das hätte ich jetzt gern auch mal in deutsch.
Weil wir in diesem Land ja so viele Sprachreinhalter haben, die bei der kleinsten Änderung losheulen, aber die meisten davon keinen blassen Schimmer davon haben, wie viel sich in unserer Sprache bewegt hat und sich weiter bewegen wird.
@yogthos
1300 was like OK it takes time to map the letters, and then to read the word fast out loud to make out some sense, but 1200 totally killed me: I thought wait is there a second wolf now? Like, dude you literally just saw her and she's already a "uuif"? Cringe
@yogthos fantastic one. enlightening as well as sobering experiment.
would like that in other languages.
@yogthos I was able to manage until 1500. After that it was like reading a foreign language.
@samebchase I could still kinda make it out by 1400, but 1200 was where I hit a wall, it's like a whole different language all of a sudden