How far back in time can you understand English?

Should be "how far back in time can you read English?" The language itself is what is spoken and the writing, while obviously related, is its own issue. Spelling is conventional and spelling and alphabet changes don't necessarily correspond to anything meaningful in the spoken language; meanwhile there can be large changes in pronunciation and comprehensibility that are masked by an orthography that doesn't reflect them.

If you want to improve your score, the blog author (Dr. Colin Gorrie) has just the thing: a book which will teach you Old English by means of a story about a talking bear. Here's how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZhlWdVvZfw . Your dream of learning Old English has never been closer: get Ōsweald Bera https://colingorrie.com/books/osweald-bera/ today.

Well, for a native speaker of Dutch who doesn't speak English at all (not many left since my grandmother died in 2014), I'd say old English is actually easier to read than modern - starting around 1400.

Around 1000, English and Dutch must have been mutually understandable.

The other difficulties with older texts is not just the different spellings or the now arcane words - but that the meaning of some of those recognisable words changed over time. C.S. Lewis wrote an excellent book that describing the changing meanings of a word (he termed ramifications) and dedicated a chapter to details this for several examples including ‘Nature’, ‘Free’ and ‘Sense’. Would highly recommend a read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_in_Words

Really interesting! Somewhat reminds me of the ending of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls", where the main character, a scion of a very old family which has done some really bad things, goes mad and progressively starts speaking in older and older versions of English after every sentence.

I can read back to 1500, but 1400 reads like a different language. To be fair this quite remarkable, given:

> Before the mid 1700s, there was no such thing as standardized spelling.

It felt like it was become more Germanic, and that appears true:

> The farther back you go, the more the familiar Latinate layer of English is stripped away, revealing the Germanic core underneath: a language that looks to modern eyes more like German or Icelandic than anything we’d call English.

Simon Roper has a spoken equivalent for Northern English -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Zqn9_OQAw.

Their long S is really annoying, although truthfully I generally am unfamiliar with the long s in modern fonts so I don't KNOW if it really looks worse than it needs to, but I feel it looks worse that it needs to and that makes it harder, for example I thought lest at first was left and had to go back a couple words after.

Anyway as I know from my reading history at 1400 it gets difficult, but I can make it through 1400 and 1300 with difficulty, but would need to break out the middle English dictionaries for 1200 and 1100. 1000 forget it, too busy to make that effort.

1400 seems fine except for the one big hurdle being "Þ", which I feel like I'd seen at some point but did not recall. ("ȝ" is useful but that's somewhat easier to guess and not too critical. "ſ" is also easy to guess and I'd seen it before.)

1300 is noticeably harder and needs some iterative refinement, but once you rewrite it, it's surprisingly not too bad:

> Then after much time spoke the master, his words were cold as winter is. His voice was the crying of rauenes(?), sharp and chill, and all that heard him were adrade(?) and dared not speak.

> "I deem thee(?) to the(?) death, stranger. Here shall you die, far from thy kin and far from thine own land, and none shall known thy name, nor non shall thy biwepe(?)."

> And I said to him [...]

1200 is where I can't understand much... it feels like where the vocabulary becomes a significant hurdle, not just the script:

> Hit(?) is much to saying all that pinunge(?) hie(?) on me(?) uroyten(?), all that sore(?) and all that sorry. No scar(?) is never hit(?) forgotten, not uuhiles(?) is libbe(?).

It gets exhausting to keep going after these :-) but this was very fun.

Very neat! My native language is Russian. I could understand it pretty well up to 1300, then only about 40% of the 1200 section (not at all the beginning, but the last paragraph was easier), then quite little after that - though I understood enough to glean that there was some woman who had showed up that caused the Master to flee.

I really got into reading Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" (about 1497) about a year ago, and I suspect that really helped me with this exercise, since he uses some language that was archaic even back then.

I really wish there was an audio recording of this story. I found the spellings in the earlier years more and more confusing.

I recently skimmed a grammar of Faroese [0]. Not much has been written about the language in English; only a few books, and an English-Faroese dictionary was only first published in the 1980s.

It's spoken by about 50,000 people in the Faroe Islands, which are between Iceland and Scotland. The isles were settled by Viking-era Norse about a thousand years ago and then largely forgotten by the rest of the world. But they kept speaking their version of Old Norse and it became its own language. There are many dialects and the writing system was designed to cover all of them, so it is is etymologically informed by Old Norse and it is very conservative. It's not at all indicative of how it's really pronounced. The written form is somewhat even mutually intelligible with Icelandic / Old Norse, but the spoken language is not.

Underneath those æ and ð is a language that is oddly similar to English, like parallel convergent evolution. It's a North Germanic language not a West Germanic language so the historical diversion point is about 1500 years ago.

But it has undergone an extensive vowel shift (but in a different pattern). And also like English, it has also undergone extensive affrication (turned into ch/j) of the stop consonants and reduction of final stops and intervocalic stops. It has the same kind of stress - vowel reduction interaction that English has. That further heightens the uncanny effect.

I came away with the impression that it is English's closest sibling language, aside from Dutch. Some vocabulary:

broðir "broh-wer" (brother), heyggjur "hoy-cher" (hill/height), brúgv "brukf" (bridge), sjógvar/sjós "shekvar/shos" (sea), skyggj "skooch" (sky/cloud), djópur "cho-pur" (deep), veðirinn "ve-vir-uhn" (weather). Rough pronunciations given between quotes; all examples are cognate with English!

There's an extended story reading by a native speaker here [1] if you want an example of what it sounds like. No idea what they're saying. The intonation reminds me a bit of the northern British isles which also had a Norse influence.

[0] https://annas-archive.org/md5/4d2ce4cd5e828bbfc7b29b3d03349b...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSXu2fuJOTQ

Repost of an earlier comment of mine.

This is something I struggle with on a semi-regular basis since I'm fairly interested in our constitutional history, so documents like the Bill of Rights 1688/9[1], the Petition of Right 1627[2], etc, are not old or illegible enough to have been given modern translations (like the Magna Carta 1297[3]). As such, they can be difficult reads, particularly with their endless run-on sentences. Punctuation seems to have not been invented yet either.

- [1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/WillandMarSess2/1/2/enact...

- [2] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Cha1/3/1/enacted

- [3] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Edw1cc1929/25/9

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).

Seems to be heavily focused on orthography. In 1700s we get the long S that resembles an F. In 1600 we screw with the V's and U's. In 1400, the thorn and that thing that looks like a 3 appears. Then more strange symbols show up later on as well.

1500 is the threshold I think. I don’t understand 1400. I can go a bit further back in my mother tongue, but 1200 is definitely tough for me.

I really think that the onset of mobile device communication will be a major pillar in the history of the English language. lol / crash out / unalive / seggs / aura

> 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

Excellent essay.

To those who enjoyed it so much as to come here and read these comments, I'd suggest to fetch a copy of David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas", and appreciate the multiple style changes between the various sections.

no cap u need to b like so unc 2 read this I finna yeet my phone like who even reads I have siri English is lowkey chueggy anyway all my homies use emoji now bet

English is cooked fam. Gen Alpha’s kids are going to get lost at the 2000 paragraph.

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.

I read the whole thing and thought I had very little interest in this kind of thing. I'm not sure if the writing is exceptional, or if I was captured by the idea that the style would change as I read on. Maybe a bit of both, but either way, this was very interesting. I wonder, if a similar thing were done with hand writing, whether many of us would be lost a lot sooner.

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 actually wonder about his conclusion that 50 years hence English will be unrecognizable.

There will be changes of course. Yet we are also more connected than ever, whereas the next town over would be a whole day trip in the past. The separation allows for more divergence.

Well, maybe if we get to Mars, differences might crop up again.

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.

A delightful exercise. Inference and phonetics alone got me back to ~1200 with probably a 90% hit rate. Then it just collapsed under me around 1100.

Honestly not a bad critical thinking exercise in general, for someone with language fluency. Much of it can be “worked out” just through gradual inference and problem-solving, and I’d be curious to see its results as a test for High Schoolers.

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...

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

Without even checking the article, presumably around 1067. Pre-Norman English was a VERY different language.

I can read until the 1300s, which is about what I expected. I encourage people to go search up historical newspaper archives from the 1700s though, because it becomes significantly harder to parse when you have little to no knowledge of the events, people or even culture of the time.

Reading Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct", and he has a section that shows how the Lord's Prayer has changed over the ages.

What's interesting is the one in use today - from the early 17th century - is not the most modern variant. There was another revision from the mid-19th century that fell out of favor because it sounded a bit off, less rhythmic, less sacred (ie. Kingdom -> Government).

Could they hunt down the werewolf wizard and defeat him or not?? I need to know how this ended.

If you enjoyed TFA, check out this excellent BBC tv doc (and companion book) with Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1XQx9pGGd0

Around 1300 to 1400. Some words were harder. But English isn't my first language either. So I guess that's alright. I guess I'd be fine in the 1500 in England. At least language wise.

Man when I read Adam Smith, that was a challenge. Not only is his Enlgish super archaic with all kinds of strange units, but he writes these incredibly long logically dense sentences.

A recent book which looks at this in an interesting fashion is _The Wake_ which treats the Norman Conquest in apocalyptic terms using a language markedly different and appropriate

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21023409-the-wake

That is superbly done. I can go further back than some here, 1300 is fine, 1200 I can mange okay, but 1100 takes real effort.

Would be curious to know from other HN readers: how far back can you understand written prose of your own language, assuming the writing system uses mostly the same letter or characters?

Medieval French, Middle High German, Ancient Greek, Classical Arabic or Chinese from different eras, etc.

an audible example:

https://loops.video/v/dxXFQREMjg

Well, I 100%'d Dark Souls, so surprisingly (or not) I can understand a lot of it.

At around 1200, Godzilla had a stroke

Is it weird that the 1900 style is closer to how I typically write than the first 2000 style? I'm not that old, am I?

> No cap, that lowkey main character energy is giving skibidi rizz, but the fanum tax is cooked so we’re just catching strays in the group chat, fr fr, it’s a total skill issue, periodt.

I'd say around 2020

1500

Dutch is 1400s English.

> of whom I hadde herd so muchel and knewe so litel.

We need to bring muchel back

In AA, they are coming out with a new addition of the Big book, using modern language, because apparently people are having a difficult time understanding language used in the 1940s.

For example, Bill W speaks about being trapped or surrounded by quicksand. Apparently, nobody today understands quicksand. So they remove the word quicksand.

I'm 44, and this makes me feel like an old man yelling at clouds.

I can get through 1300 with some effort, but from 1200 I get nothing. Just a complete dropoff in that one time frame.

This is cool, I love the concept.

I wonder how much our understanding of past language is affected by survivorship bias? Most text would have been written by a highly-educated elite, and most of what survives is what we have valued and prized over the centuries.

For instance, this line in the 1800s passage:

> Hunger, that great leveller, makes philosophers of us all, and renders even the meanest dish agreeable.

This definitely sounds like the 1800s to me, but part of that is the romance of the idea expressed. I wonder what Twitter would have been like back then, for instance, especially if the illiterate had speech-to-text.

It's probably roughly Elizabethan English (1600s).

I'd love to see actual, authentic material that was rewritten through the years. One possibility is a passage from the Bible, though that's not usual English. Another is laws or other official texts - even if not exactly the same, they may be comparable. Maybe personal letters written from or to the same place about the same topic - e.g., from or to the Church of England and its predecessor about burial, marriage, or baptism.

The author Colin Gorrie, "PhD linguist and ancient language teacher", obviously knows their stuff. From my experience, much more limited and less informed, the older material looks like a modern writer mixing in some archaic letters and expression - it doesn't look like the old stuff and isn't nearly as challenging, to me.

I am an ESL, but I can easily comprehend 1600. 1500 with serious effort.

Now now slow down - still struggling with modern English here ...

How far into the future is my concern

Ask an Indian haha :)

>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

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

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 ?

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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