alt Hacker NewsHow far back in time can you understand English?
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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.
> of whom I hadde herd so muchel and knewe so litel.
We need to bring muchel back
I am an ESL, but I can easily comprehend 1600. 1500 with serious effort.
Now now slow down - still struggling with modern English here ...
>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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It's probably roughly Elizabethan English (1600s).