[HN Gopher] How far back in time can you understand English?
___________________________________________________________________
How far back in time can you understand English?
Author : spzb
Score : 276 points
Date : 2026-02-18 14:56 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.deadlanguagesociety.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.deadlanguagesociety.com)
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| 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.
| 7v3x3n3sem9vv wrote:
| an audible example:
|
| https://loops.video/v/dxXFQREMjg
| leoc wrote:
| And here's the Simon Roper videos acknowledged in the article:
| "From Old English to Modern American English in One Monologue"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic (short version:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_pS3_c6QkI ). This runs
| forward rather than back in time. However, Roper's "How Far
| Back Can You Understand Northern English?"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Zqn9_OQAw does run backwards
| in time.
| metalman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Knowing that W is a late addition to the alphabet and would
| have been written UU or VV suddenly makes uuif obvious.
| antonvs wrote:
| 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.
| remyp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Also French femme. It isn't limited to Italic languages
| either. There's also German Frau, Dutch vrouw, Irish
| bean.
| dhosek wrote:
| Czech zena
| Symbiote wrote:
| "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".
| rhdunn wrote:
| Simon Roper has a spoken equivalent for Northern English --
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Zqn9_OQAw.
| petesergeant wrote:
| for a very specific dialect of Northern English. I struggled to
| understand much beyond 1950, and I had a good ear
| qingcharles wrote:
| LOL I'm from Northern England and I tapped out ~1850.
|
| I remember my father and I having to enable the subtitles for
| Rab C Nesbitt when I was a kid. There are areas of Scotland
| (especially the isles) which are probably still unintelligible
| to most of the British population I would wager.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| He has a spoken one that isn't Northern English specific too:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic
|
| "From Olde English to Modern American English in One Monologue"
| good-idea wrote:
| How far into the future is my concern
| iso1631 wrote:
| I'm heading to Stornoway next week, I don't hold out much hope
| dddgghhbbfblk wrote:
| 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.
| dhosek wrote:
| Indeed, I remember being in Oxford in the 90s and an older man
| approached me and spoke to me _in English_ and I couldn't
| understand a word he said. My ex-wife, who's an ESL speaker who
| speaks fluently and without an accent has trouble with English
| accents in general. Similarly, in Spanish, I find it's
| generally easier for me to understand Spanish speakers than
| Mexican speakers even though I learned Mexican Spanish in
| school and it's been my primary exposure to the language.
| Likewise, I generally have an easier time understanding South
| American speakers than Caribbean speakers and both sound little
| like Mexican Spanish. (The Spanish I understand most easily is
| the heavily accented Spanish of non-native Spanish speakers.)
|
| Accents have diverged a lot over time and as I recall, American
| English (particularly the mid-Atlantic seaboard variety) is
| closer to what Shakespeare and his cohort spoke than the
| standard BBC accent employed in most contemporary Shakespeare
| productions).
| JasonADrury wrote:
| I live in London, I can drive a little over an hour from
| where I live and hardly understand the people working at the
| petrol station. A few more hours and they start to speak
| French.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I have had to interpret between an Ulsterman and a South
| African, who were both speaking English. I think those
| accents have vowel shifted in opposite directions.
|
| I was also taught a bit of Chaucer (died 1400) in English at
| school. Although not any of the naughty bits.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| Having interpreted for a guy speaking with a broad
| Glaswegian accent on the east coast main line, I can
| totally believe this.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| > older man approached me and spoke to me in English and I
| couldn't understand a word he said
|
| like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc ?
| mock-possum wrote:
| Yeah it's really just the glyphs that are changing here, and
| occasionally the spelling, otherwise the words themselves are
| still fairly recognizable if you're well-read.
| gfto wrote:
| You can try this video to see how far back you can understand
| spoken English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Languages can change in many different ways. Pronunciation
| changes impede you a lot more the first time you meet someone
| with a different pronunciation than they do as you interact
| over time. Grammatical changes are trickier.
| BoredomIsFun wrote:
| I am an ESL, but I can easily comprehend 1600. 1500 with serious
| effort.
| Dwedit wrote:
| At 1400, they add in the thorn "th". If you don't know that's
| supposed to be "th", you'll get stuck there.
| BoredomIsFun wrote:
| No, not that. The endings are different, the verbs are
| substantially different. AFAIK invention of printing had
| generally stabilizing effect on English.
|
| It is not that I am incapable to understand old English, it
| is that 1600 is dramatically closer to modern than 1400 one;
| I think someone from 1600 would be able to converse at 2026
| UK farmers market with little problems too; someone from 1400
| would be far more challenged.
| dhosek wrote:
| Not to mention that there are pockets of English speakers
| in Great Britain whose everyday speech isn't very far from
| 17th century English. The hypothetical time traveler might
| be asked, "So you're from Yorkshire then, are you?"
| adrian_b wrote:
| The invention of printing had a stabilizing effect on all
| languages, at least of their written form, because for some
| languages, especially for English, the pronunciation has
| diverged later from the written form, but the latter was
| not changed to follow the pronunciation.
|
| I have read many printed books from the range 1450 to 1900,
| in several European languages. In all of them the languages
| are much easier to understand than those of the earlier
| manuscripts.
| reader9274 wrote:
| At around 1200, Godzilla had a stroke
| b112 wrote:
| Don't get the reference compared to the text in the article for
| that timeframe.
|
| Is there something specific in there?
| doctor_blood wrote:
| "Godzilla Had a Stroke Trying to Read This and Fucking Died"
| is a meme frequently posted in response to
| incomprehensible/extremely dumb posts.
| Dwedit wrote:
| 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.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| Orthography is probably the biggest stumbling block going back
| to the 1500s or 1400s , but that's really because the rest of
| the language has changed in vocabulary and style, but is still
| understandable. If you think the 1200 or 1100 entry are mostly
| orthographical changes then you are missing the interesting
| bits.
| saltcured wrote:
| I would prefer to see a version that was skillfully
| translated to modern orthography so that we could appreciate
| shifts in vocabulary and grammar.
|
| To me, it is nearly like trying to look at a picture book of
| fashion but the imagery is degraded as you go back. I'd like
| to see the time-traveler's version with clean digital
| pictures of every era...
| leoc wrote:
| 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 _Osweald
| Bera_ https://colingorrie.com/books/osweald-bera/ today.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Man, I really needed this when I was studying OE. I was trying
| to do the Alice in Wonderland book and an Oxford textbook but
| it was really a lot of work compared to other language learning
| (even compared to Latin). This would have made it a lot more
| fun.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| The link above mentions Orberg who did something similar for
| Latin (Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, ebook and audiobook),
| which I've read through with good success. It's known as the
| immersive Orberg method after him.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| The Orberg method is great, I wish more languages had media
| utilizing it.
| aeve890 wrote:
| > 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
| BadBadJellyBean wrote:
| 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.
| Sharlin wrote:
| In 1500 a lot of pronunciation would've been different too, it
| was in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift [1]. And of course
| while the UK is still (in)famous for its many accents and
| dialects, some nigh mutually unintelligible, the situation
| would've been even worse back then.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
| dhosek wrote:
| Or as I've heard it described humorously, the Big Vowel
| Movement.
| BadBadJellyBean wrote:
| I'd assume I'd be able to adapt. Might take a little while
| bit seems comprehensible.
| jmclnx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You can tell second-language speakers because they know
| when to use "its" and "it's".
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| and knowing how to count to 1 to not use "they" xD
| dhosek wrote:
| 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.
| WillAdams wrote:
| 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
| inglor_cz wrote:
| There is an interesting review of _The Wake_ on the PSmiths
| literary substack:
|
| https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/guest-review-the-wake-by-paul-k...
| WillAdams wrote:
| That has moved it out of a wish list and into my cart for my
| next purchase.
|
| Makes me wonder what J.R.R. Tolkien would have thought of
| this.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| If you go far enough down the Psmiths' online rabbit hole,
| you'll find (via footnote 7) some speculation on that.
| Tolkien was apparently of the opinion that the Norman
| Conquest was a Very Bad Thing for English historical
| language and culture, hence his frequent references and
| allusions to Anglo-Saxon mythology. It sounds like he would
| have been a fan of The Wake as described here.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| 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.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Shakespeare is a definite barrier.
| delecti wrote:
| I normally don't use a "voice" in my head when reading, but
| doing so is invaluable when reading Shakspeare. If I can't
| "hear" what I'm reading, it's much harder to parse.
| throwaway3060 wrote:
| I can get through 1300 with some effort, but from 1200 I get
| nothing. Just a complete dropoff in that one time frame.
| antonvs wrote:
| I was able to get the gist of 1200, with some effort. By
| paragraph:
|
| P1: Unclear, but I think it's basically saying there is much to
| say about all that happened to him.
|
| [Edit: the more I stare at it, the more sense it makes. "There
| is much to say about all that ? was wrought on me, ???. I shall
| never forget it, not while I live!"]
|
| P2: Unexpectedly, a woman ("uuif", wife) appeared at "great
| speed" to save him. "She came in among the evil men..."
|
| P3: "She slaughtered the heathen men that pinned me,
| slaughtered them and felled them to the ground. There was blood
| and bale enough and the fallen lay still, for [they could no
| more?] stand. As for the Maister, the [wrathe?] Maister, he
| fled away in the darkness and was seen no more."
|
| P4: The protagonist thanks the woman for saving him, "I thank
| thee..."
|
| On first reading, I didn't know what "uuif" was. I had to look
| that one up.
| adrian_b wrote:
| That older spelling is the reason why "w" is called "double
| u".
|
| Had the word been written "wif", I don't think that there
| would have been any need for you to search the word, as the
| relationship with "wife" would have been obvious.
|
| Between then and now, in this word only the pronunciation of
| "i" has changed, from "i" like in the European languages to
| "ai".
| antonvs wrote:
| Also I loved this little discovery, from 1300:
|
| > "The euele man louy, whan that he sawe my peine, and it was
| a crueel louyter, withouten merci or pitee as of a man that
| hath no rewthe in his herte."
|
| "The evil man laughed, when he saw my pain, and it was a
| cruel laughter, without mercy or pity as of a man that has no
| rewthe in his heart."
|
| In other words, a rewthe-less man.
|
| We've retained the word "ruthless" but no longer use the word
| "ruth", "a feeling of pity, distress, or grief."
| ajb wrote:
| Yeah same. The explanation at the bottom is interesting, lots
| of the words imported from Normandy drop off then, and the
| grammar changes more significantly.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| I think people see "The blog ends there. No sign-off, no
| "thanks for reading."" and stop reading everything after that
| xD
| MrDrDr wrote:
| 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
| ilamont wrote:
| 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.
| fooker wrote:
| This is, roughly, a measure of how old your civilization is.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| For square Hebrew (Assyrian) you can go back for about 2000
| years. So for example Dead Sea scrolls are fairly readable. But
| old classical Hebrew impossible.
| e-khadem wrote:
| People read Shahname[1] regularly in Iran, and it was written
| at around 1000 CE, but there isn't much before 900 CE that is
| comprehensible to a modern day Persian speaker.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh
|
| _The Shahnameh is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet
| Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 CE and is the national epic of
| Greater Iran. Shahnameh is one of the world 's longest epic
| poems, and the longest epic poem created by a single author._
| idoubtit wrote:
| Most European people know about Odysseus, but few have read
| Homer, even in translation.
|
| I one met a visiting Iranian academic just after I'd learned
| about the Shahnameh. I'd also read the opinion of a French
| scholar who thought its language was, for a modern Iranian,
| like Montaigne for a modern French. The Iranian woman told me
| that very few people in Iran actually read the book. It's
| very long, and hard to grasp for untrained readers. But most
| people know some of its stories and characters, because they
| are often mentioned in everyday life, and because the
| abridged prose books are widespread.
|
| BTW, I don't know which editions are the most popular in
| Iran. Wikipedia says the Shahnameh was heavily modified and
| modernized up to the 14th century, when its most famous
| illustrated edition was created. The book most read today is
| probably not a scholar edition.
| cenamus wrote:
| If you're interested you can read up on language change (and
| glottochronology, although that's a bit controversial now), and
| the Swadesh lists.
|
| In general, language changes around at the same rate all over
| history and geography, barring some things (migration,
| liturgical languages)
| idoubtit wrote:
| I think it depends a lot on the history of the language. My
| native language is French, and since long ago various
| authorities try to normalize and "purify" the language. This is
| why the gap between spoken French and written French is so
| wide. Now my experience as an avid reader...
|
| Books written in the 17th century or later are easy to read. Of
| course, the meaning of some words can change over time but
| that's a minor trouble. I believe Moliere and Racine are still
| studied in school nowadays, but the first name that came to my
| mind was Cyrano de Bergerac (the writer, not the fictitious
| character).
|
| Books from the 16th need practice, but I think anyone who tries
| hard will get used to the language. I enjoyed Rabelais's
| Pantagruel and Gargantua a lot, and I first read them by myself
| when I was in highschool (I knew a bit of Latin and Greek,
| which helped).
|
| Before that, French was much more diverse; the famous split
| into "langue d'oc" and "langue d'oil" (terms for "oui" -- yes
| -- at the time) is a simplification, because there were many
| dialects with blurry contours over space and time.
|
| I've read several 11th-12th novels about the Round Table, but I
| was already experienced in Old French when I started, and I
| think most readers would struggle to make sense of it. It may
| depend on the dialect; I remember "Mort Artur" was easier than
| "Lancelot, le chevalier a la charette".
|
| "La chanson de Roland" (11th century, Old French named anglo-
| normand) is one of my favorite books of all times. Reading it
| for the first time was a long process -- I learned the
| declensions of Old French and a lot of vocabulary -- but it was
| also fun, like deciphering some mystery. And the poesy is a
| marvel, epic, incredibly concise, surprising and deep.
|
| Before that (9th-10th), Old French was even closer to Latin.
| riffraff wrote:
| In Italy we all study Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio in school,
| which are 1300, and it's quite easy to understand them beyond
| some unusual words. 1200 poetry is easy enough too.
|
| There's not much literature older than that, cause people
| preferred to write in Latin, the oldest bit in "volgare" is the
| Indovinello Veronese[0] which is from the 8th or 9th century
| and at that point it's almost latin spelling-wise, it's
| understandable if you're well educated but wouldn't be
| understandable by everyone.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronese_Riddle
| the_gastropod wrote:
| I'm studying Chinese (Taiwanese style, so traditional
| characters), and my understanding is anything back to about the
| Han Dynasty (~200 BCE) is intelligible to an educated Chinese
| speaker.
|
| Resiliency is one of the weird beneficial side-effects of
| having a writing system based on ideas instead of sounds.
| Today, you've got a variety of Chinese dialects that, when
| spoken, are completely unintelligible to one another. But
| people who speak different dialects can read the same book just
| fine. Very odd, from a native English speaking perspective.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| Written Chinese stayed the same while the spoken language
| evolved from the 5th century BC until the 1911 revolution,
| after which people began writing Chinese the way it's spoken in
| Beijing. So there's a sharp dividing line just over 100 years
| ago; Literary Chinese is still taught in school but without
| that you'd have trouble understanding it.
| mmooss wrote:
| 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.
| dhosek wrote:
| Some early English translations of the Bible were
| unintentionally comical, e.g., "and Enoch walked with God and
| he was a lucky fellowe."
|
| Of course that's not limited to the 16th century. The Good News
| Bible renders what is most commonly given as "our name is
| Legion for we are many" instead as "our name is Mob because
| there are a lot of us." In my mind I hear the former spoken in
| that sort of stereotypical demon voice: deep with chorus
| effect, the latter spoken like Alvin and the Chipmunks.
| npilk wrote:
| 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.
| opengrass wrote:
| 1500
|
| Dutch is 1400s English.
| englishrookie wrote:
| 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.
| dboreham wrote:
| My experience traveling to the Netherlands as an English
| speaker is that people are speaking English, but they're drunk!
| phpnode wrote:
| When they seamlessly switch from English to Dutch I feel like
| I'm having a stroke: all the same intonation, the same
| accent, but nothing makes sense any more
| mattmanser wrote:
| That doesn't jive with my experience at all. I'm half-
| dutch, raised in England.
|
| Dutch doesn't have the same intonation, has harsher
| pronunciations, and has a whole extra sound most English
| people struggle with (a rolled r).
|
| The older generations also can't pronounce -thew very well
| as it's not a thing in Dutch, so struggle to pronounce my
| name, calling me Matchoo instead of Matthew. It still
| boggles my mind that my Mum would pick a name the Dutch
| can't pronounce.
|
| The Dutch accent is also extremely noticeable to a native
| English speaker.
|
| Ultimately, they're not the same at all as English is
| Germanic/Latin hybrid where half the words are
| French/Italian words, and half the words are Germanic/Dutch
| words.
|
| Dutch is not.
|
| You can usually tell by looking at the word and the end of
| the word.
|
| Words like fantastic, manual, vision, aquatic, consume are
| all from -ique, -alle, -umme and will have similar words in
| French/Italian. The tend to be longer words with more
| syllables.
|
| Words like mother, strong, good, are Germanic in root. The
| -er, -ong, -od words will all be similar to the
| German/Dutch words. Shorter, quicker to pronounce.
| jakevoytko wrote:
| As someone who took German in high school, Dutch had my brain
| flailing for vocabulary to understand but nothing connected.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| There's a meme about how Dutch doesn't seem like a serious
| language to English speakers, and what's funnier is Dutch
| speakers trying to figure out why it's so funny to English
| speakers.
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/english-to-dutch-translations
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| What accent did you read it in? Vlaams? Gronings?
| englishrookie wrote:
| I don't have a voice in my head when I read. Knowledge of
| West-Fries helps though.
| vaylian wrote:
| A native Frisian speaker would probably have an even easier
| time, given that Frisian is the closest language to English.
| However, Frisian is still more similar to other west-germanic
| languages than English.
| trueismywork wrote:
| I am Indian. I read easily to 1400. But then 1300 is suddenly
| difficult to read
| Gander5739 wrote:
| I speak English natively. I read to 1400 without difficulty,
| read 1400 and 1300 with some sruggle, and found beyond that
| it was largely unintelligible; I can understand maybe 1 in 3
| words.
| riffraff wrote:
| Italian here, and it was the same for me, the language feels
| very different by 1300.
|
| Which is interesting cause 1200 italian[0] seems pretty
| readable by everyone who can read italian (and likely every
| other romance language), you have to go further back to have
| a shift.
|
| [0] E.g. Saint Francis' Canticle of the Sun
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canticle_of_the_Sun
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > it was the same for me, the language feels very different
| by 1300.
|
| The language in section 1300 isn't much different from
| section 1400. Almost all of it is still good English today
| if you give the words their modern spelling:
|
| _Then after much time spoke the Master, and his words were
| cold as winter is. His voice was as the crying of ravens,
| sharp and shrill, and all that heard him were adread and
| durst not speak._
|
| _" I deem1 thee to the death, stranger. Here shalt thou
| die, far from thy kin and far from thine own land, and none
| shall know thy name, nor none shall thee beweep."_
|
| _And I said to him, with what boldness I might gather,
| "Why farest thou with me thus? What trespass have I wrought
| against thee, that thou deemst1 me so hard a doom?"_
|
| "[Swie!]"2 _quoth he, and smote me with his hand, so that I
| fell to the earth. And the blood ran down from my mouth._
|
| _And I_ [swied],2 _for the great dread that was come upon
| me was more than I might bear. My heart became as stone,
| and my limbs were heavy as lead, and I []3 might no more
| stand nor speak._
|
| _The evil man laughed, when that he saw my pain, and it
| was a cruel laughter, without mercy or pity as of a man
| that hath no_ [rewthe]4 _in his heart._
|
| _Alas! I should never have come to this town of
| Wolvesfleet! Cursed be the day and cursed be the hour that
| I first set foot therein!_
|
| 1 We still have this word in modern English, but the
| meaning is different.
|
| 2 No idea what this word is.
|
| 3 I assume the _ne_ in the text here is required by some
| kind of grammatical negative agreement with the rest of the
| clause. In more modern (but still fairly archaic) English,
| nothing goes here. In actual modern-day English, the
| grammar of this clause isn 't really available for use, but
| it's intelligible.
|
| 4 This turns out to be the element _ruth_ in _ruthless_ ,
| and a man with no ruth in his heart is one who is literally
| ruthless, without "ruth". It literally means "regret", but
| the use in the text clearly matches the metaphorical sense
| of the modern word _ruthless_.
| sokols wrote:
| Albanian, managed to understand till 1300. Then it gets more
| germanic i think, though I speak a bit of German as well, the
| characters make it a bit difficult to parse.
|
| "Swie!" is interesting, I understood it somehow naturally. In
| Gheg Albanian we say "Shuj!", which means "Be silent!".
| rapidfl wrote:
| tried to read Prince and I assume it is a translation to
| English from Italian or whatever.
|
| Assuming that translation was done a while ago (100+ yrs?)...
| It is hard to read. I can understand it if I try. But the
| phrasing is not current. 100 pages will take double the time at
| the least.
|
| Almost think AI needs to rephrase it into current English.
|
| Probably has these double negatives, long sentences, etc.
| mmooss wrote:
| _Beowulf_ was discovered and translated by Grimur Jonsson
| Thorkelin, an Icelander who was National Archivist [0] in
| Denmark, researching Danish history in the British Library.
|
| [0] Or at the time promised the post, I don't remember the
| details.
| marssaxman wrote:
| I've often had the same thought coming from the other
| direction, as an English speaker learning Dutch for the past
| couple of years: I hear many little echoes in Dutch of archaic
| or poetic English forms.
| trelane wrote:
| Probably not a coincidence:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxons
| artyom wrote:
| Well, I 100%'d Dark Souls, so surprisingly (or not) I can
| understand a lot of it.
| sometimes_all wrote:
| 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.
| mhitza wrote:
| Thanks, that's such a great detail. I was reading Lovecraft
| during highschool in locally translated print editions. Where
| such details didn't come through.
|
| Do you know if there any other such language related eastereggs
| in other of Lovecraft's writing? should I chose to revisit
| them, in English this time around.
| pixelsub wrote:
| Ask an Indian haha :)
| WalterGR wrote:
| What would they say?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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.)
| n8cpdx wrote:
| 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.
| Arch485 wrote:
| fr fr, OP be cappin 2000 ain't English
| zamadatix wrote:
| Things like slang and casual registers always seem to move much
| faster but for some reason we assume it's always going to be
| the next set newer than how we'd write that will result in
| things going off the rails or resulting in it being the only
| speech understood by that generation.
|
| Lowkey though, let's keep it 100 and check it. Back in the day
| Millennials got totally ragged on for sounding all extra like
| this n' usin all sort of txting abbreviations early on 2. Yet
| they can still peep oldskool English just the same - talk about
| insane in the membrane, for real.
| logicchains wrote:
| "unc" can't be used as an adjective like that.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| 4 now imma trendsetter homie u b tripping
| teo_zero wrote:
| 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.
| stego-tech wrote:
| 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.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| 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.
| ksymph wrote:
| It exists! Showed up on HN a few months back:
| https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms
|
| Only from 1913-1946 though.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| Capital! That's one of the most interesting time periods.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's probably roughly Elizabethan English (1600s).
| rubee64 wrote:
| Thanks to RobWords [1] I at least remember thorn (Th)
| pronunciation and could mostly decipher 1400. Not much past that,
| though
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJxKyh9e5_A&t=36s
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| 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.
| BorisMelnik wrote:
| 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
| layer8 wrote:
| Since these occur primarily in ephemeral communication, it's
| unclear how much of a lasting influence there will be. It's
| also "only" vocabulary, to a limited degree orthography, and
| rarely grammar.
| 1bpp wrote:
| lowkey gives cultural collapse type vibes
| amarant wrote:
| 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?
| layer8 wrote:
| The 2000 sample was a bit exaggerated.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The difference between 1900 and 2000 seems to largely be the
| voice/intended audience changing rather than the language.
|
| I.e. the 2000s one is a casual travel blog style intended
| normally intended for any random quick reader and the 1900s one
| is more a mix of academic sounding/formal conversation intended
| for longer content. If you assume a more casual voice in the
| 1900s one and a more formal voice in the 2000s one I bet they'd
| even almost seem to be placed backwards chronologically.
| constantcrying wrote:
| 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.
| guerrilla wrote:
| 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.
| brandall10 wrote:
| 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).
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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
| zamadatix wrote:
| Not sure what you mean?
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| ironically, I think there's an epidemic of ai bots accusing
| everything of being ai-written here on hn
| coldtea wrote:
| That this kind of writing "The blog ends there. No sign-off,
| no "thanks for reading."" has tell-tale AI mannerisms
| poly2it wrote:
| My slopometer tells me an LLM would not by itself write
| something so concise, especially beginning with "the blog ends
| there".
| alamortsubite wrote:
| 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
| aardvark179 wrote:
| 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.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Hmm, I thought it wafnt fo bad, myfelf
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| oh my god, you're right, they just used an f, no wonder I
| found it so bad! That is really annoying. Enraging even.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I should have noticed, it has a full cross bar, I guess
| it's my fading eyesight and also the white text of green is
| perhaps not the best contrast.
| zamadatix wrote:
| It doesn't have such a bar in the article e.g. "swifter"
| https://imgur.com/a/XwsoVgB
| rhdunn wrote:
| The text doesn't use an `f`. If you copy from e.g. the 1700
| passage you get `s` not `f`.
| poly2it wrote:
| Probably people are confused by ligatures. Indeed it is a
| long S.
| krackers wrote:
| (function() { const SKIP_PARENTS = new Set(["SCRIPT",
| "STYLE", "NOSCRIPT", "TEXTAREA"]); const walker =
| document.createTreeWalker( document.body,
| NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT, { acceptNode(node)
| { const p = node.parentNode; if (!p
| || SKIP_PARENTS.has(p.nodeName)) return
| NodeFilter.FILTER_REJECT; if (p.nodeName ===
| "INPUT") return NodeFilter.FILTER_REJECT; return
| NodeFilter.FILTER_ACCEPT; } } );
| let node; while ((node = walker.nextNode())) {
| node.nodeValue = node.nodeValue.replace(/s/g, "s"); }
| })()
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| what?
| krackers wrote:
| That will replace the long-s with the standard s. You can
| do the same for the thorn.
| BobAliceInATree wrote:
| Interestingly I found the long s annoying and I had to think
| every time I saw it, but I quickly got used to and could read
| it naturally after a few paragraphs.
| dataflow wrote:
| 1400 seems fine except for the one big hurdle being "Th", which I
| feel like I'd seen at some point but did not recall. ("y" 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.
| ajross wrote:
| > adrade(?)
|
| "adread", meaning afraid
|
| Still a recognizable archaic word, constructed from a still-in-
| use root. Just the spelling is different.
| dataflow wrote:
| Ahh of course! Yeah I guess if I'd read the sentence a few
| more times it might have been possible to guess that too.
| Thanks!
| petesergeant wrote:
| > rauenes
|
| Ravens
| dataflow wrote:
| Amazing. Thanks!
| klondike_klive wrote:
| switch the double-u for a w. Uuhiles becomes "whiles" (or
| "while")
| krackers wrote:
| retvrn to tradition
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Damn I hate that I didn't catch on to why it made a w sound.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| I found it helped me to read it out loud in a pirate voice.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Ravens, adread (filled with dread), condemn you to your death
| (I think just an archaic usage of deem), beweep (none will weep
| for you, I think). I also hit a pretty hard wall at 1200.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Now now slow down - still struggling with modern English here ...
| dmurray wrote:
| > 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
| strawhatguy wrote:
| In fairness , Dickens is quite dry. My mind would wonder off.
|
| In some sense, it's better these days, competition has led to
| care for the reader that probably didn't exist as much then,
| since so few people can read.
| SkyeCA wrote:
| 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.
| Defletter wrote:
| 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
| bradley13 wrote:
| 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...
| tejohnso wrote:
| 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.
| Esn024 wrote:
| 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.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| audio would drop off slightly faster than text, due to vowel
| shift in 1400s
| strawhatguy wrote:
| 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.
| drdeadringer wrote:
| 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.
| snickerer wrote:
| Could they hunt down the werewolf wizard and defeat him or not??
| I need to know how this ended.
| Arubis wrote:
| Without even checking the article, presumably around 1067. Pre-
| Norman English was a VERY different language.
| loeg wrote:
| 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 "th" this
| article uses).
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| > of whom I hadde herd so muchel and knewe so litel.
|
| We need to bring muchel back
| retrac wrote:
| 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 ae and d 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:
|
| brodir "broh-wer" (brother), heyggjur "hoy-cher" (hill/height),
| brugv "brukf" (bridge), sjogvar/sjos "shekvar/shos" (sea), skyggj
| "skooch" (sky/cloud), djopur "cho-pur" (deep), vedirinn "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.
| bArray wrote:
| 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.
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