That was great, thanks for sharing! The þorn guy around Lemmy might learn from it a few more ways to be archaically misunderstood.
You mean Sân?
Yes, fâþer?
This was fun! Anyone know about the ſ character? How come in the 1600s it only sometimes seemed to take the place of s?
It was often used for “f” as well, specifically in print to save money.
Towards the end of the article, they explain the same thing was done with using “y” to replace the letters that make the “th” sound (ð and þ) so instead of “the” or “ðe” you got “ye”
I did better than I thought I would but by 1300 it was starting to get confusing.
And that’s just the reading part. Phonetic changes will make the spoken word unintelligible a bit ways before that.
Good thing I’m not a time traveler.
Oh no þis article has þe þorn character, nobody panic
Written English has been remarkably stable over the last 300 years
And yet the College Board will use the most incoherent journal entry that makes the westing game look like a picture book
Around 1200, I start having a little trouble, but I can still read most of it fairly well. 1100 is when I start to lose a lot of it, struggling through. 1000 is what I remember from trying to write papers on this stuff in University wherein I’d use translated copies side by side.
Maybe I can go back further than some others because I’m so damned old. 🤣
This is all quite interesting, but did the farmer really offer the traveler his lusty hens?
I was able to make it all the way to 1500 with no issues. I was lost at 1400 due to the unfamiliar lettering.
Just reading text isn’t really a fair representation of the English language as you go back to beyond the 14th century. The grammar remains pretty similar if you sound it out and most vocab is similar (or can be figured out by context clues).
The non-standardized spelling and premodern characters make it feel alien but it’s mostly someone with a heavy accent using phonetics to write [approximately] what they’re sounding like. I bet most people wouldn’t struggle if the text was massaged a bit.
Dear lord I did poorly lol. And I use to read some middle English books for school!
I got back to 1300 alright, but not 1200. But I had a bit of an odd upbringing - our houshold library for some reason had lots of British fiction from the 1700s/1800s and so I got a jump in obscure vocabulary. heh
As a person that is native Icelandic speaker, took Danish in school and speak Dutch it was really fun. I whish they kept going so it becomes more like Icelandic again.
Technically it’s more like Old Norse
Exactly, Icelandic is basically old norse with a spelling skin and different vocabulary. Most people take an least one class which involves reading old norse like Hávamál. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hávamál?wprov=sfla1
How similar? Here’s the first stanza of Hávamál translated by me just now. All the words are common. Other places like Snorra Edda is also easily readable although Snorri used less common words so there’s more vocabulary to memorise like “röðull” for sun and “gumi” for man.
Gattir allar, aþr gangi fram, vm scoðaz scyli, vm scygnaz scyli; þviat ouist er at vita, hvar ovinir sitia a fleti fyr[b]
Gáttir allar, áður gangi fram, um skoðast skal, um skyggnast skal: því að víst er að vita, hvar óvinir sitja á fleti fyrir.
I could understand more-or-less everything at 1300, got the gist of the story at 1200, and could make out some familiar roots and morphology from other languages at 1100 and 1000 but not enough to puzzle things together.
At a certain point it feels like reading math
I crap out at the 1200’s. Which is ironically how far back i can trace my paternal line
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4a9LfdavRlVMaSSWFdIciA
Rob words YouTube channel is amazing!
