It’s a thousand years of the English language, compressed into a single blog post.
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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
@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
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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
@Yogthos til 1200, which checks out, cuz I studied English evolution a lot during my degree. The 13th and 14th centuries were pretty major in that regard.
I studied Old English too, but uhhh that was a long time ago lol -
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
@yogthos That was great fun! I was good until about 1000, and then the Germanic structure was more than my Latin based brain could translate. (To be fair, I studied Middle English in uni, so I had an advantage.) Good to know our blogger is out there hunting the Master though.

🥳 -
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
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.
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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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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
@yogthos Really interesting. I noticed that you can pick up pronunciation clues from the later posts and apply them to the earlier ones.
So " miȝt" is "might".
1400 is reasonably readable.
1300 is quite fragmentary.
1200 is a mess.
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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
@yogthos Studying Anglo-Saxon in college helps

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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
@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…
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@yogthos Really interesting. I noticed that you can pick up pronunciation clues from the later posts and apply them to the earlier ones.
So " miȝt" is "might".
1400 is reasonably readable.
1300 is quite fragmentary.
1200 is a mess.
@oblate yeah 1200 was where I hit a wall
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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
@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.
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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
@yogthos back to the 1300s was ok. Then it got really hard. Helps being Scandinavian, it seems.
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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
@yogthos really struggled at 1200 but still got the message, didn't understand a thing at 1100.
(Non-native English speaker, though. Learned untill college) -
@yogthos really struggled at 1200 but still got the message, didn't understand a thing at 1100.
(Non-native English speaker, though. Learned untill college)@dremmwel 1200 was the cut off for me
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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
@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.
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@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
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@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 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?
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@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?
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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
@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.
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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
@yogthos @petrillic I was able to make it back to 1300, but 1200 really stumped me.