This is delightful fun: how far back in time can you understand English?

@alexhaist

Allas! I scholde neuer hauen icumen to þis toune of Wuluesfleete!

I know I should be able to read the 1100, and while finding I can read it aloud, the meaning of it has entirely escaped me in my dotage.

So 1200 is the last I can manage sensibly, and that much did I enjoy greatly.

@Gaptangle oh wow! I was thoroughly lost by then.

@danmccullough I wish you much joy of it! I love this sort of historical linguistic stroll.

@alexhaist At one point I had learned a chunk of German and a tiny bit of French, and don't recall enough of either now to have a conversation but some of the old structure is still sitting rusty in my brain. Comparing all of them and recognizing sources of phrasing or spelling can help with that if I have the Braille. Screenreaders of course with their modern English pronunciation rules wreck it all lol.

@alexhaist by 1600 I'm reading aloud out of necessity.
By 1300 I'm struggling.
1200 I can get the gist of with the help of my linguistics degree.
Past that it's all just German to me.

@dgold @alexhaist Wuluesfleet.
Now I'm wondering where the f in wolf came from. A little extra efficiency of speech? A borrowing of the p from Latin lupus? Whatever it is, I'm charmed by the idea that the word wolf used to be onomatopoeia.

@alexhaist
Thanks for posting! (I made it through 1400, with a smidgen of 1300’s.)

@alexhaist I'm fine as far as 1300, but further back is opaque. I find that those last couple of centuries, 1300 and 1400, become vastly more accessible if (a) written in modern orthography and (b) read aloud.

@alexhaist Wow. I barely read the 1500 text

My boyfriend however, an English philologist, recognised all the things he learned at the university!

@alexhaist
1200 is more guessing than reading.
🧝 : "The languages of humans are many, and they change faster than a dragon flies."

@alexhaist I was comfortable until 14/1300, but quickly zoned out around 12/1100 unless I was *really* focusing.

Caveat that I’m German/English bilingual with decades old linguistics studies behind me.

@alexhaist

This is excellent and yes, 1300 for me was when I tapped out

@WizardOfDocs @alexhaist

Well, Wuluesfleet would be pronounced Wulvesfleet...

so the plural wulves takes a singular wulv with a hard stop, which you can imagine scribes writing as WolF

EDIT: coming to partial memory of my englishianisms - it would be singular wuluv, making wolF almost inevitable

@alexhaist @danmccullough I'm kind of a dictionary, reference hoarder. Probably no surprise to some who follow me...

Came across "The English Dialect Dictionary" on Archive a few years ago. It's a six volume set. Kinda nifty if you're into this sort of stuff

https://archive.org/details/englishdialectdi0000jose_y6q6/page/n7/mode/2up

@alexhaist Thanks for sharing this, especially since it has this great explanation at the end about u and v etc...
As a non-native speaker I thought "Cool, 1900 is using more commas. Kinda like I'd do it in German". Then in 1800 I thought "woah, stop it with the commas please!"

@alexhaist

Just reminds me how badly I did with the relevant chapter of Ulysses, and how long I had to skim before I got to anything I could read.

@dgold @alexhaist awuuuuuuluv

@alexhaist

Thanks for posting this.

I finally got all of the 1300s. The word rewþe (reuth) was difficult. I suspected it meant compassion and that it's where our word ruthless comes from. I just looked it up and it is. My only real training in English is from reading Shakespeare and that helped.

@alexhaist

1300 - easy
1200 - work, possible
1100 - work, maybe 25-30% but only in parts; enough to fake a two sentence summary
1000 - hard work, maybe 15-20%; enough to feel like I should be able to understand more but not enough to fake a two sentence summary

@alexhaist
Not a native speaker but I think it helps that German is my mother tongue.