It’s a thousand years of the English language, compressed into a single blog post.

@oblate yeah 1200 was where I hit a wall

@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.

@yogthos back to the 1300s was ok. Then it got really hard. Helps being Scandinavian, it seems.

@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

@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.

@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?

@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?

@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.

@yogthos @petrillic I was able to make it back to 1300, but 1200 really stumped me.

@David the justification for it is to illustrate how things were commonly written, I think you really gotta work on that reading comprehension of modern English before criticizing their examples from 1500s

@David why should I read something I intemd to criticize says the intellectual in my replies

@yogthos at about 1300 it started needing active thought to translate bits. 1200 felt like i was missing details & nuances even if I could follow along. 1100 the following along wasn't certain. 1000 I got it less than I thought I did.

Knowing Scandinavian, having taken a couple of years of German back in school, and having some interest in linguistics sure did help.

@yogthos 1200 I had to work hard at it. 1100 I think I got the gist? 1000 was incomprehensible.

@akamran I started hitting a wall at 1200, I could make out words, but I was guessing overall meaning at that point

@europlus @yogthos same here, and 1300 was REALLY a slog.

@yogthos
I've met thorn and the like before, I speak several European languages, know a smattering of Latin, and oi speaks Wiltshire. That saw me through the 1200's and then it fell off a cliff.

@david @yogthos yeah, beyond that I recognized a few words, but some of those I recognized from the time when I played a medieval nun on the internet

(I hand copied a text in Old English of which I had read a translation, so I had a vague idea of what was happening, but I couldn't exactly understand what I was copying in each individual sentence)

@bougiewonderland @yogthos Interesting !
I am not a native English speaker. Am I ? Not ? From the Netherlands, with German border 2 hrs drive East, traffic permitting. Saxon phrases on farms, shops ,spoken language.Going North just 0.5 hour entering Frisian language. Travelling with Julius Ceasar brought that mix to the Anglo-Saxon -parts of England. That is where I started to speak English. Trying to sort out Scottish, Welsh, Irish dialects. Even more now in Amsterdam. Double Dutch...