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

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@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?
@David why should I read something I intemd to criticize says the intellectual in my replies
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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 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.
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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 1200 I had to work hard at it. 1100 I think I got the gist? 1000 was incomprehensible.
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@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
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@yogthos @petrillic I was able to make it back to 1300, but 1200 really stumped 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
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)
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@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…
@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... -
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