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.
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
At a certain point it feels like reading math
This is all quite interesting, but did the farmer really offer the traveler his lusty hens?
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
It was a good thread here too: https://lemmy.world/post/43447694
I guess the nature of the fediverse means that some post duplication is necessary for exposure coverage, lol, so who am I to accuse a repost of not suitably linking the source.
Seems to me that 1400 is harder than 1300.
That was great, thanks for sharing! The þorn guy around Lemmy might learn from it a few more ways to be archaically misunderstood.
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. 🤣
I muddled through the 1200s with context clues, and was still catching words in the 1100s, but gave up on the 1000s. It was too brutally yuele.
I would love to find an audio version to see how far I could get on spoken word alone. Being from the Appalachians, I’ve always been told our dialect is older.
Here is a similar thing in audio monologue:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4a9LfdavRlVMaSSWFdIciA
Rob words YouTube channel is amazing!
This was fun! Anyone know about the ſ character? How come in the 1600s it only sometimes seemed to take the place of s?
Some of the rules for the use of the long s from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
Long s was always used (ſong, ſubſtitute), except:
- Upper-case letters are always the round S; there is no upper-case long s.
- A round s was always used at the end of a word ending with ⟨s⟩: his, complains, ſucceſs
- However, long s was maintained in abbreviations such as ſ. for ſubſtantive(substantive), and Geneſ. for Geneſis(Genesis).
- Before an apostrophe (indicating an omitted letter), a round s was used: us’d and clos’d.
- Before or after an f, a round s was used: offset, ſatisfaction.
It looks almost like the old german “S”.
I was able to make it all the way to 1500 with no issues. I was lost at 1400 due to the unfamiliar lettering.
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.
1700 got a little hard and 1600 was mostly nonsense
