Just wondering how far languages diverge over time. How far back can we go before a modern English speaker would have real trouble making themselves understood?
Could a modern English speaker be understood by a speaker of Old or Middle English or are Old English and Middle English so different from modern english as to be virtually unintelligible if an Old or Middle English speaker was magically transported to the current era? How about Colonial English? Could I have a coherent conversation with Chaucer?
IIRC, it would depend on where you went as well. there were parts of England that were seperated by as little as 30 miles that had mutually unintelligible dialects of English.
It also would depend on what you’re defining as modern English- the written version, or one of the spoken Englishes-Ozzie Englishes, American Englishes, one of the many British Englishes.
The writings of Sir Thomas More (who died in 1535) are a breeze to read; there may be a word here and there you have trouble with, but you’ll at least get the jist of everything he says. The writings of Chaucer , who died in 1400, while still understandable in most parts, are significantly harder and much more of the nuance is lost and in some places require translation into modern English if you really want to grasp them. Based on this, I’d say you could safely go back to the Early Tudor era but before then you’re getting murky and by the time you reach the Plantaganets you’ll need an interpreter.
Um, Sampiro, of course that first link is a breeze to read – Utopia was originally written in Latin, and the translation you’ve linked to is dated 1901.
For a sample of More’s English writings, look here. It’s still easier going than Chaucer (although, of course, prose usually is easier than poetry), but definitely archaic-sounding.
Keep in mind that pronunciation has changed a great deal. I have no training in how to read Middle English but I managed to read “Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight” in ME and translate it to modern English fairly accurately. Reading, however, is much easier than listening to it and understanding it. The word “knight” originally had no silent letters in it. As it was spelled the same, you would still read it as “knight,” but hearing it spoken aloud with every letter pronounced, would you still understand?
We would have to presume an educated time-travler and an educated listener.
I would guess with those stipulations, the answer is pretty far back. Olde Time Englishe would have a honkin’ gruesome accent to our ears, but you can get used to that. Many of the basic nouns are unchanged.
(You would have a hard time explaining a laser to Edward I, but he could catch your drift about bread pretty well.)
Our time-traveller would be up and communicating in Old English by then of the week I should guess. More if we gave him some Latin and French to help him out before sending him off.
Being able to read something and being able to understand it spoken are not exactly the same thing. Old English (Anglo-Saxon) is generally taught as a foreign language, because it is difficult to parse and read, but you’d probably be amazed how much you’d pick up if you heard it spoken in an authentic voice.
I’ve taken a class on Medieval English Literature, and from what my professor told our class and what we read, it really isn’t that hard to get used to. Double vowels in writing meant that when the word was pronounced, the vowel sound would just last longer. There was also the great vowel shift that lead to English vowels sounding different from romance language vowels.
By the end of the semester, we were all reading Chaucer out loud with ease. Reading it silently is still hard for me though, because his spellings were all phonetic.
We also looked at the untranslated Beowulf text that came in one of our books, and I found that to be extremely difficult to hear or read and be able to understand it.
Well the Modern English period starts at 1500 (though of course early Modern English didn’t just come into being at this time) most things written after this time are pretty easy to understand as long as you adjust for the arcane language and variable spelling.
Chaucer is written in the East Midlands dialect of Middle English, the dialect which informed standard English and therefore Modern English the most, which makes him alot easier to understand than other contempary writers writing in different dialects:
I should add that both can be understood easier if you realize that the spelling is roughly phonetic. Also the second one can be better understood when you know that the ‘þ’ or ‘thorn’ can simply be viewed as a ‘th’.
Yes, ditto on the observation above: one can go as far as Modern English goes and still understand it; it’s somewhere in Middle English that it becomes difficult and, in Early Middle or Old, impossible to understand without help.
Yes, but you can still understand SOME middle English, dependent on the dialect and how far back in time it is. Old English is very difficult to understand due to the fact that the vocabulary is very different.
ps please ignore my previous post, it is most defintely the ‘thorn’, the eth is another old English character, from runic, which also approximates to ‘th’.
Yes, but the 1901 translation only changed two words from the original, which is a manuscript in my personal possession that’s been handed down in my family since 1535 when he gave it for safekeeping to my ggggggg-grandfather, Euthanasius Sampyrro of Ghyrle-on-Ghurl, with the specific request that it never be put onto the Internet. Now, because of your comments, I’m not going to show it to you.
