What would happen if someone from the London of Chaucer’s era suddenly found himself in London 2003? Assume he’s relatively healthy but otherwise normal for his time (which I would assume would mean he’s one of London’s lower classes, and therefore illiterate). How well would he be understood and how well could he understand us? Would we need to quarantine him?
Just for fun, assume he ends up as a scientific curiosity instead of a street person.
(This was originally thought of as a linguistic question, but it has so much more potential.)
I would assume that he would need to be quarantined, for his health, and for ours. He wouldn’t have immunity to any of the nasty bugs we have floating around today, and would need vaccinations immediately. Nor would we necessarily be immune to his.
Also, he’d definitly need a bath, and dental care.
Obviously we could use Katisha as an interpreter…
although I expect that a real native speaker of Middle English would have some surprises for linguistics experts in the pronunciaton stakes-
pronunciation is stll changing today, so you could find that an mid14th C person would sound different to an early 13th C person, and very different to the way their speech has been reconstructed by today’s experts.
Every bacterium and virus this person carries will be separated from our own versions by hundreds of years of mutation, so quarantine is a good idea.
A small idea of the culture shock involved can be had from watching * Les Visiteurs*, a pretty good French comedy on the subject…
Well, the clip I read is from Chaucer, so it’s roughly the dialect we’re talking about it (East Midlands, late 14th century), though as noted the pronunciation is only approximated, and we would indeed probably be surprised if we had the chance to talk to a native speaker.
I’m told that to people who don’t know any Middle English, hearing the approximated version is semi-intelligible, depending on the speaker. It’d be interesting to imagine how it might sound the other way round…
