Sorry for the indecipherable title (due to truncation), but here’s my question–a question I’ve touched on in Cafe Society.
When first introduced to his writings, modern-day Americans generally have some difficulty understanding the Bard, who wrote circa 1600. But when I see movies that depict Jane Austin’s England (circa 1800), the language is 100 percent intelligible to me, and seemingly to the audience, as well.
Although my question invites a somewhat subjective answer, at about what point in history did this transformation occur? That is, at about what time in history did spoken/written English become so readily intelligible. Though I understand it was a gradual process, what spurred this process of simplification/modernization? The difference in just 200 years is tremendous. (Of course, Beowolf is another story…)
I don’t know how well I really trust the movies to accurately convey the style of speech of Jane Austen’s era. And most people may have trouble understanding Shakespeare’s language when they hear it, but most can puzzle through it if they get a chance to read it.
Look at the Declaration of Independence for an of a completely intelligible document.
I wouldn’t depend on a movie to show you how intelligible speech was in a given era either. Also Shakespeare isn’t that hard to understand, especially when you read it rather than listening to it. Its only the odd anachronistic word here and there that makes it difficult to understand.
I’m far from an expert (this knowledge is from a BBC documentary), but I think the biggest change in the english language (to modern ears anyway) occurred in the time between William the Conqueror invading Britain (1066AD) and a couple of hundred years later when english once again became the offical language of Britain. Pre 1066 english sounds and looks like german, its very difficult to get much meaning out of it. After 1066 english became a peasant’s language which was spoken, but not written down. This led to it simplifying massively, and taking in a lot of french words, so that by the time it was once again adopted as the language of nobility, the courts etc it had changed into something that sounds like modern english.
No argument on this point, but it’s also fairly self-evident.
Actually, my interest is post-Shakespeare. Aside from the BBC/British-produced films I’ve seen, I’ve also read Jane Austin/Bronte and their writings seem transparent compared to what I (and many other new readers) find in much of Shakespeare. Your familiarity with the Bard is admirable but, believe me, his prose isn’t so intelligible to millions, teeming or no.
Getting back to your original point, are you suggesting that the transformation actually decelerated in the past 400 years? I might agree. Compare the writings between A.D. 1200 and 1600, and then between A.D. 1600 and 2000.
(Obviously, I’m no linguist and find myself way out of my element…)
Its been a while since i read any Shakespeare, but i seem to remember it being mostly understandable in a written form anyway. Theres a few archaic words, and strange sentence constructions, but if you read it slowly and carefully you can understand it. Maybe the fact i’m english helps too though - British english might well be closer to Shakespeares english than American english, i don’t know. I’m not trying to suggest i read it all the time, and understand it perfectly or anything though!
Changes in english have definately slowed in the last 400 years compared to previous centuries though, mainly due to the invention of the removable type printing press i think. I’m afraid i’ve pretty much reached the limit of what i know on the subject though, maybe someone else can help you now!
For a dissertation that I wrote on the English Bible circa 1525 to 1560, I had occasion to read a number of documents written between c. 1200 and 1580. It goes without saying that anything written after 1500 was understandable to everyone. The Book of Margery Kempe, written c. 1380, was less so, as was The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynys of c. 1410, and the “Wycliffite Bible” also of c. 1380. By the time I got back to material written in the early-14th century, I was finding it more and more difficult to understand. There were lots of Old English terms that were still being used.
One thing I found was that, before about 1350, you could still talk about dialectical forms of the English language. It’s going too far to say that there was no such thing as a “national form of English,” but there were still distinct regional forms. There’s a famous (well, famous to historians) story by Chaucer, who wrote about travelling to Kent and asking a farmwoman for eggs. I don’t know what you’re talking about, she said, we don’t speak French here. In Kent in the mid-14th century, the plural of “egg” was “eyren.”
It wasn’t until the English forms of the Mass became popular, then, later, printing reached English shores, that people in different parts of England began speaking what might be considered a fully national language. The printed word often “fixes” language–once it starts becoming common to write words and language down, there becomes such a thing as “correct” grammar, “correct” spelling, “correct” syntax. Perhaps more than anyone, we owe Caxton, England’s first printer, what we now call “English.”
for a quick test, try Samuel Pepys’s diary at http://www.pepysdiary.com/
Not written in ‘literary’ style or with a view to publication. Some words have changed their meaning, e.g. ‘easily’ meant ‘slowly’, and ‘discover’ meant ‘reveal’ (we see the remnants of these in “take it easy” and the lawyers’ ‘discovery’ obligation in court)
While is true that there may be periods of faster or slower change in language, the important point is that language is always changing. There are never sudden breaks, but there are also never periods without change. I think that you can say about English just what you can say about any language: People 200 years ago would be fairly easy to understand for a modern speaker. People 400 years ago would be somewhat harder, but you could reasonably quickly learn to understand what they are saying. People 600 years ago would be quite difficult, but you could pick up some of what they were saying and could eventually teach yourself to understand them fairly well. People 800 years ago would be harder yet, but you would understand a word here and there. People 1000 years ago would be hard to distinguish from a foreign language.
Perfectly intelligible, especially all the references to ale.
A few things might sound flowery to modern ears, but the prose is nothing that you have to hack through with a machette. Anyone with a fourth or sixth grade education can read it without problems or effort.
Let’s go back 166 years. Here’s an excerpt from Ballad of a Tyrranical Husband, written in 1500.
Definitely not modern English.
So, we’ve got it narrowed down between 1500 and 1666. Let’s fast-forward to 1569, with Richard Grafton’s Chronicle at Large.
Much more comprehendible. Let’s go to 1632, with *A True Tale of Robin Hood]
WotNot: Yes, you are right. I wanted to come back and change it, but of course the board was down. :smack:
elmwood: I disagree with your perception of Ballad of a Tyrannical Husband. Yes, on first glance, it looks difficult to read. But that’s only because of spelling differences. It wasn’t until the mid-16th century that spelling became even a little standardized. Cleaned up of its spelling “errors,” and keeping all the words intact, here’s the first paragraph of the ballad:
That isn’t too hard to read. And, really, almost all I did was remove the trailing ‘e’ and fix the vowels. Once you get used to reading something like that, and it doesn’t take long at all, it’s perfectly intelligible even when the spelling isn’t fixed.
Now, compare this from the 14th century:
Yes, that is Psalm 23, from the 1384 Wycliffite Bible. Even if I cleaned up the spelling, there are still words like “dreden” and “rightwisenesse” that we don’t come across today. This text is only marginally understandable, I suppose, to a modern reader unversed in Old English. And that’s over a century older than the ballad.
If you’re talking written English, I think that the transition occurred around the late 17th century. The Diary of Samuel Pepys is dramatically more modern than Shakespeare or Jonson or Marlowe.
Changes in pronunciation were more recent. The drawn-out “a” as in “father” and a sine qua non of the English home counties accent basically didn’t exist in the US or England until around 1800, claims Bill Bryson.
Here is another document, this time dated to October 1605. It is the letter which Lord Monteagle claimed to have received, and have promptly passed to Robert Cecil, the Secretary of State, and was the first warning which the Government officially claimed to have received of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up King and Parliament during the State Opening on November 5th. Whether the letter is what it purported to be is another argument.
“My lord
out of the love i beare to some of youere frends i have a caer of youer preseruacion therfor i would advyse yowe as yowe tender youer lyf to devys some excuse to shift of youer attendance at this parleament for god and man hath concurred to punishe the wickednes of this tyme and think not slightlye of this advertisment but retyre youre self into youre contri wheare yowe may expect the event in safti for thowghe theare be no appearance of anni stir yet i saye they shall receyve a terrible blowe this parleament and yet they shall not seie who hurts them this cowncel is not to be contemned because it may do yowe good and can do yowe no harme for the dangere is passed as soon as yowe have burnt the letter and i hope god will give yowe the grace to mak good use of it to whose holy proteccion i comend yowe.”
But even that, isn’t incomprehensible, especially read out loud. While “dreden” is gone, “dread” isn’t. I’m not at a complete loss about what the writer isn’t doing with euelis. The same could be said of “rightwisnesse” and “righteousness,” though I admit “sties” and “gherde” would throw me. (There is also that I know the psalm)
Even the King James Bible, published in Shakespeare’s time (1611), is quite understandable today (with spellings cleaned up). Here is Luke, Chapter 2.
When reading Shakespeare, keep in mind that in almost all of his plays he wrote the dialogue in metrical verse, not in prose, and metrical verse sometimes tortures the syntax of everyday speech.
That’s true enough, and I had little problem reading the Wycliffe Bible myself. I agree that you do have to go further back to reach total incomprehensibility, although I’d say that, if we didn’t have the context of “rightwisness” and “dreden,” we might not know what they mean right away.
Here are a couple of passages from 1582: (spelling altered to modern day spelling by myself)
*I’ve resited the urge to change ‘thee’ to ‘the’ as it would wrongly reflect the pronounciation
**slippers
Both passages can be understood with a fair degree of ease by any native English speaker, this reflects the fact that they both come from the (early) modern period, which out of convenience, is said to start in the year 1500. Generally speaking speech after 1500 is intelligible tro the modern listener, though it may require a little thought (esp. the further back you go). If you go back to middle English it becomes very difficult to impossible to understand depending on thereader, dilaect and period) and quite often only parts of passages are intelligible (again it gets much difficult as you go back and is further aggravated by large dialectal variations). Old English is taught pretty much in the same way as a foreign language.
