I defy any of you to easily read Old English/Anglo Saxon:
This is from a poem called “The Wife’s Lament.” It’s very sad and mysterious, about a woman desert on an island by her lord/husband. The last time: “Wa bið þam…” translates as:
Here is a bit of the Cantebury Tales, written in the 1390’s
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
5 Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
10 That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
15 And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for the seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.
Bifil that in that seson, on a day,
20 In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
25 Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
Some parts are pretty easy to follow, others leave me at a complete loss, such as " To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes"
Having transcribed a number of American documents of the 1600s, I find it pretty intelligible to read once I got down with the idea that many writers liked to show off by seeing how many different ways they could spell a word, particularly place names. I think that actually provides a pretty strong clue as to how the word is pronounced.
Here is an interesting example of a variably spelled place name from 1629:
Coa hassett alias Cona hassett
Coahassett alias-Cone hassett
Coahassett alias Conahassett
Which is almost certainly modern-day Cohasset, Massachusetts.
Of course, it takes me a few days just to really get familliar with a Scot’s accent, so there can be plenty of variation in the way something is spelled and the way it’s pronounced. Still, I think the near-phonetic spellings of the 1600s indicate that the spoken language was not too dissimilar from today’s.
I think istara’s example of Anglo-Saxon shows that Old English is not intelligible to modern English-speakers.
Also, I think the above clip of Chaucer with modern spelling shows how modern people can understand a lot of what’s written and puzzle out most of the rest of it based on context.
Does anyone has an example of something written between 1066 and Chaucer’s time? It’s fun to imagine how far back in time I would be able to go in England and still be able to reasonably converse.
-k
It’s interesting that you should ask that using Chaucer as an example. If Chaucer himself were to read the Canterbury Tales to you, you’d wonder what the hell he was saying. Pronunciations have changed significantly in the past 600 years.
I find the Bard a struggle to understand, though I have watched and enjoyed perhaps a dozen or so of his plays.
That said, I suspect that it is misleading to consider his speech representative of Elizabethan England: the Mayflower Compact (1620) and A Model of Christian Charity (John Winthrop, 1630) are fairly lucid to my eyes and ears.
Here’s a sample:
Mayflower:
Ok, but when was the phrase, “run-on sentence” coined?
Winthrop :
God Almightie in his most holy and wise providence hath soe disposed of the Condicion of mankinde, as in all times some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subieccion.
That’s a run-on sentence? That’s NOTHING!
Check out a couple of pages from the likes of Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan). Apparently, the cost of periods was considerably more than semicolons a few centuries ago. Either that, or periods were so rare that writers felt duty bound to conserve them. Hobbes’ sentences were often hundreds of words long and replete with parenthetical thoughts. (I think he and his peers were showing off–showing the complexity of their minds.)
Ultrafilter is right about Chaucer. I’ve heard it read in the original. Almost impossible to understand.
Re: the statement of Measure for Measure: “I find the Bard a struggle to understand, though I have watched and enjoyed perhaps a dozen or so of his plays.” I think many contemporary Americans would agree. That said, I’m guessing Shakespeare deliberately wrote in a sophisticated style for his time period.
Can anyone confirm this?
Shakespeare is more difficult to understand than most writers of his period for several reasons. First, his plays are written in a metrical pattern, and the grammar is often twisted to accommodate this. Second, they’re full of allusions, and it takes a knowledge of the scientific, literary, political, etc. facts of his day to understand. Third, he had an enormous vocabulary. I’ve seen estimates that he must have had one of the largest vocabularies of anyone who’s ever written in English.
Nit pick, but that verse is NOT written in Old English.
It’s middle english.
Old english would be almost completely uninteligeble to a modern englich speaking person, or even a german person, regardless of it’s germanic influence.
Middle engligh, specially towards later periods is much more easily understood, but only when written. If you were to hear a person speak it, I’d guarantee you would likely not make out more than a word or two. The pronounciation is very germanic/french like, and not like modern english.
Arrrgh…until you said that, Kinthalis, I had no idea I typed that.
Duke’s brain: “That’s it, I’m outta here…” (sound of door slamming, brain walking away)
Depending how you count them, Shakespeare used between 29,066 and 31,534 different words in his works, including proper names. However, when you count the number of root words, or lemmas, that number is reduced to about 18,000 to 20,000.
According to research by Professor David Crystal, one of the world’s foremost authorities on language, the average college graduate may have an active vocabulary of 60,000 words, and a passive vocabulary of 75,000 words, counting only dictionary head words.
That sounds reasonable, though now I’m curious to know how linguists have come to this conclusion.
-k
curious
Quoth zimaane:
The only word that leaves me at a complete loss there is “kowthe”. I would think it related to modern “go”, except that we’ve elsewhere seen “goon on pilgrimages”. “To” and “in” are, of course, the same as modern. “ferne” might be cognate to “foreign”, or it might be to “fern” (a reference to palms?). “halwes” would be holy or hallowed, and “sondry londes” are “sundry lands”. And this is all without any knowledge of Germanic languages (other than modern English, of course).
Of course, one might even argue that modern American English and modern British English are not completely co-intelligible. Ask a Brit sometime what he thinks of the idea of making a “peanut butter and jelly sandwich”.
I I’m almost certain that ferne = foreign and that halwes is related to halwes.
‘kowthe’ = ‘couth’, which is an obselet word, though uncouth is till sometimes used, if a littel archaic.
d’oh sorry I menat “I’m pretty sure halwes is related to hallow”, I’d hazard the gues that ‘halwes’ = ‘hallows’ = ‘saints’ (as in ‘all hallows’ = ‘all saints’) = ‘saint’s shrines’
For those of you who may be curious to hear what middle english sounded like:
http://www.umkc.edu/lib/engelond/prologue.htm
(you’ll need real player).
Close your eyes and don’t look at the words and you’ll see that it is very difficult to make out what the person is saying.
Sounds beautiful IMHO too 
And a bonus treat:
An Old English poem, “The dream of the rood”.
Text: http://www.flsouthern.edu/eng/abruce/rood/ROODTEXT/OE~1.HTM
Real media reading: http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/noa/realmedia/TheDreamOfRoad.rm
Saturday 26 January 1660/61
Within all the morning. About noon comes one that had formerly known me and I him, but I know not his name, to borrow 5l. of me, but I had the wit to deny him. There dined with me this day both the Pierces and their wives, and Captain Cuttance, and Lieutenant Lambert, with whom we made ourselves very merry by taking away his ribbans and garters, having made him to confess that he is lately married. The company being gone I went to my lute till night, and so to bed.
[HIJACK]
Excuse me, but THIS is the greatest diarist in the English Language? "I stayed in all morning then some guy whose name I don’t remember dropped by to borrow some money but I turned him down. Then some other people dropped by and we ate and played games. After they left I played my lute and went to bed.
And how big a loser do you have to be to get your name forgotten by a bigger name dropper than Truman Capote and Andy Warhol combined?
[HIJACK]
I don’t know if anyone saw Melyvn Bragg’s "The Journey of English’, they had a reconstruction of English as spoken by Shakespeare, it sounded like a west country accent (for Americans think generic Englsih farmer, pirate, peasant accent) with more than a touch of Brummie (the accent of Ozzy Osbourne).
The intresting thing about Chaucer is that he was writing in the London/East Midlands dialect which formed the basis for standard English of the modern period. Therfore as he was writin in the arse-half of the Middle English period, his dialect should be one of the most understandable to present-day English speakers.
Walloon writes:
> Depending how you count them, Shakespeare used between 29,066 and
> 31,534 different words in his works, including proper names. However, when
> you count the number of root words, or lemmas, that number is reduced to
> about 18,000 to 20,000.
>
> According to research by Professor David Crystal, one of the world’s foremost
> authorities on language, the average college graduate may have an active
> vocabulary of 60,000 words, and a passive vocabulary of 75,000 words,
> counting only dictionary head words.
O.K., but how does that relate to what I was saying? A person may have an active vocabulary of 60,000 words, but that doesn’t mean that they are going to use that many of them in the body of their writings. That figure of 60,000 isn’t calculated by going through the body of their writings (which most people don’t have anyway). It’s calculated by getting them to write a few short essays and estimating from that how many words they could use in writing if they wanted to. I assumed when I started reading your post that you were going to give some examples of writers who had used more different words than Shakespeare, but that’s not what you’ve done. Are there any other examples of writers who have used 30,000, let alone 60,000, words in their writings?