That excerpt of “The Miller’s Tale” wasn’t too hard, except for knowing what a “gnof” was.
That’s what I suspect the biggest impediment might be- knowing enough period vocabulary to actually know what was going on.
(my recollection of Spanish from school is similar; I can read a sentence and usually know the verb tense, and what’s going on in a rough sense, but I may not remember what that verb means, or what the object is, etc…)
The spoken language would be much more difficult to understand, since many of the sounds would be different, and some letters that are now silent would be pronounced. And there would be different dialects, some of which would be harder than others to understand. It would probably take a month or so to get used to the accent. Then you’d have some words that have changed meaning or that have dropped out of usage.
If the people you were dealing with were literate, you might communicate better at first thru writing.
It seems to me that language is changing more slowly these days. Let’s imagine that someone from 400 years ago, maybe King James of Bible fame, became a time traveler. I think he would probably have a much easier time communicating with people today than with people from the year 1200.
But a big problem with Chaucer is simply spelling. The words aren’t spelled in a way that has become standarized, if you simply modernize the spelling without changing the words Chaucer is fairly easily understandable, although you run into unfamiliar vocabulary and differences in word order and such.
We have to distinguish between the orthography–the method of representing a spoken language in written form–and the actual language.
For example, the Turkish that robert_columbia mentioned. The language didn’t change, the alphabet changed. Ataturk decided that Turkish wasn’t going to use the Arabic alphabet, but the Latin alphabet. It really isn’t hard to learn a new alphabet. It’s not that the old text are impenetrable, it’s that you’d have to learn the old alphabet to read them unless they’re transliterated into the new alphabet. You can learn a new alphabet in a few hours, and get familiar enough with it to read it in a few weeks. The problem with learning a language using a different alphabet isn’t the alphabet, it’s the language itself. The alphabet is pretty easy.
Of course, even if two languages share an alphabet that doesn’t mean the same characters represent the same phonemes in both alphabets. And slightly different alphabets can represent the exact same sounds. No one should be confused by the medial s, it’s just a variant form of the letter s, just like there are several forms of lower-case g and a. It wasn’t pronounced like an “f”, for crying out loud. Same with u vs v and i vs j. The letters represent the same phoneme, just represented differently. It doesn’t matter whether the th sounds represented by the two letter digraph th, or by edh (ð) and thorn (þ), learning those sounds is pretty easy.
Of course a big problem is that the spelling of a word can remain constant for hundreds of years, while the pronunciation of the word can change. And so we plough through the tough cough and hiccough, with bright knights who fight all night.
So seeing a word in used in Shakespeare, even if in modern english it has the same spelling it did 500 years ago, doesn’t mean the word was pronounced identically. But it was probably pronounced similarly, and vowel and consonant changes happened in an explicable way. So even today an American might have trouble understanding certain spoken English or Scottish dialects, but if they were written down would have no problem. Also note that there are plenty of dialects that are almost never written down. Even if two dialect speakers want to communicate by writing, they write according to the rules for a prestige or national dialect and would never consider trying to transcribe their dialect.
robert_columbia writes:
> Two languages that have famously undergone major changes in the past 100-150
> years are Japanese and Turkish, meaning that many native speakers today who
> were born in the 20th century often have a great deal of difficulty reading works
> written in the 1800’s.
Could you give me a scholarly citation for this? I just tried to find any evidence for it online. I didn’t find much useful. There was a little bit about the increasing or decreasing amount of borrowing from foreign sources. I’d like to know more about this.
Change (in any language) doesn’t happen at a uniform rate. In a couple of centuries English changed dramatically under the influence of the Norman conquest; then much more slowly. English is probably changing relatively slowly right now - American English and British English have been diverging for a couple of centuries but the two variants are still easily mutually comprehensible, both in spoken and written form - but other languages, coming under the influence of English, may be changing very rapidly indeed. And so forth.
I assume he’s talking about the change in the alphabet by Ataturk:
I don’t know. Think of how many words have been added to English in the last ten years. Go back to 2005 and tell someone to send you a selfie, and they don’t know what you mean. And with all the internet abbreviations, I think language is changing plenty fast. Also, keep in mind that there are now dozens of varieties of English around the globe as more and more people speak it.
There are real, historical reasons why English changed a LOT in a short time around the year 1300 +/-. That was an anomaly, though.
Cute post but actually I’m not sure. There are some tangentially related threads but not really the same - well, at least according to my search-fu.
The above ‘300 year’ posts are very interesting. If they really are the same language that’s astounding.
Actually, the Atatürk reforms went way farther than simply changing the alphabet used to write the language. Ottoman Turkish (the official language of Turkey as used until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire) and Modern Turkish are truly two different languages.
Atatürk not only ordered the adoption of the latin alphabet – he also ordered the “turkification” of the language, purging it from all non-Turkish borrowings (mostly Persian and Arabic). This purist approach did not only change vocabulary – there were even some grammatical changes done to the language.
During the time of the Ottoman Empire, there was an effective situation of diglossia among Turkish speakers: The official Ottoman Turkish Language (the written language, and spoken by the elites) was tremendously different from what was known as “Raw Turkish”, which is what was spoken by the majority of the population.
Copy-paste from the relevant Wikipedia article on the Ottoman Turkish Language:
During the peak of Ottoman power, Persian and Arabic vocabulary amounted for up to 88% of its vocabulary, while words of Arabic origins heavily outnumbered native Turkish words. Consequently, Ottoman Turkish was largely unintelligible to the less-educated lower-class and rural Turks, who continued to use kaba Türkçe (“raw Turkish”), which used far fewer foreign loanwords and which is the basis of the modern Turkish language.
Here you have some examples of vocabulary changes in Turkish, as presented in the aforementioned wikipedia page:
ENGLISH MEANING OTTOMAN TURKISH WORD MODERN WORD
=============== ==================== ===========
"Obligatory" Vâcib Zorunlu
"Hardship" Müşkül Güçluk / Zorluk
"City" Şehir Kent / Şehir (old word is alternate)
"War" Cenk Savaş
So, I do not find it surprising that modern scholars would consider Modern Turkish to be a different language from Ottoman Turkish, and that the majority of modern Turkish-speaking people would be unable to understand texts written in Ottoman Turkish, independently of the alphabet used to write it.
[As an aside – Greece was in the same situation as Ottoman Turkey until 1976. The official language in Greece until then was “Katharevousa”, which was an artificial koiné developed by scholars during the early 19th century that was of a purist bent, tried to “clean” Turkish elements from the language, and hewed close to Ancient Greek. But people spoke “Demotiki”, which was very different from Katharevousa. There is anecdotal evidence of schools in rural Greece where the teacher would give his lesson in Katharevousa, and the students would be unable to understand him. Only after the fall of the “Colonel’s Regime” was the official language of Greece changed to a somewhat Katharevousa-influenced version of Demotiki. Check online for samples of texts in both variants of Greek, and you will see that they are indeed rather different.
The same situation happens today in Arabic-speaking countries, where “Standard Literary Arabic” can be VERY different from the local variant of Arabic as spoken by the people.]
JoseB writes:
> During the peak of Ottoman power, Persian and Arabic vocabulary amounted for
> up to 88% of its vocabulary, while words of Arabic origins heavily outnumbered
> native Turkish words. Consequently, Ottoman Turkish was largely unintelligible to
> the less-educated lower-class and rural Turks, who continued to use kaba Türkçe
> (“raw Turkish”), which used far fewer foreign loanwords and which is the basis of
> the modern Turkish language.
This doesn’t sound to me like a language changing quickly from one to another vastly different one. It sounds like one dialect being suppressed and another dialect becoming the prestige dialect. What happened here is that an elite dialect slowly got formed over the period of almost a thousand years by heavy borrowing from Farsi (Persian) and Arabic (although it’s not clear what dialects of Arabic. This elite dialect was only used by an upper class, and it became less and less intelligible to the lower classes as time went on. Doubtlessly some of the upper class had to know the lower-class dialect too to speak to the lower class. Then there was a government-imposed reform in the early twentieth century. The use of the upper-class dialect was discouraged, and the upper class had to learn the lower-class dialect. Words were created at that point for some terms that had no names in the lower-class dialect. The lower-class dialect with the terms added became the new elite dialect.
> The same situation happens today in Arabic-speaking countries, where “Standard
> Literary Arabic” can be VERY different from the local variant of Arabic as spoken by
> the people.]
The things spoken by Arabic speakers are simply different languages by now. They slowly diverged from the Classical Arabic that was spoken over a thousand years age. There are at least four different spoken Arabic languages now in addition to Standard Written Arabic. They are different languages, not just different dialects, despite what they are called by the local inhabitants. They constitute a dialect continuum:
Only Standard Written Arabic is used in writings. Similarly for Chinese. There are at least fourteen different Chinese languages, despite there being called “dialects.” They are mutually unintelligible. They have been diverging from a common ancestor spoken a couple of thousand years ago.
Languages do not change in a linear way, instead they tend to remain relatively stable unless an external factor (an invasion, a colonisation or a sudden increase in technology level) upsets the apple cart.
English, rather famously, has changed as a result of Roman, French, Saxon invasions, and due to its own Victorian imperialism. The rise in technologies over the last 150 years have shaped the language even more.
How far could you go back in time and still be able to communicate? Depends on what you want to say. If you only want to ask about the family you might be able to go quite a way. If you want to talk about the post-modernist movement in online media, you’ll struggle to make sense to somebody from 10 years ago.
All I know is that there are British dialects I cannot understand at all. Maybe a couple weeks of immersion would solve that problem, but going back 400 years to the late Shakespeare years would almost certainly make me incomprehensible to them and vice versa.
If you can understand Weegie (Glaswegian) you’re doing very well indeed. Doric’s pretty hard too.
From a 2002 BBC documentary on the English language (the link starts the video at this quote):
Then come examples of words that modern-English speakers can understand.
^^ That should be ITV, not BBC, despite the title on YouTube. I couldn’t edit the post because the text box comes up blank again.
Interesting. Thanks for the link.
A lot of the answers seem to be flipping the question on its head. The question is, how far back could you go and be understood…my suspicion is - whatever the period - that they would have a harder time understanding you, than you would understanding them.
Emphasis added. That is not a logical conclusion that can be derived form the first part of your post.
You mean, you step out of the time machine and start a monologue, and the people have to try to understand you? And you’re not allowed to modify your idiolect to match the local people? And you’re obliged to use all sorts of modern neologisms, and you’re trying to explain Instagram and IP numbers?