How far back in time could I travel and still be able to talk to people?

Factual Questions
1

I’m an American and I speak (American) english.

If I traveled back to, oh say, 1750. Would I be able to speak to and understand other people?

What if I traveled back to England during the time of Shakespeare? Would I be able to walk up the box office and buy a ticket to Hamlet?

2

There would be some vocabulary difficulties (more in 1600 than in 1750, of course), but the pronunciation would be basically the same, I think. They’d probably think you had a funny accent, but I don’t think there’d be a huge communication gap.

If you went back to the time of Chaucer (1300s), you’d have some trouble. Vowels were pronounced completely differently then, and every letter was pronounced–there were no silent letters like there are now. If you want to hear what it sounded like: http://academics.vmi.edu/english/audio/audio_index.html

And what it looked like:

Understandable with some effort.

If you went back to 1000AD, you’d be completely lost. Old English is so different from Modern English that it’s basically a foreign language. From Beowulf:

3

The next question is, why is there such a huge linguistic jump from 1000 to 1300, and a smaller jump from 1300 to today, even though the second period is more than twice as many years?

4

The reason is the written word - or more precisely, the printing press. Once English was widely printed and accessible to everyone (and it’s amazing how widespread literacy became very quickly after the printing press) regional variations dwindle, useages become commonly accepted, and the language stabilizes. The big leap between Old and Middle English is due to the huge influx of latinate (Old Norman French) words after the Norman Conquest in 1066.

5

So would that be the same for most European languages? Pre-printing press is tough but after printing the language becomes more uniform?
I was thinking about time traveling around Europe.
Or something like that.

6
      • Semi-related: I have a book on the Egyptian Book of the Dead and it points out that the first copies appeared around 9500 BC and remained much the same for a “short” period–about 15 centuries. About 1500 years later copies began to have curious errors in them–passages and sometimes whole chapters printed backwards, and sometimes the vignettes (pictures placed between chapters) were preserved at the expense of the actual text. What is suspected is that after “only” the initial 1,500 years, the dialect spoken had changed so much that people could no longer really read the original book–and so it may have been passed down as an artifact and as an oral legend–for another ~7000 years.
        ~
7

Yes and no. You have to remember that most European countries that we think of today weren’t all that unified even 200 or 300 years ago, and so regional dialects were more pronounced. If you speak French, you’d probably notice a bigger difference if you went back in time 300 years to Paris vs 300 yrs to Marseilles

8

Man - if you’re time-traveling through Europe, sign me up!! Just have to get my shots.

I know a lot more about English than other languages, but I’m sure there was similar impact. The first bible printed in English was printed in Marburg, Germany. And Europe was a vast trading network with people and goods moving all over the place. But in the isolated areas language changed much more slowly, so it’s not a uniform, consistent evolution.

9

That would be “smaller difference”, not “bigger”. :slight_smile:

10

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11

It’s interesting that the first printing press is built in England in 1476 and the Modern English period (where we see a standard English emerge out of the varied dialects of Middle English) canonically starts in 1500, but I wouldn’t read too much into it.

12

Similar thread

How far back in time could we go with modern English and still be understood?

13

I noticed that … have you guys built a time machine? Can I look at it? Huh? pleeeeeeze!!!

14

It’s not printing, per se, that has a stablizing effect on a language, but literacy. Once a critical mass becomes literate, then there is a drag on the change of the language. So, to the extent that printing aids literacy, it will tend to slow language change. But I wouldn’t be surprised if TV and film has an even larger effect on the standardization and stablization of language.

15

Of course, one big reason for the huge change in English between 1000 and 1300 was the Norman invasion of 1066. The Normans spoke French, so a lot of Latinate words entered the English vocabulary in the century following the invasion. The declension and conjugation system of English simplified a lot as well (possibly because it eased communication between the two groups?), becoming more dependent on word order. Old English had four noun cases and verbs had many more conjugations than they do today, but word order was much freer.

Also, English changed faster in some places than in others. There are writings from other places in England from the 1300s that look more like Old English than Modern English.