The title explains fairly well, but I should expand:
I’ve heard very old (“old” being relative to the amount of time sound recordings have been around) sound recordings, and I can understand the people talking pretty clearly. It’s certain that accents have shifted, but I don’t have any real problems.
Now obviously finding someone who speaks “English” that I can’t understand due to pure accent is doable today, Glasgow English can be notoriously hard to Americans to understand from what I’ve heard. What I’m asking is how far I’d have to go back before it would be a significant challenge to find almost anybody I could communicate with easily. (I say easily because obviously we can always hammer our a pidgin if we need to).
I think this involves two major components: accent and vocabulary. “Accent” is simply whether or not I can even understand the words they’re saying. They could be saying “I’m surfing the internet #swag#yolo”, but if the pronunciation is significantly foreign, I may have big problems. The second component is vocabulary, where our vocabularies are just plain different. I hear their words just fine, but who the hell knows what they mean? There might even be tons of hilarious misunderstandings as I interpret words by their current meaning, rather than the archaic one. Obviously grammatical structure will change a bit too, but that seems at least a small bit more static – at least I suspect that vocab and accent will get me before any significant grammar changes do.
Obviously these work together. A minor accent isn’t going to throw me off for long, and likewise I can get used to strange slang and words if the grammatical structure and certain operative words are similar enough. A combination of significantly altered features will really contribute.
I think it’s probably impossible to pinpoint anything, but I figure we can at least think of several possible contenders.
So when would it be really, really hard to find anyone I could talk to without hammering out a trade language? Shakespeare? Chaucer? Earlier? Later?
Shakespeare would be fairly easy, think of watching the more obscure Brit TV shows [the stuff made for Britain, not exporting to the US.] My old English teacher could handle Chaucer, he could actually converse in it and read it. [well, actually back in the day so could my Mother, but she was into Chaucer and studied it fairly intently back in college. She and my teacher would talk about me in Chaucerian vintage english. Very annoying.]
I think Spanish has remained fairly neutral for a number of centuries, I remember reading somewhere that Don Quixiote never needed translation from old Spanish to a newer Spanish, no idea if it is true or not.]
What you might be interested in is the so-called “Great Vowel Shift” of English. It is believed that English pronunciation changed drastically during the Middle Ages. This is a big reason why English spelling appears to be so messed up. The spellings have preserved elements of medieval pronunciation that were dropped from the spoken language. A big one is the final silent ‘e’ that is the bane of little kids. In addition to vowels, you have the silent ‘gh’ - this was originally the same sound as German ‘ch’. Chaucer might have pronounced the word ‘light’ in the same way as modern German ‘licht’. There was a clip on YouTube of a person attempting to recite some Chaucer in a way that it might have actually sounded in the day.
In English, the Great Vowel Switch around the 15th century greatly changed pronunciation. This is basically a radical accent. Your every conversation would be like this ramped up to 11. So with some work you could most likely fit in ok. At the very least you should be ok anytime after that.
Middle English (from the 1066 to the 15th century) would be increasingly difficult the further back you go. English slowly absorbed Norman-French, and changed as it did. Things like ending words with -s for plurals developed during this period. Even the alphabet changed as þ (thorn, the ‘th’ sound) was removed from the English alphabet. Learning this would be like learning a closely related language or dialect. It is probable you couldn’t immediately communicate.
Old English (from 5th century to 1066) would be unintelligible to a modern English speaker. In this period folks are speaking a form of German with a lot of local influences from Celtic and Latin. Here is a sample from Beowulf:
Hwæt wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum
þēod-cyninga þrym gefrūnon
hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon
Oft Scyld Scēfing sceaþena þrēatum
monegum mægþum meodo-setla oftēah
egsian eorl syððan ǣrest weorþan
For simplicity, let’s say that you’re talking to someone in London. There are places in England today where you probably can’t understand the accent, and the problem only gets worse as you go back in time.
You would have no difficulty with Shakespeare’s time (c. 1600); it’s just modern English with a relatively mild accent and a few differences in vocabulary. If you go back another century or so, to the time of Malory (1485), the accent problem is harder, but the core vocabulary is surprisingly stable. You might require some time to get used to their pronunciations, but then you could understand without too much trouble. Of course, whether they understand you will be dependent on whether you can limit yourself to a period-appropriate vocabulary.
The language changes more and becomes less standardized as you go further back in time, prior to the introduction of printing in the 1470s. When you get back to Chaucer (c. 1390), you most certainly will not initially understand what is being said. Still, people can learn to understand Chaucerian English in a few days, so that will be easier for you than working up a trade language.
Anything much older than that is going to be very hard indeed. Here are some samples to give you an idea:
It befell in the days of Uther Pendragon, when he was king of all England, and so reigned, that there was a mighty duke in Cornwall that held war against him long time. (Le Morte Darthur, 1485)
WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote . . . . (Canterbury Tales, late 14th century)
Þe uerste heste þet god made / and het: is þis. “Þou ne sselt habbe / uele godes.” (Ayenbite of Inwyt, 1340)
To add to this, when I was in college, I picked up a copy of The Canterbury Tales in the original written form. I’m an engineer, not an English major by any stretch, but I could read random passages without much difficulty at all. Mostly just bad spelling*. The OP probably has experienced that on the internet.
Yeah middle English is rather intelligible in written form. But the pronunciation is very German. You’d have better luck asking the knight about to behead you to write down his words.
That is amazing that the language changed so rapidly – could a late 14th century Englishman have understood a speaker from 1340 as easily as we could understand an American from late 1860s? 140 years does not seem that long.
What is the evidence for the great vowel shift? I am curious. The only way off the top of my head to determine this would be with poetry and assume that people like rhymes.
No, and writers from Shakespeare’s day were despondent at the thought that their work would be as difficult to read as Chaucer’s in a couple of centuries. That didn’t happen, because the printing press turns out to have a marvelously stabilizing effect on language.
If you speak modern Hebrew you could go back 2000 years, easy. They’d look at you funny because you weren’t speaking Aramaic or Greek, though. I don’t know when spoken Hebrew stopped being the mother oral language of the Jews; you might be able to get, what, another 700 years?
Put a little gold star on the top of your head! Also, people wrote things phonetically before the writing system was standardized.
As for the OP, you would be hearing essentially a foreign language if you landed yourself in England prior to 1066. After 1400, it would be mostly accent you were fighting, not vocabulary. So, some time between then. Pick a date.
The Wiki on Ayenbite of Inwyt “The Again-bite of Conscience” is excellent on the relationship, in this case, on how the orthography matches (unusually?) closely the local pronunciation.
As is noted in the entry, Stephen Daedalus in Ulysses often broods with this phrase in mind, written as agenbite of inwit.
Overly optimistic. The pronunciation differences between Ancient Hebrew and Modern Hebrew are huge. Spoken Ancient Hebrew would be as difficult to understand for modern Israelis as Chaucer is for us, if not more so, because it contained several sounds that are not used today, and the vowel system has been radically simplified, to give a couple of the reasons why.
Also, Hebrew had already been replaced by Aramaic as the everyday spoken language around 500 BCE, during the Achaemenid Empire, whose official language was Aramaic.
Also, people wrote things phonetically before the writing system was standardized.