# How far back in time would I have to go before communication became a problem? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 12, 2013, 2:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-far-back-in-time-would-i-have-to-go-before-communication-became-a-problem/655507 "2013-04-12T14:55:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2013, 9:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-far-back-in-time-would-i-have-to-go-before-communication-became-a-problem/655507/21 "2013-04-13T09:30:10Z")
> [@Bartman](#): > > 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](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSHHbfY6MVc&list=PL779F5142C1949ADC) 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. I have spent 3 years in an EVE Online corp conversing daily with a Geordie and a Glaswegian. I would fit in just fine… 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Dendarii\_Dame](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/bbce88/32.png) [@Dendarii\_Dame](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dendarii_Dame)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2013, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-far-back-in-time-would-i-have-to-go-before-communication-became-a-problem/655507/22 "2013-04-13T16:07:36Z")
When I was in college, I took a course in Chaucer. Everyone in the class had to recite from memory a quatrain from _The Canterbury Tales_. Each person was assigned a different quatrain. The professor told us how to pronounce the words, and I confidently recited my lines, which began, “With us theyr was a doctor of physick”. (I may be misspelling that. It means “With us there was a doctor of medicine.”) The teacher thoroughly humiliated me. I thought I’d done a decent job, but apparently, it was the worst in the history of the world. Bad me. She did let me try again in a few days. Apparently, I didn’t use enough saliva the first time. In her opinion, you needed to at least dribble, if not spit, to pronounce Chaucer properly. Four lines later, I was up to my ankles in drool, but I had my A. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2013, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-far-back-in-time-would-i-have-to-go-before-communication-became-a-problem/655507/23 "2013-04-13T16:22:48Z")
One caveat to my earlier post. We moderns would be a slight advantage in making ourselves understood, especially with a little training and prep. By avoiding words derived from Romance languages, we could make ourselves understood better than the O.E. folks could since they would have no way of knowing which words had fallen out of use. We would speak to the folk. We would _not_ communicate with the populace. ---
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2013, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-far-back-in-time-would-i-have-to-go-before-communication-became-a-problem/655507/24 "2013-04-13T16:42:00Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > 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. Huh. Ignorance fought. ---
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2013, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-far-back-in-time-would-i-have-to-go-before-communication-became-a-problem/655507/25 "2013-04-14T01:01:42Z")
I talked to a Chaucer muckety-muck I’m friendly with. Reported he: [Prof. Joyce Coleman](http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/C/Joyce.K.Coleman-1/CV.html), University of Oklahoma Coleman is on point for the Chaucer drift here and is aces for the full OP for medieval Europe. and Prof. Betsy Bowden, ret. from Rutgers _Chaucer Aloud: The Varieties of Textual Interpretation_ (Pennsylvania, 1987 _Listeners’ Guide to Medieval English: A Discography_ (Garland, 1988) _Eighteenth-Century Modernizations from the Canterbury Tales_ (Boydell & Brewer, 1991). Bowden is also boss on Bob Dylan. \ Are these cites or what? I’ve heard a mod who goes into passionate modes when banning spammers. I’m kind of like that when I find out good stuff. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2013, 11:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-far-back-in-time-would-i-have-to-go-before-communication-became-a-problem/655507/26 "2013-04-14T11:33:34Z")
> [@ZenBeam](#): > > but I could _read_ random passages without much difficulty at all. Mostly just bad spelling\*. The OP probably has experienced that on the internet. > > - I know. Middle English is not just Chaucer. It was a jumble of several quite different dialects. For us moderns, “Whan that Aprill” is always the go-to example of Middle English. That is the \*easiest \*form of Middle English for us, because Chaucer wrote in London dialect, which became the basis for standard Modern English (in large part because of Chaucer). But Middle English is also represented by the _Ancrene Riwle_ in West Midlands dialect, or the _Aȝenbite of Inwyt_ in Kentish dialect, which are more than half gibberish to us. There’s more to the difference than spelling. There’s also weird grammar: > [@](#): > > The word \*Ancrene \*itself still exhibits a plural genitive inflection descended from the old Germanic weak noun declension; this was practically unknown by the time of Chaucer. We’re always fed “Whan that Aprill” by sympathetic language scholars, because that’s one text that won’t scare us off. It’s þe shallow ende of þe Middle Englishe poole. ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2013, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-far-back-in-time-would-i-have-to-go-before-communication-became-a-problem/655507/27 "2013-04-14T18:16:53Z")
> [@Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](#): > > I’m told that modern-day Icelandic isn’t much different than what the vikings spoke 1500 and more years ago. [Linguistic purism in Icelandic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_Icelandic) is the law of the land. A modern day Icelandic speaker has no trouble reading texts from the 1000’s! So learn Icelandic before going back in time, and you will have no problems!!! ---
**Author:** ![ZenBeam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/3ab097/32.png) [@ZenBeam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZenBeam)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2013, 8:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-far-back-in-time-would-i-have-to-go-before-communication-became-a-problem/655507/28 "2013-04-14T20:04:45Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > Middle English is not just Chaucer. It was a jumble of several quite different dialects. For us moderns, “Whan that Aprill” is always the go-to example of Middle English. That is the \*easiest \*form of Middle English for us, because Chaucer wrote in London dialect, which became the basis for standard Modern English (in large part because of Chaucer). > > But Middle English is also represented by the _Ancrene Riwle_ in West Midlands dialect, or the _Aȝenbite of Inwyt_ in Kentish dialect, which are more than half gibberish to us. There’s more to the difference than spelling. There’s also weird grammar: > We’re always fed “Whan that Aprill” by sympathetic language scholars, because that’s one text that won’t scare us off. It’s þe shallow ende of þe Middle Englishe poole. I looked at random passages, not at “Whan that Aprill …”. That part was actually harder to read than the bits I looked at, although that may have been due to all the notes in that section obscuring the printed words (it was an old textbook, with several people’s notes). At any rate, the OP was asking when he could find _anyone_ he could talk to, so “þe shallow ende” is what he’s looking for. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-far-back-in-time-would-i-have-to-go-before-communication-became-a-problem/655507.md?page=1)