A fairly amazing piece of writing here, which is not only a decent story in itself but is primarily a fantastic illustration of how the English language has changed over the centuries. How far back in time can you understand English?
It’s a short story about a man - a year 2000 travel blogger - visiting the town of Wulfleet, checking into a B&B and noticing some oddness about the town.
Odd indeed - as the story continues, the written English slips back 100 years every few paragraphs. The exercise is, how far back can you make sense of it. At some point it becomes hard to read fluently and you need to puzzle it out, at some point you can only get the gist and at some point you need help to make sense of it at all. (I realise that, this being the SDMB, there will be some of us who have the education to read it all fluently). I personally did fine until 1500, picked my through until 1300 but rapidly found it harder after that.
There’s a good walkthrough at the end, but well worth having a go to experience how English goes to:
Well, I finally got to the town everyone has been talking about lately. Wulfleet. And let me tell you, it was not easy to get here
from
And ƿe hine secaþ git, begen ætsomne, ƿer ond ƿif, þurh þa deorcan stræta þisses grimman stedes. Hƿæþere God us gefultumige!
I’ll have to look this story up. Thanks for the recommendation.
In a similar vein, may I recommend Poul Anderson’s Uncleftish Beholding - a nonfiction essay about atomic physics, set in an alternate timeline where the Norman Conquest never happened and the English language evolved without any influences from French and Latin.
For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.
The underlying kinds of stuff are the firststuffs, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff.
The firststuffs have their being as motes called unclefts. These are mightly small; one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called bulkbits. Thus, the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on. (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in ices when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.) When unlike clefts link in a bulkbit, they make bindings. Thus, water is a binding of two waterstuff unclefts with one sourstuff uncleft, while a bulkbit of one of the forestuffs making up flesh may have a thousand thousand or more unclefts of these two firststuffs together with coalstuff and chokestuff.
Better yet, I could include the link in the OP like I meant to! Thanks for the nudge, have put in in edit and here as well, in stable door bolting style:
That’s fascinating. I haven’t gone through it, just gave it a quick look, but I will come back to it.
Years ago, I had a girlfriend who did her Bachelors, Masters, and Doctorate in English, and she could read Old English. She could also speak Middle English (which sounded quite musical to me). She taught me a bit of each, so I’ll look forward to seeing how far I can go in your link. Thanks!
I plugged the first paragraph of the entry from 1100 into Google Translate. It identified the language as Icelandic and translated
Þæt ƿif me andsƿarode and cƿæð, “Ic eom Ælfgifu gehaten. Þu scalt me to ƿife nimen, þeah þe þu hit ne ƿite gyt, for hit is sƿa gedon þæt nan man ne nan ƿif ne mote heonon faren buten þurh þone dæð þæs Hlafordes
to
The king said to me, “I am Ælfgifu. You have chosen me to be your son, and I will not let you go, for you are a great man, and you will not be able to go anywhere else.
It’s not great - I think the only full sentence it got correct is “I am Ælfgifu”. The ideas of being chosen and not being able to go anywhere are right, but important context is being missed.
(I can’t give a full translation, as I’m going off the walktrhough on hte site plus my own feeble efforts, and in any case I don’t want to jump the gun for other readers.)
As a hint, one of the big challenges is working out the new letters as they arrive in the text, which you kind of have to do from context. But if you can, reading aloud makes things much clearer than they appear on the page. If you can work out - or look up, that’s how we learn things! - what modern English letter ƿ represents then ƿif/ƿife will tell you one of the big things the translation got wrong.
1500 is where I have to start reading phrases twice. (Transition to Middle English?)
In 1200 it took me considerable effort to get the gist out of the first two paragraphs, but interestingly after that, the third paragraph went smoothly again.
From 1100 and 1000, I only understood fractions. (Transition to Old English?)
So you set it up to translate English to English??
That bodes well
Yeah, well, I do not have any knowledge of Old English, so I cannot translate it accurately but if you read the text it obviously says
That woman answered me and quoth, "I am called Ælfgifu. Thou shalt take me as wife, though [you know it not yet??], for it is so that no man or woman might fare hence but through the Lord’s death
or something sort of, kind of like that; at least we get the gist
Thanks; this is really well done! I’ve bookmarked it to share with students.
As someone who reads a lot of early modern and late Middle English, I was doing just fine through 1300. (I didn’t know the word “swie,” but figured from the context that it had to mean something like “be quiet”; everything else was smooth sailing.) I thought I was doing fine at getting the gist of the 1200 and 1100 sections, but on reading his explanation, I realized I had missed some crucial details (amusingly, I was picturing our protagonist’s rescuer Ælfgifu as another talking wolf, although on looking back at the text, she’s clearly described as a wif, and I missed her prediction that they would marry completely, although I did get the “we have to kill the Master” part). The 1000 section – well, the first sentence was relatively easy, and I got that the story had ended on a cliffhanger with the Master / Hlaford not yet found and slain and our heroes still seeking him through the dark streets of this grim city, but the details were very hazy. (I had a couple of semesters of Old English in grad school, but after 25 years it’s all gone.) Very interesting to see that the Norman Conquest started to have an influence almost immediately; when I got to the 1100 section I thought “OK, this is Old English now,” but upon comparison with 1000, it’s noticeably different, with a simpler and more familiar vocabulary and much less going on with the prefixes and suffixes.
In my day (and maybe still) taking EngLit in a grammar school meant a chunk of the Canterbury Tales (1399) as one of the set texts, albeit in a modern English translation. However, we were introduced to at least a bit of the original language, which I didn’t find too difficult (as long as there’s a parallel text to hand. My understanding is that the “merger” of Anglo-Saxon and Latinate language was pretty well confirmed by that publication, thanks to Chaucer’s position at court.
Any further back and I’d need a translation (must get round to Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf one day …or sometime..)
Soon after it started, but not quite quick enough, I closed my eyes to find out what I could understand without the captions - because it’s simple sentences, I was getting 90% plus surprisingly early, though with a bit of a satellite delay as my brain reinterpreted it.
One of the things I like about the story is that it’s not just the alphabet and orthography that changes, but teh writing style.
The 2000 blog is chatty and informal, using lots of asides and rhetorical questions to engage the listener. The 1900 account feels more like a speaker addressing an audience - a good anecdote for which the teller assumes the audience will be interested, so he’s declarative. The 1800 speaker is more discursive and reflective - sentences have got much longer over the past two passages - and is the one most conscious of the impression of the author that the reader might be forming.
There’s also a degree of changing social roles. See for example, how the writer described being afraid, and the extent to which he feels shame at admitting it.
A guy was following me for a while. It kind of freaked me out. Anyway, if you go to Wulfleet, just watch out for this one weird guy who hangs out near the bus stop. I know, real specific. But anyway, that was just a bit odd.
I closed the window again but was entirely unable to fall asleep due to the shock. I am not, I hope, an easily frightened man, but I confess the incident left me not a little unsettled.
The only thing that disturbed my good humour was when I thought, for a brief moment, that I saw the man who accosted me yesterday among the crowd. But it must have been a mere fancy, for whatever I thought I saw vanished as quickly as it had appeared. I chided myself for the weakness of my nerves, and took another draught to steady them.
I entertained for a moment such unmanly thoughts as are far from my cuſtom, and which I ſhould be aſhamed to ſet down here, were it not that an honeſt account requires it.
That was (AFAICT) very skillfully done and quite fascinating.
I can read the language of 1500 but slowly. I get quite shaky at 1400.
That wouldn’t be Icelandic in any modern sense of course, but most likely Old Norse (or heavily influenced by it) which originated in Scandinavia but was spread to Europe by the Vikings.
“Swie” was unfamiliar to me, too, but otherwise the 1300 passage was clear. I was fine with the 1200 section (I read a lot of medieval literature), though there were a half-dozen unfamiliar words, but in the 1100 section I could only get a few chunks, and the 1000 section was mostly hopeless. I could get the first sentence and a few phrases here and there.
This site contains the full text of “The Knight’s Tale” from Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales”, written roughly in the decade between 1390 and 1400 (click on the hyperlinks on the top left) as well as a handy glossary of Middle English. It’s interesting to compare that with the text from 1400 in the cited story. The Chaucer text, however, doesn’t contain the thorn character “þ” which appears to represent “th”. The cited story also contains the “ȝ” character, which apparently can variously represent y, g, or gh in modern English. Thus we would read “þouȝte” as “thoughte” (thought).
True, but you can’t necessarily tell that from your link—sometimes editors silently correct þ to th. CONTENTdm shows that, at least in this ms., they were using th.
