I wonder if that was a copy made decades later. It’s handwritten, but the Gutenberg press wasn’t even invented until around the middle of the 1400s. According to Google, the thorn character was already losing ground in Chaucer’s time, but persisted until imported printing presses started to become commonplace, which would have been towards the end of the 1400s. So there could have been hand-printed Chaucer texts with and without the character. The character does not appear in the example text for 1500, and that seems about right.
I had to read Chaucer in its original language in college for my undergraduate degree in English many years ago.
I am fairly competent reading through the 1300s but the1200s is where I start to have difficulty.
Yes. The Normans didn’t like the non-Latin characters and discouraged their use wherever they could. When books were all hand-scribed, the copyist could make their own choices. But once books were made on presses, it was expensive to add characters to the standard Latin alphabet. I’m not sure when the first typefont was cast in England; even when the press was built locally, the characters were all made in Europe.
Non-Latin characters that were used in English before the Norman Conquest, that were later discontinued:
Æ “ash”, used for the “short A” sound.
Þ “thorn” and Ð “eth”, used for the “TH sound”. Nominally unvoiced and voiced, but often interchanged (it’s not like modern speakers distinguish the sounds well, either).
Ƿ "wynn, used for the “W sound”.
Handy info for reading Old English at
IIRC, all of our surviving Chaucer manuscripts date from after his death in 1400, often well after it, so yes, “decades later” seems likely.
I was able to manage well until 1300. (My husband recommended it to me.)
I wish this website had been available when I was teaching English as a foreign language 20-odd years ago. I could have used it to explain a lot of things my students found odd about its present form.
I was good up to 1200, but I have made a study of early English NT translations, mainly Wycliffe and Tyndale, so that helped.
This is loads of fun. Thankee!
Same. I did my capstone class on Scottish witchcraft trials as an undergraduate, so I have a good amount of experience reading English from the 16th and 17th centuries. When I hit the 15th century it becomes quite a slog.
It was set to “Detect language” and translate to English.
I made it back to 1100 all right, but grasped scarcely half of the 1000 section. It helps to recognize the letter wynn, and to know that wif means ‘woman’ not just wife.
I got this without looking anything up: “Ne gemette ic næfre ær sƿylce ƿifman” = I’d never met such a woman.
I started working hard at 1100 and after 1000 I was lost. Which makes sense because I studied “Beowulf” as a kid, but never went back any further.
If I decide to take a time machine back to observe the Battle of Hastings, you are definitely coming along! LOL
As a student, I remember reading about the designations “Middle English” and “Old English”. Do they not use those designations anymore and, if so, what are the century markers for each one of those designations?
This is great, including the commentary after the story - thanks.
I could get about 80% of 1300, and 40% of 1200, but just 5% of 1100.
The 1600 seemed a bit easier than it should be. Shakespeare typically includes a word every two sentences or so that is either unfamiliar (to me), or is being used in an unfamiliar way. I only detected a couple of these in the several paragraphs of that section.
Middle English starts after the Norman Conquest, once Latinate words invade our language. So somewhere around 1100 is generally the cutoff, but these things don’t have hard edges. Learning Old English as a Modern English speaker is a bit like learning a different, but related, language. Middle English feels more like learning a distant dialect of Modern English. Or something like that – at least that’s how it feels to me.
I liked reading the prompt. It developed my patience in listening later at a work meeting today where the administrators talked in high English. It reminded me that we share the same language even though they try to couch their thoughts (or however one puts it in boardrooms) . Maybe I should appreciate that more.
I could understand 1300, more than get the gist, but less than getting every word. 1200 is a foreign language as far as I’m concerned.
Yeah, 1200 is where it starts to really break up for me. I can kinda sort get some of 1200 and 1100 especially via what basic knowledge I have of German, but it’s really, really patchy. I did read Canterbury Tales (c. 1400) in college in Middle English, so that tracks about right. The only memories I have for Old English are during a High School English class where we had the first paragraph or two side-by-side with a Modern English translation to demonstrate how much the language has changed.
Thanks for linking to this! The writer has a very interesting blog on Substack. I just subscribed to it.
It is to a large extent just the Old-Timey spelling throwing you off:
(ge)mette = met
ic = I [cf German]
næfre = never
ær = ere
sƿylce = such
ƿifman = [wo]man