Well, for a native speaker of Dutch who doesn't speak English at all (not many left since my grandmother died in 2014), I'd say old English is actually easier to read than modern - starting around 1400.
Around 1000, English and Dutch must have been mutually understandable.
dddgghhbbfblk•about 4 hours ago
Should be "how far back in time can you read English?" The language itself is what is spoken and the writing, while obviously related, is its own issue. Spelling is conventional and spelling and alphabet changes don't necessarily correspond to anything meaningful in the spoken language; meanwhile there can be large changes in pronunciation and comprehensibility that are masked by an orthography that doesn't reflect them.
dhosek•about 3 hours ago
Indeed, I remember being in Oxford in the 90s and an older man approached me and spoke to me in English and I couldn’t understand a word he said. My ex-wife, who’s an ESL speaker who speaks fluently and without an accent has trouble with English accents in general. Similarly, in Spanish, I find it’s generally easier for me to understand Spanish speakers than Mexican speakers even though I learned Mexican Spanish in school and it’s been my primary exposure to the language. Likewise, I generally have an easier time understanding South American speakers than Caribbean speakers and both sound little like Mexican Spanish. (The Spanish I understand most easily is the heavily accented Spanish of non-native Spanish speakers.)
Accents have diverged a lot over time and as I recall, American English (particularly the mid-Atlantic seaboard variety) is closer to what Shakespeare and his cohort spoke than the standard BBC accent employed in most contemporary Shakespeare productions).
JasonADrury•about 2 hours ago
I live in London, I can drive a little over an hour from where I live and hardly understand the people working at the petrol station. A few more hours and they start to speak French.
leoc•about 4 hours ago
If you want to improve your score, the blog author (Dr. Colin Gorrie) has just the thing: a book which will teach you Old English by means of a story about a talking bear. Here's how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZhlWdVvZfw . Your dream of learning Old English has never been closer: get _Ōsweald Bera_ https://colingorrie.com/books/osweald-bera/ today.
brandall10•about 1 hour ago
Reading Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct", and he has a section that shows how the Lord's Prayer has changed over the ages.
What's interesting is the one in use today - from the early 17th century - is not the most modern variant. There was another revision from the mid-19th century that fell out of favor because it sounded a bit off, less rhythmic, less sacred (ie. Kingdom -> Government).
y-c-o-m-b•about 1 hour ago
This was a fun exercise. I made it through 1300 by reading it in a Scottish accent and being familiar with some basic old Norse characters from a prior trip to Iceland. I watch Scottish shows like "Still Game", and for some reason that combo with the accent and their lingo made it simpler to read. By 1200 I was completely lost; it looks more Germanic to me, which I don't have the knowledge to read.
MrDrDr•about 3 hours ago
The other difficulties with older texts is not just the different spellings or the now arcane words - but that the meaning of some of those recognisable words changed over time. C.S. Lewis wrote an excellent book that describing the changing meanings of a word (he termed ramifications) and dedicated a chapter to details this for several examples including ‘Nature’, ‘Free’ and ‘Sense’. Would highly recommend a read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_in_Words
sometimes_all•about 2 hours ago
Really interesting! Somewhat reminds me of the ending of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls", where the main character, a scion of a very old family which has done some really bad things, goes mad and progressively starts speaking in older and older versions of English after every sentence.
mhitza•about 1 hour ago
Thanks, that's such a great detail. I was reading Lovecraft during highschool in locally translated print editions. Where such details didn't come through.
Do you know if there any other such language related eastereggs in other of Lovecraft's writing? should I chose to revisit them, in English this time around.
guerrilla•about 1 hour ago
Man when I read Adam Smith, that was a challenge. Not only is his Enlgish super archaic with all kinds of strange units, but he writes these incredibly long logically dense sentences.
>The blog ends there. No sign-off, no “thanks for reading.” Just a few sentences in a language that most of us lost the ability to follow somewhere around the thirteenth century.
Fucking AI slop, even this
zamadatix•32 minutes ago
Not sure what you mean?
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markus_zhang•about 3 hours ago
1500 is the threshold I think. I don’t understand 1400. I can go a bit further back in my mother tongue, but 1200 is definitely tough for me.
smitty1e•about 3 hours ago
Shakespeare is a definite barrier.
Dwedit•about 4 hours ago
Seems to be heavily focused on orthography. In 1700s we get the long S that resembles an F. In 1600 we screw with the V's and U's. In 1400, the thorn and that thing that looks like a 3 appears. Then more strange symbols show up later on as well.
stego-tech•about 2 hours ago
A delightful exercise. Inference and phonetics alone got me back to ~1200 with probably a 90% hit rate. Then it just collapsed under me around 1100.
Honestly not a bad critical thinking exercise in general, for someone with language fluency. Much of it can be “worked out” just through gradual inference and problem-solving, and I’d be curious to see its results as a test for High Schoolers.
BorisMelnik•about 1 hour ago
I really think that the onset of mobile device communication will be a major pillar in the history of the English language. lol / crash out / unalive / seggs / aura
layer8•33 minutes ago
Since these occur primarily in ephemeral communication, it’s unclear how much of a lasting influence there will be. It’s also “only” vocabulary, to a limited degree orthography, and rarely grammar.
rubee64•about 1 hour ago
Thanks to RobWords [1] I at least remember thorn (Þ) pronunciation and could mostly decipher 1400. Not much past that, though
Is it weird that the 1900 style is closer to how I typically write than the first 2000 style? I'm not that old, am I?
layer8•30 minutes ago
The 2000 sample was a bit exaggerated.
teo_zero•about 2 hours ago
Excellent essay.
To those who enjoyed it so much as to come here and read these comments, I'd suggest to fetch a copy of David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas", and appreciate the multiple style changes between the various sections.
n8cpdx•about 2 hours ago
no cap u need to b like so unc 2 read this I finna yeet my phone like who even reads I have siri English is lowkey chueggy anyway all my homies use emoji now bet
English is cooked fam. Gen Alpha’s kids are going to get lost at the 2000 paragraph.
zamadatix•about 2 hours ago
Things like slang and casual registers always seem to move much faster but for some reason we assume it's always going to be the next set newer than how we'd write that will result in things going off the rails or resulting in it being the only speech understood by that generation.
Lowkey though, let’s keep it 100 and check it. Back in the day Millennials got totally ragged on for sounding all extra like this n' usin all sort of txting abbreviations early on 2. Yet they can still peep oldskool English just the same - talk about insane in the membrane, for real.
Arch485•about 2 hours ago
fr fr, OP be cappin 2000 ain't English
logicchains•about 1 hour ago
"unc" can't be used as an adjective like that.
thomassmith65•about 2 hours ago
Something I look forward to, though it could take a few years, is for someone to train a family of state-of-the-art chatbots where each uses a corpus with a cut off date of 1950... 1900... 1850.. and so on. How fascinating it would be to see what words and concepts it would and would not understand. That would be as close to time travel as a person could get.
Capital! That's one of the most interesting time periods.
fuzzfactor•3 days ago
This is a good quick example, almost like an eye test where the characters are harder to interpret when you go down the page because they are smaller.
Only for this the font stays the same size, and it gets harder to interpret as is deviates further from modern English.
For me, I can easily go back to about when the printing press got popular.
No coincidence I think.
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artyom•about 2 hours ago
Well, I 100%'d Dark Souls, so surprisingly (or not) I can understand a lot of it.
BadBadJellyBean•about 4 hours ago
Around 1300 to 1400. Some words were harder. But English isn't my first language either. So I guess that's alright. I guess I'd be fine in the 1500 in England. At least language wise.
Sharlin•about 3 hours ago
In 1500 a lot of pronunciation would've been different too, it was in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift [1]. And of course while the UK is still (in)famous for its many accents and dialects, some nigh mutually unintelligible, the situation would've been even worse back then.
Or as I’ve heard it described humorously, the Big Vowel Movement.
ilamont•about 3 hours ago
Would be curious to know from other HN readers: how far back can you understand written prose of your own language, assuming the writing system uses mostly the same letter or characters?
Medieval French, Middle High German, Ancient Greek, Classical Arabic or Chinese from different eras, etc.
WillAdams•about 3 hours ago
A recent book which looks at this in an interesting fashion is _The Wake_ which treats the Norman Conquest in apocalyptic terms using a language markedly different and appropriate
> No cap, that lowkey main character energy is giving skibidi rizz, but the fanum tax is cooked so we’re just catching strays in the group chat, fr fr, it’s a total skill issue, periodt.
I'd say around 2020
npilk•about 3 hours ago
This is cool, I love the concept.
I wonder how much our understanding of past language is affected by survivorship bias? Most text would have been written by a highly-educated elite, and most of what survives is what we have valued and prized over the centuries.
For instance, this line in the 1800s passage:
> Hunger, that great leveller, makes philosophers of us all, and renders even the meanest dish agreeable.
This definitely sounds like the 1800s to me, but part of that is the romance of the idea expressed. I wonder what Twitter would have been like back then, for instance, especially if the illiterate had speech-to-text.
mmooss•about 3 hours ago
I'd love to see actual, authentic material that was rewritten through the years. One possibility is a passage from the Bible, though that's not usual English. Another is laws or other official texts - even if not exactly the same, they may be comparable. Maybe personal letters written from or to the same place about the same topic - e.g., from or to the Church of England and its predecessor about burial, marriage, or baptism.
The author Colin Gorrie, "PhD linguist and ancient language teacher", obviously knows their stuff. From my experience, much more limited and less informed, the older material looks like a modern writer mixing in some archaic letters and expression - it doesn't look like the old stuff and isn't nearly as challenging, to me.
dhosek•about 3 hours ago
Some early English translations of the Bible were unintentionally comical, e.g., “and Enoch walked with God and he was a lucky fellowe.”
Of course that’s not limited to the 16th century. The Good News Bible renders what is most commonly given as “our name is Legion for we are many” instead as “our name is Mob because there are a lot of us.” In my mind I hear the former spoken in that sort of stereotypical demon voice: deep with chorus effect, the latter spoken like Alvin and the Chipmunks.
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throwaway3060•about 3 hours ago
I can get through 1300 with some effort, but from 1200 I get nothing. Just a complete dropoff in that one time frame.
ajb•about 3 hours ago
Yeah same. The explanation at the bottom is interesting, lots of the words imported from Normandy drop off then, and the grammar changes more significantly.
antonvs•about 3 hours ago
I was able to get the gist of 1200, with some effort. By paragraph:
P1: Unclear, but I think it's basically saying there is much to say about all that happened to him.
P2: Unexpectedly, a woman ("uuif", wife) appeared at "great speed" to save him. "She came in among the evil men..."
P3: "She slaughtered the heathen men that pinned me, slaughtered them and felled them to the ground. There was blood and bale enough and the fallen lay still, for [they could no more?] stand. As for the Maister, the ? Maister, he fled away in the darkness and was seen no more."
P4: The protagonist thanks the woman for saving him, "I thank thee..."
On first reading, I didn't know what "uuif" was. I had to look that one up.
reader9274•about 4 hours ago
At around 1200, Godzilla had a stroke
b112•about 3 hours ago
Don't get the reference compared to the text in the article for that timeframe.
Is there something specific in there?
doctor_blood•about 3 hours ago
"Godzilla Had a Stroke Trying to Read This and Fucking Died" is a meme frequently posted in response to incomprehensible/extremely dumb posts.
BoredomIsFun•about 4 hours ago
I am an ESL, but I can easily comprehend 1600. 1500 with serious effort.
Dwedit•about 4 hours ago
At 1400, they add in the thorn "þ". If you don't know that's supposed to be "th", you'll get stuck there.
BoredomIsFun•about 3 hours ago
No, not that. The endings are different, the verbs are substantially different. AFAIK invention of printing had generally stabilizing effect on English.
It is not that I am incapable to understand old English, it is that 1600 is dramatically closer to modern than 1400 one; I think someone from 1600 would be able to converse at 2026 UK farmers market with little problems too; someone from 1400 would be far more challenged.
dhosek•about 3 hours ago
Not to mention that there are pockets of English speakers in Great Britain whose everyday speech isn’t very far from 17th century English. The hypothetical time traveler might be asked, “So you’re from Yorkshire then, are you?”
pixelsub•about 2 hours ago
Ask an Indian haha :)
pbhjpbhj•about 2 hours ago
I don't know what your problem is, your comments so far are all low effort and not really contributing to the conversation.
Your language is not acceptable here.
If you're not already shadow-banned I suspect that's the way you're heading.
Have a word with yourself. (A British idiom, meaning to consider what you're doing, particularly in terms of morality and cultural acceptability.)
WalterGR•about 2 hours ago
What would they say?
constantcrying•about 1 hour ago
I have an edition of the Nibelungenlied, which presents a modern German translation right next to a version of the original text. While the original is somewhat difficult to understand there is an amazing continuity between the two.
To me this made it clear that the German Nation has been clearly defined over the last thousand years and just how similar the people who wrote and enjoyed that work are to the native Germans right now. Can only recommend people do something like that if they want to dispel the delusion that people of your Nation who lived a thousand years ago were in any way fundamentally different from you.
jmclnx•about 3 hours ago
It will be interesting on how texting will change things down the road. For example, many people use 'u' instead of 'you'. Could that make English spelling in regards to how words are spoken worse or better then now ?
antonvs•about 3 hours ago
> worse or better then now?
*than.
Which I realize is an ironic correction in this context. I wonder if we'll lose a separate then/than and disambiguate by context.
dhosek•about 3 hours ago
I’d say we’ve already partly lost separate then/than. It’s sort of like how you can sometimes tell second-language speakers of a language because their grammar is much more precise than a native speaker’s would be (I have a vague notion that native French speakers tend to use third person plural where the textbooks inform French learners to use first person plural, but I’m too lazy to open another tab and google for the sake of an HN comment).
good-idea•about 4 hours ago
How far into the future is my concern
iso1631•about 3 hours ago
I'm heading to Stornoway next week, I don't hold out much hope
metalman•about 4 hours ago
the experience of grendle in the original flashing between comprehensibility and jumbled letters is as far back as I have gone, but I read everything truely ancient that I can get my hands on from any culture in any language(translated) and try and make sense of it best as I can
rhdunn•about 4 hours ago
I can comprehend most of the text back to 1300, if slower than Modern/Present Day English. It helps to know the old letter forms, and some of how Shakespearean (Early Modern), Middle, and Old English work. It also helps sounding it out.
Past that, I'm not familiar with Old English enough to understand and follow the text.
At first it stumped me, but I spent some time on it and it started to become intelligible. I didn't look up any words until after I was done, at which point I looked up "uuif" (woman/wife) since I wanted to know what manner of amazing creature had saved the protagonist :D
dhosek•about 2 hours ago
Knowing that W is a late addition to the alphabet and would have been written UU or VV suddenly makes uuif obvious.
Discussion (88 Comments)
Around 1000, English and Dutch must have been mutually understandable.
Accents have diverged a lot over time and as I recall, American English (particularly the mid-Atlantic seaboard variety) is closer to what Shakespeare and his cohort spoke than the standard BBC accent employed in most contemporary Shakespeare productions).
What's interesting is the one in use today - from the early 17th century - is not the most modern variant. There was another revision from the mid-19th century that fell out of favor because it sounded a bit off, less rhythmic, less sacred (ie. Kingdom -> Government).
Do you know if there any other such language related eastereggs in other of Lovecraft's writing? should I chose to revisit them, in English this time around.
Fucking AI slop, even this
Honestly not a bad critical thinking exercise in general, for someone with language fluency. Much of it can be “worked out” just through gradual inference and problem-solving, and I’d be curious to see its results as a test for High Schoolers.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJxKyh9e5_A&t=36s
To those who enjoyed it so much as to come here and read these comments, I'd suggest to fetch a copy of David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas", and appreciate the multiple style changes between the various sections.
English is cooked fam. Gen Alpha’s kids are going to get lost at the 2000 paragraph.
Lowkey though, let’s keep it 100 and check it. Back in the day Millennials got totally ragged on for sounding all extra like this n' usin all sort of txting abbreviations early on 2. Yet they can still peep oldskool English just the same - talk about insane in the membrane, for real.
Only from 1913-1946 though.
Only for this the font stays the same size, and it gets harder to interpret as is deviates further from modern English.
For me, I can easily go back to about when the printing press got popular.
No coincidence I think.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
Medieval French, Middle High German, Ancient Greek, Classical Arabic or Chinese from different eras, etc.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21023409-the-wake
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/guest-review-the-wake-by-paul-k...
https://loops.video/v/dxXFQREMjg
Dutch is 1400s English.
I'd say around 2020
I wonder how much our understanding of past language is affected by survivorship bias? Most text would have been written by a highly-educated elite, and most of what survives is what we have valued and prized over the centuries.
For instance, this line in the 1800s passage:
> Hunger, that great leveller, makes philosophers of us all, and renders even the meanest dish agreeable.
This definitely sounds like the 1800s to me, but part of that is the romance of the idea expressed. I wonder what Twitter would have been like back then, for instance, especially if the illiterate had speech-to-text.
The author Colin Gorrie, "PhD linguist and ancient language teacher", obviously knows their stuff. From my experience, much more limited and less informed, the older material looks like a modern writer mixing in some archaic letters and expression - it doesn't look like the old stuff and isn't nearly as challenging, to me.
Of course that’s not limited to the 16th century. The Good News Bible renders what is most commonly given as “our name is Legion for we are many” instead as “our name is Mob because there are a lot of us.” In my mind I hear the former spoken in that sort of stereotypical demon voice: deep with chorus effect, the latter spoken like Alvin and the Chipmunks.
P1: Unclear, but I think it's basically saying there is much to say about all that happened to him.
P2: Unexpectedly, a woman ("uuif", wife) appeared at "great speed" to save him. "She came in among the evil men..."
P3: "She slaughtered the heathen men that pinned me, slaughtered them and felled them to the ground. There was blood and bale enough and the fallen lay still, for [they could no more?] stand. As for the Maister, the ? Maister, he fled away in the darkness and was seen no more."
P4: The protagonist thanks the woman for saving him, "I thank thee..."
On first reading, I didn't know what "uuif" was. I had to look that one up.
Is there something specific in there?
It is not that I am incapable to understand old English, it is that 1600 is dramatically closer to modern than 1400 one; I think someone from 1600 would be able to converse at 2026 UK farmers market with little problems too; someone from 1400 would be far more challenged.
Your language is not acceptable here.
If you're not already shadow-banned I suspect that's the way you're heading.
Have a word with yourself. (A British idiom, meaning to consider what you're doing, particularly in terms of morality and cultural acceptability.)
To me this made it clear that the German Nation has been clearly defined over the last thousand years and just how similar the people who wrote and enjoyed that work are to the native Germans right now. Can only recommend people do something like that if they want to dispel the delusion that people of your Nation who lived a thousand years ago were in any way fundamentally different from you.
*than.
Which I realize is an ironic correction in this context. I wonder if we'll lose a separate then/than and disambiguate by context.
Past that, I'm not familiar with Old English enough to understand and follow the text.
I posted my amateur translation of 1200 here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47102874
At first it stumped me, but I spent some time on it and it started to become intelligible. I didn't look up any words until after I was done, at which point I looked up "uuif" (woman/wife) since I wanted to know what manner of amazing creature had saved the protagonist :D