Around 1000, English and Dutch must have been mutually understandable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Anglo-Saxon_England
Dutch doesn't have the same intonation, has harsher pronunciations, and has a whole extra sound most English people struggle with (a rolled r).
The older generations also can't pronounce -thew very well as it's not a thing in Dutch, so struggle to pronounce my name, calling me Matchoo instead of Matthew. It still boggles my mind that my Mum would pick a name the Dutch can't pronounce.
The Dutch accent is also extremely noticeable to a native English speaker.
Ultimately, they're not the same at all as English is Germanic/Latin hybrid where half the words are French/Italian words, and half the words are Germanic/Dutch words.
Dutch is not.
You can usually tell by looking at the word and the end of the word.
Words like fantastic, manual, vision, aquatic, consume are all from -ique, -alle, -umme and will have similar words in French/Italian. The tend to be longer words with more syllables.
Words like mother, strong, good, are Germanic in root. The -er, -ong, -od words will all be similar to the German/Dutch words. Shorter, quicker to pronounce.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/english-to-dutch-translations
Which is interesting cause 1200 italian[0] seems pretty readable by everyone who can read italian (and likely every other romance language), you have to go further back to have a shift.
[0] E.g. Saint Francis' Canticle of the Sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canticle_of_the_Sun
The language in section 1300 isn't much different from section 1400. Almost all of it is still good English today if you give the words their modern spelling:
Then after much time spoke the Master, and his words were cold as winter is. His voice was as the crying of ravens, sharp and shrill, and all that heard him were adread and durst not speak.
"I deem¹ thee to the death, stranger. Here shalt thou die, far from thy kin and far from thine own land, and none shall know thy name, nor none shall thee beweep."
And I said to him, with what boldness I might gather, "Why farest thou with me thus? What trespass have I wrought against thee, that thou deemst¹ me so hard a doom?"
"[Swie!]"² quoth he, and smote me with his hand, so that I fell to the earth. And the blood ran down from my mouth.
And I [swied],² for the great dread that was come upon me was more than I might bear. My heart became as stone, and my limbs were heavy as lead, and I []³ might no more stand nor speak.
The evil man laughed, when that he saw my pain, and it was a cruel laughter, without mercy or pity as of a man that hath no [rewthe]⁴ in his heart.
Alas! I should never have come to this town of Wolvesfleet! Cursed be the day and cursed be the hour that I first set foot therein!
¹ We still have this word in modern English, but the meaning is different.
² No idea what this word is.
³ I assume the ne in the text here is required by some kind of grammatical negative agreement with the rest of the clause. In more modern (but still fairly archaic) English, nothing goes here. In actual modern-day English, the grammar of this clause isn't really available for use, but it's intelligible.
⁴ This turns out to be the element ruth in ruthless, and a man with no ruth in his heart is one who is literally ruthless, without "ruth". It literally means "regret", but the use in the text clearly matches the metaphorical sense of the modern word ruthless.
“Swie!” is interesting, I understood it somehow naturally. In Gheg Albanian we say “Shuj!”, which means “Be silent!”.
...Nor shall I never it forget, not while I live!
... and that was a wife [= woman], strong and [stith]! She came in among the evil men and me [nerede] from their hands.
She slew the heathen men that me pinned, slew them and felled them to the ground. There was blood and [bale] enough. And they fell [and] lay still, for they [] might no more stand. And the Master, the [wraþþe] Master, he flew away in the darkness and was seen no more.
I said [to] her, "I thank thee, [leove] wife, for thou hast me [ineredd] from death and from all mine [ifoan]!"
Interestingly, nerede/ineredd has no descendant in modern English, but it's not difficult to understand in the passage, while leove and ifoan do have descendants, and in the case of ifoan the meaning hasn't changed, but they are harder to read.
In 1100 the idea of "just substitute the modern word in for the old word" starts to break down.
[0] Or at the time promised the post, I don't remember the details.
Assuming that translation was done a while ago (100+ yrs?)... It is hard to read. I can understand it if I try. But the phrasing is not current. 100 pages will take double the time at the least.
Almost think AI needs to rephrase it into current English.
Probably has these double negatives, long sentences, etc.
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.
"From Olde English to Modern American English in One Monologue"
I remember my father and I having to enable the subtitles for Rab C Nesbitt when I was a kid. There are areas of Scotland (especially the isles) which are probably still unintelligible to most of the British population I would wager.
Anyway as I know from my reading history at 1400 it gets difficult, but I can make it through 1400 and 1300 with difficulty, but would need to break out the middle English dictionaries for 1200 and 1100. 1000 forget it, too busy to make that effort.
(function() {
const SKIP_PARENTS = new Set(["SCRIPT", "STYLE", "NOSCRIPT", "TEXTAREA"]);
const walker = document.createTreeWalker(
document.body,
NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT,
{
acceptNode(node) {
const p = node.parentNode;
if (!p || SKIP_PARENTS.has(p.nodeName)) return NodeFilter.FILTER_REJECT;
if (p.nodeName === "INPUT") return NodeFilter.FILTER_REJECT;
return NodeFilter.FILTER_ACCEPT;
}
}
);
let node;
while ((node = walker.nextNode())) {
node.nodeValue = node.nodeValue.replace(/ſ/g, "s");
}
})()1300 is noticeably harder and needs some iterative refinement, but once you rewrite it, it's surprisingly not too bad:
> Then after much time spoke the master, his words were cold as winter is. His voice was the crying of rauenes(?), sharp and chill, and all that heard him were adrade(?) and dared not speak.
> "I deem thee(?) to the(?) death, stranger. Here shall you die, far from thy kin and far from thine own land, and none shall known thy name, nor non shall thy biwepe(?)."
> And I said to him [...]
1200 is where I can't understand much... it feels like where the vocabulary becomes a significant hurdle, not just the script:
> Hit(?) is much to saying all that pinunge(?) hie(?) on me(?) uroyten(?), all that sore(?) and all that sorry. No scar(?) is never hit(?) forgotten, not uuhiles(?) is libbe(?).
It gets exhausting to keep going after these :-) but this was very fun.
Someone here needs to brush up on their Icelandic!
I really got into reading Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" (about 1497) about a year ago, and I suspect that really helped me with this exercise, since he uses some language that was archaic even back then.
I really wish there was an audio recording of this story. I found the spellings in the earlier years more and more confusing.
> Before the mid 1700s, there was no such thing as standardized spelling.
It felt like it was become more Germanic, and that appears true:
> The farther back you go, the more the familiar Latinate layer of English is stripped away, revealing the Germanic core underneath: a language that looks to modern eyes more like German or Icelandic than anything we’d call English.
- [1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/WillandMarSess2/1/2/enact...
To me, it is nearly like trying to look at a picture book of fashion but the imagery is degraded as you go back. I'd like to see the time-traveler's version with clean digital pictures of every era...
It's spoken by about 50,000 people in the Faroe Islands, which are between Iceland and Scotland. The isles were settled by Viking-era Norse about a thousand years ago and then largely forgotten by the rest of the world. But they kept speaking their version of Old Norse and it became its own language. There are many dialects and the writing system was designed to cover all of them, so it is is etymologically informed by Old Norse and it is very conservative. It's not at all indicative of how it's really pronounced. The written form is somewhat even mutually intelligible with Icelandic / Old Norse, but the spoken language is not.
Underneath those æ and ð is a language that is oddly similar to English, like parallel convergent evolution. It's a North Germanic language not a West Germanic language so the historical diversion point is about 1500 years ago.
But it has undergone an extensive vowel shift (but in a different pattern). And also like English, it has also undergone extensive affrication (turned into ch/j) of the stop consonants and reduction of final stops and intervocalic stops. It has the same kind of stress - vowel reduction interaction that English has. That further heightens the uncanny effect.
I came away with the impression that it is English's closest sibling language, aside from Dutch. Some vocabulary:
broðir "broh-wer" (brother), heyggjur "hoy-cher" (hill/height), brúgv "brukf" (bridge), sjógvar/sjós "shekvar/shos" (sea), skyggj "skooch" (sky/cloud), djópur "cho-pur" (deep), veðirinn "ve-vir-uhn" (weather). Rough pronunciations given between quotes; all examples are cognate with English!
There's an extended story reading by a native speaker here [1] if you want an example of what it sounds like. No idea what they're saying. The intonation reminds me a bit of the northern British isles which also had a Norse influence.
[0] https://annas-archive.org/md5/4d2ce4cd5e828bbfc7b29b3d03349b...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSXu2fuJOTQ
Repost of an earlier comment of mine.
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.
This is generous to his readers. Most American college students majoring in English can't read Dickens, according to a study discussed here last year [0].
People reading a post on a blog about dead languages are self-selected to be better at this task. But so are people who've decided to spend four years of their life studying English literature.
In some sense, it's better these days, competition has led to care for the reader that probably didn't exist as much then, since so few people can read.
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.
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.
Language changes. It's weird to see it happening in front of you...
There will be changes of course. Yet we are also more connected than ever, whereas the next town over would be a whole day trip in the past. The separation allows for more divergence.
Well, maybe if we get to Mars, differences might crop up again.
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).
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/guest-review-the-wake-by-paul-k...
Makes me wonder what J.R.R. Tolkien would have thought of this.
Medieval French, Middle High German, Ancient Greek, Classical Arabic or Chinese from different eras, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh
The Shahnameh is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 CE and is the national epic of Greater Iran. Shahnameh is one of the world's longest epic poems, and the longest epic poem created by a single author.
I one met a visiting Iranian academic just after I'd learned about the Shahnameh. I'd also read the opinion of a French scholar who thought its language was, for a modern Iranian, like Montaigne for a modern French. The Iranian woman told me that very few people in Iran actually read the book. It's very long, and hard to grasp for untrained readers. But most people know some of its stories and characters, because they are often mentioned in everyday life, and because the abridged prose books are widespread.
BTW, I don't know which editions are the most popular in Iran. Wikipedia says the Shahnameh was heavily modified and modernized up to the 14th century, when its most famous illustrated edition was created. The book most read today is probably not a scholar edition.
She makes a fair point. Reading and fully understanding Shahnameh is not straightforward. The difficulty does not primarily stem from drastic linguistic change, although the language has evolved and been somewhat simplified over time, but rather from the nature of Persian poetry itself, which is often deliberately layered and intricate *.
That said, Iranian students are introduced to selected passages and stories from Shahnameh throughout their schooling. Teachers typically devote considerable time to these texts, as the work is closely tied to cultural identity and a sense of historical pride.
* Persian, in particular, is often described as highly suited to poetic expression. Its flexible grammar and word order allow for a degree of intentional ambiguity, and this interpretive openness is frequently regarded as a mark of sophistication (difficult to master at a high-level for a layperson). A single ghazal by Hafez, for instance, can be read as a dialogue with God, a beloved man, or a beloved woman, with each interpretation leading to a different emotional and philosophical resonance. This multiplicity is the core part of the artistry.
Personally, I did not truly understand Hafez until I fell in love for the first time. My vocabulary and historical knowledge remained the same, yet my experience of the poetry changed completely. What shifted was something more inward and spiritual and only then did I begin to feel the full force of the verses.
For example, consider the following (unfortunately) translated lines:
O cupbearer, pass the cup around and offer it to me --
For love seemed easy at first, but then the difficulties began.
Books written in the 17th century or later are easy to read. Of course, the meaning of some words can change over time but that's a minor trouble. I believe Molière and Racine are still studied in school nowadays, but the first name that came to my mind was Cyrano de Bergerac (the writer, not the fictitious character).
Books from the 16th need practice, but I think anyone who tries hard will get used to the language. I enjoyed Rabelais's Pantagruel and Gargantua a lot, and I first read them by myself when I was in highschool (I knew a bit of Latin and Greek, which helped).
Before that, French was much more diverse; the famous split into "langue d'oc" and "langue d'oïl" (terms for "oui" — yes — at the time) is a simplification, because there were many dialects with blurry contours over space and time.
I've read several 11th-12th novels about the Round Table, but I was already experienced in Old French when I started, and I think most readers would struggle to make sense of it. It may depend on the dialect; I remember "Mort Artur" was easier than "Lancelot, le chevalier à la charette".
"La chanson de Roland" (11th century, Old French named anglo-normand) is one of my favorite books of all times. Reading it for the first time was a long process — I learned the declensions of Old French and a lot of vocabulary — but it was also fun, like deciphering some mystery. And the poesy is a marvel, epic, incredibly concise, surprising and deep.
Before that (9th-10th), Old French was even closer to Latin.
There's not much literature older than that, cause people preferred to write in Latin, the oldest bit in "volgare" is the Indovinello Veronese[0] which is from the 8th or 9th century and at that point it's almost latin spelling-wise, it's understandable if you're well educated but wouldn't be understandable by everyone.
In general, language changes around at the same rate all over history and geography, barring some things (migration, liturgical languages)
Resiliency is one of the weird beneficial side-effects of having a writing system based on ideas instead of sounds. Today, you've got a variety of Chinese dialects that, when spoken, are completely unintelligible to one another. But people who speak different dialects can read the same book just fine. Very odd, from a native English speaking perspective.
Is there something specific in there?
I.e. the 2000s one is a casual travel blog style intended normally intended for any random quick reader and the 1900s one is more a mix of academic sounding/formal conversation intended for longer content. If you assume a more casual voice in the 1900s one and a more formal voice in the 2000s one I bet they'd even almost seem to be placed backwards chronologically.
I'd say around 2020
P1: Unclear, but I think it's basically saying there is much to say about all that happened to him.
[Edit: the more I stare at it, the more sense it makes. "There is much to say about all that ? was wrought on me, ???. I shall never forget it, not while I live!"]
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 [wrathe?] 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.
Had the word been written "wif", I don't think that there would have been any need for you to search the word, as the relationship with "wife" would have been obvious.
Between then and now, in this word only the pronunciation of "i" has changed, from "i" like in the European languages to "ai".
> "Þe euele man louȝ, whan that he sawe my peine, and it was a crueel louȝter, wiþouten merci or pitee as of a man þat haþ no rewþe in his herte."
"The evil man laughed, when he saw my pain, and it was a cruel laughter, without mercy or pity as of a man that has no rewthe in his heart."
In other words, a rewthe-less man.
We've retained the word "ruthless" but no longer use the word "ruth", "a feeling of pity, distress, or grief."
For example, Bill W speaks about being trapped or surrounded by quicksand. Apparently, nobody today understands quicksand. So they remove the word quicksand.
I'm 44, and this makes me feel like an old man yelling at clouds.
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.
We need to bring muchel back
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.
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.
I have read many printed books from the range 1450 to 1900, in several European languages. In all of them the languages are much easier to understand than those of the earlier manuscripts.
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.)
Fucking AI slop, even this
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
Man changed to mean only a male person, and we lost wer except in the word "werewolf".
*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.
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.
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).
I was also taught a bit of Chaucer (died 1400) in English at school. Although not any of the naughty bits.
like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc ?