As a person that is native Icelandic speaker, took Danish in school and speak Dutch it was really fun. I whish they kept going so it becomes more like Icelandic again.
Technically it’s more like Old Norse
Exactly, Icelandic is basically old norse with a spelling skin and different vocabulary. Most people take an least one class which involves reading old norse like Hávamál. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hávamál?wprov=sfla1
How similar? Here’s the first stanza of Hávamál translated by me just now. All the words are common. Other places like Snorra Edda is also easily readable although Snorri used less common words so there’s more vocabulary to memorise like “röðull” for sun and “gumi” for man.
Gattir allar, aþr gangi fram, vm scoðaz scyli, vm scygnaz scyli; þviat ouist er at vita, hvar ovinir sitia a fleti fyr[b]
Gáttir allar, áður gangi fram, um skoðast skal, um skyggnast skal: því að víst er að vita, hvar óvinir sitja á fleti fyrir.
I could understand more-or-less everything at 1300, got the gist of the story at 1200, and could make out some familiar roots and morphology from other languages at 1100 and 1000 but not enough to puzzle things together.
As a nonnative, I stuck at 1600. Too many different spellings really gives me trouble…
I can’t believe what pretentious twats they sounded like in 1900
It’s called class and style
1300s I can understand.
1200s I can make out the odd word.
In my a-level English lessons we did a term on the Canterbury Tales and Middle English so we had to learn how to read it.
gets to 1500s:
“I get the gist, I reckon I could do this”
gets to 1400s:
It’s easy if you know the rules - the fs that are s’s, the fact v and u were pretty much interchangeable and that prior to 1700 spelling was largely vibe driven
Yeah but i mean actually talking to someone lol. The reading I get but talking it in a convo? I reckon 1500s i just might barely be passable
I parse the first line of the 1400’s “But the man would me not abandon there, nor suffer me to pass forth. I might not flee, for his companions, of whom there were a great number, beset me about and held me fast that I should not escape.”
So…if you’ve read a pompous fantasy hack in your teens (and honestly who hasn’t) you’ll get by.
also the word douȝti suggests there’s a chunk of scots in there.
That was great, thanks for sharing! The þorn guy around Lemmy might learn from it a few more ways to be archaically misunderstood.
the porn guy
You mean Sân?
Yes, fâþer?
For a person who barely speaks English as me, going beyond 1700 it’s impossible.
Just reading text isn’t really a fair representation of the English language as you go back to beyond the 14th century. The grammar remains pretty similar if you sound it out and most vocab is similar (or can be figured out by context clues).
The non-standardized spelling and premodern characters make it feel alien but it’s mostly someone with a heavy accent using phonetics to write [approximately] what they’re sounding like. I bet most people wouldn’t struggle if the text was massaged a bit.
I crap out at the 1200’s. Which is ironically how far back i can trace my paternal line
About to 1400, then it starts to look more like Dutch or something. A few hundred years more and it starts to look like Danish or something. I bet it’s harder to understand verbally.
Yeah, I said it looked like Dutch in the 1300 and before period. Maybe that’s a bias because I can speak danish (okay, anyway) but dutch is like a random bunch of nonsense to me
Yeah same. I wonder how related were English and Dutch around that time period. It seems like the latter is still somewhere in that time period in speech and grammar style.
This was fun! Anyone know about the ſ character? How come in the 1600s it only sometimes seemed to take the place of s?
It’s purely stylistic, but here are the rules - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s#Rules
Some of the rules for the use of the long s from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
Long s was always used (ſong, ſubſtitute), except:
- Upper-case letters are always the round S; there is no upper-case long s.
- A round s was always used at the end of a word ending with ⟨s⟩: his, complains, ſucceſs
- However, long s was maintained in abbreviations such as ſ. for ſubſtantive(substantive), and Geneſ. for Geneſis(Genesis).
- Before an apostrophe (indicating an omitted letter), a round s was used: us’d and clos’d.
- Before or after an f, a round s was used: offset, ſatisfaction.
It was often used for “f” as well, specifically in print to save money.
Towards the end of the article, they explain the same thing was done with using “y” to replace the letters that make the “th” sound (ð and þ) so instead of “the” or “ðe” you got “ye”
It looks almost like the old german “S”.
Written English has been remarkably stable over the last 300 years
And yet the College Board will use the most incoherent journal entry that makes the westing game look like a picture book
I did better than I thought I would but by 1300 it was starting to get confusing.
And that’s just the reading part. Phonetic changes will make the spoken word unintelligible a bit ways before that.
Good thing I’m not a time traveler.
I muddled through the 1200s with context clues, and was still catching words in the 1100s, but gave up on the 1000s. It was too brutally yuele.
I would love to find an audio version to see how far I could get on spoken word alone. Being from the Appalachians, I’ve always been told our dialect is older.
Here is a similar thing in audio monologue:
