[dddgghhbbfblk]

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]

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]

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.

[pjc50]

I have had to interpret between an Ulsterman and a South African, who were both speaking English. I think those accents have vowel shifted in opposite directions.

I was also taught a bit of Chaucer (died 1400) in English at school. Although not any of the naughty bits.

[lqstuart]

I think I read it's more "hillbilly" English that sounds like Shakespeare? Like coal mining towns where words like "deer" and "bear" are two syllables. Probably a combination of that and eastern seaboard.

I only learned recently that the vowel shift and non-rhotic R's in Britain happened after the colonization of America. Americans still talk "normally" whereas the English got weird. Also why Irish accents sound closer to American than British I think. Linguistics is cool

[NooneAtAll3]

> older man approached me and spoke to me in English and I couldn’t understand a word he said

like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc ?

[Oreb]

> The Spanish I understand most easily is the heavily accented Spanish of non-native Spanish speakers.

Are you sure this is because of their accent? I have the same experience with French (the non-native speakers are easier to understand), but I always thought that was because they use fewer and simpler words.

[ranger_danger]

I didn't think it was possible to speak "without an accent."

[tayo42]

Who taught you Mexican Spanish in school? Im always hearing about how Spanish speakers not from Spain struggle with Spanish in school. You didn't learn vosostros?

[syspec]

Did you mean it is easier for you to understand Spaniards speaking Spanish than Mexican speakers?

[gfto]

You can try this video to see how far back you can understand spoken English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic

[frogpelt]

I came here to post the same video. I couldn't understand it until 1600-ish. My wife immediately recognized swinu as pigs early in the video.

[KPGv2]

> Spelling is conventional and spelling and alphabet changes don't necessarily correspond to anything meaningful in the spoken language

On the contrary, spelling is highly idiosyncratic until the 18th century, and until then it was tightly correlated to the sounds of spoken language. Shakespeare didn't even HIMSELF have one way of spelling his own last name. That's how non-conventional spelling was until pretty recently.

You can even see it in these examples, words like "maiſter" in IIRC the 1300s example. Which becomes "master" later in English, but remains Mäster in Frisian (the closest Germanic language to English) and is also mäster in Swedish.

[chuckadams]

Screw these modern sensibilities, I am totally renaming my default git branch to "maiſter".

[dddgghhbbfblk]

I think you are missing my point. Just because spelling can be inconsistent doesn't mean it's not conventional. We agree that certain letters and combinations of letters correspond to certain sounds--that's a convention. We could just as easily remap the letters in our alphabet to entirely different sounds from the ones they represent today and the resulting written text would be, on the surface, entirely incomprehensible, because we no longer understand the conventions being used.

In this particular case, there are several glyphs used in the older texts which we don't use any more today, which makes the older text both appear more "different" and, for most people, harder to read. But this is an artificial source of difficulty in this case. I acknowledge your point that some other spelling differences track pronunciation differences but this isn't always true.

As far as pronunciation changes that aren't captured in spelling changes, this is true most obviously for a lot of words whose spelling standardized during or before the Great Vowel Shift, like "day".

[noosphr]

I use a screen reader and in managed quite well until 1200.

That said: phonetic spelling now. We have spent 500 years turning English into something closer to Egyptian hieroglyphs than a language with an alphabet.

[Oreb]

Phonetic spelling would perhaps make the language easier to learn for native speakers, but it would make it harder to learn for foreigners, at least those of us who come from Europe. Most words in written English resemble words in Germanic or Romance languages. If English was spelled phonetically, the resemblance would be significantly smaller.

People often say that the English spelling is weird or illogical. As a non-native speaker, I disagree. The English spelling makes perfect sense. It’s the English pronunciation which is really strange and inconsistent.

[sheept]

phonetic spelling based on whose dialect? should "merry" "marry" and "Mary" be spelled the same?

besides, pronunciation continues to evolve, so any phonetic spelling would continue to gradually diverge from the spoken language

[williadc]

I've been thinking about this problem for quite awhile, and recently coded up something that allows for easy conversion between today's written English, and a phonetic spelling convention.

https://git.sr.ht/~dcw/iNgliS

I've created a Firefox Add-on for it as well.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/inglis/

[abustamam]

I'm a bit confused by what you mean by that, unless you're talking about emoji, but those weren't around 500 years ago.

Do you mean that since English isn't phonetically spelled, that which we call the alphabet is rather arbitrary?

[mock-possum]

Yeah it’s really just the glyphs that are changing here, and occasionally the spelling, otherwise the words themselves are still fairly recognizable if you’re well-read.

[ksenzee]

This is true through 1300 or so. If you transliterate the 1200, 1100, and 1000 sections to modern glyphs, it's still a foreign language with the occasional recognizable word (such as "the"). Learning Old English in college was a lot like learning Latin: lots of recognizable vocabulary, totally unfamiliar case endings, mostly unfamiliar pronouns, arbitrary word order.

[jjtheblunt]

there'd be a discontinuity around 1066 since Normans brought over Latin-derived vocabulary aplenty, and overlayed germanic vocabulary. it's super evident if you learn Swedish (for example...very related to pre-1066 English) and have learned Latin (or French), while speaking English.

[Terretta]

> Should be "how far back in time can you read English?"

Made a version with modern glyphs to help separate language familiarity from writing familiarity:

https://gist.github.com/terretta/5be1e14b42cf62ec9c235c7cd88...

All credit to original, just agreed with your point this munged two things as presented and preferred to focus on the language.

[thaumasiotes]

Languages can change in many different ways. Pronunciation changes impede you a lot more the first time you meet someone with a different pronunciation than they do as you interact over time. Grammatical changes are trickier.

[carlosjobim]

We have the written word from centuries ago available today.

Where are you going to find the spoken word from centuries ago?

[CRConrad]

In a crashed flying saucer, in the recordings of an old alien ethnographer?

[zadikian]

I honestly didn't know English had so many non-Latin characters in those centuries. Like a modern English reader can more easily read (but not understand) a Roman inscription than some of these examples.