Timeline for How far back in time would English be understandable to a modern speaker?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
5 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 17, 2016 at 22:18 | comment | added | Perkins | For voice immersion, (and to an extent written) you need a good ear as well. Dialectic shifts tend to follow patterns. To pull an example from Chaucer, you'd need to be able to first recognize that "strahnd" has morphed into "strand", and then realise from the context that it's the "beach" version of the meaning. Once you get in the habit of deliberately looking for patterns in the language it starts getting easier. | |
| Aug 11, 2016 at 19:18 | comment | added | T.E.D. | Is this really true? I have a very large English vocab (just measured it online at 35,500, 80th percentile for my age), and cannot comprehend spoken Shakespeare. I've also had the experience of being dropped into an incomprehensible dialect and having to learn it (AAVE), and I don't think my vocab knowledge was very helpful for that. It seems to me I pretty much have to learn anew how and what words were used in the new dialect. | |
| Aug 8, 2016 at 20:57 | comment | added | Perkins | I'm referring to the people who would actually spell it the way I did. You know, the ones that literally don't know what the word "literally" means. How far back you can go tends to grow exponentially with vocabulary size, so anyone who didn't flunk the section on Shakespeare should be able to handle a few hundred years easily. Do note also that, by the time my youngest brother was going through HS, the Federalist Papers were never mentioned, the Constitution was only partially studied, and Lincoln's speeches were things that were played as sound-bites and never discussed or explained. | |
| Aug 8, 2016 at 20:43 | comment | added | user1975 | I am not so sure about that 150 year cutoff for a typical uneducated HS graduate. I know in HS I read the U.S. Constitution and some of the other political literature of the day (e.g. Federalist Papers). While dense at times, at least the printed language of 230-240 years ago was very comprehensible without an advanced education or vocabulary. 150 years ago is 1866, just after Lincoln's assassination. Documents from the civil war era (e.g. Lincoln's speeches) are very readable, leading me to believe it should be easy to speak with someone from that era. | |
| Aug 8, 2016 at 20:21 | history | answered | Perkins | CC BY-SA 3.0 |