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There's also the fact that human language will also change over the course of 500 years 500 year old English is nothing like English today

blfr 5y ago
Languages change slower once they're written down. Today's English should be readily comprehensible.
FeteCommuniste 5y ago
Five hundred years ago is Shakespeare, roughly. Still readily understandable for the most part. Now if we go back a thousand years…
- kevinmchugh 5y ago
  Shakespeare and the KJV are both closer to 400 years old. Shakespeare wanted to be accessible, though modern readers still need annotations to understand some of the words and most of the references. The KJV was intentionally somewhat archaic. There's a big difference in how accessible KJV is vs Shakespeare But otherwise yeah, the Norman Conquest did a number on the language
- paxys 5y ago
  Shakespeare wrote in what is referred to as "Early Modern English". It is no secret that his writings were a big influence in the evolution of the language itself. If you look at some of his contemporaries from the same period, however, their language will be very different and much harder to understand.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    My specialty in undergrad was 15th and 16th century poetry. His contemporaries' writing (and writings from the early 15th c.) was no harder to read than Shakespeare.¹ The biggest challenge would be the irregularities of spelling—before the printing press and for at least a century afterwards, English spelling was inconsistent and flexible (and frequently was left up to the compositor for printed materials which led to different spellings for a word in the same document to make line breaks work better). ⸻⸻⸻ 1. A notable exception would be Edmund Spenser who wrote in a style that was archaic even to his contemporaries.
nkrisc 5y ago
It’s still intelligible, though. One thousand years is about the accepted timeframe for a language to be no longer mutually intelligible for speakers at either end of that period. Of course, it’s entirely possible the rate of change within a language is not static over millennia.
- ignoramous 5y ago
  ...but the world wasn't a global village back then. A thousand years on, the world may look more similar than diverse, and less divergent / more convergent than it did over a similar time frame in the past?
  - wccrawford 5y ago
    Or it could vary even more rapidly as local language changes can take root internationally on a whim now, where they had major barriers before.
  - nkrisc 5y ago
    It very well might. The extraordinary ways we’re able to preserve knowledge might slow the rate of change, or perhaps increasing interconnectedness between different cultures will accelerate the rate of change.
- srcreigh 5y ago
  Isn't it a bit silly to ask about whether 1000 year old people can understand modern language? If it's not, I would love to know more about this.
  - genewitch 5y ago
    a large portion of English, in general, is changes in spelling from prior words, usually traceable to proto-indo-european, which is a catchall group of languages that etymologists are unable to find reliable sources for. It's generally extrapolated backward, and decent extrapolations are used to bootstrap understanding of words that don't quite "fit" with english, and may, in fact, come from other areas of the planet. There are also scads of words that had a contemporary meaning that changed "overnight", morphing into entirely new meanings, which then brokered entirely new words with different definitions. My current favorite word to use an example of this is "filibuster" - the act of obstructing legislation by talking. The word, as so many in english, came from bastardizing the dutch word for "freebooter" or pirate, through a circuitous route of the French adding an S, and the American English removing an S. If you dig a bit more, you find that the "booty" part of freebooter (which means 'loves plunder' from the original dutch) came from a french word first recorded in the 1300s, "butin", which probably came from some mid-german word meaning "haul from plundering". There's also an implication that for a while in the 1500s-1800s freebooter was also the name of a private entity that engaged in exchanging goods - a "free trader", with the negative connotations falling in and out of style. So, if you can parse Shakespeare or Chaucer at all, it's because of the mechanism of how English, and other languages derived from the same roots "evolve". Saxon and old High German, as well as Icelandic all play a huge role in the way we speak and write today, to name a few.
thruway516 5y ago
Assuming anyone is still speaking English, and not say Mandarin or even some obscure African language no one has even heard about yet.
- genewitch 5y ago
  put me in for $1 on both Lojban and Esperanto.
  - necovek 5y ago
    I am saddened to hear you are not betting on Slovio too. :D
- t-writescode 5y ago
  This is interesting because your go to was an existing, but non-English language, rather than a completely different language that is an amalgamation of other, existing languages, gone through several generations of memes, in-jokes, meaning reversals, etc, to the point of being unintelligible from the former.
  - thruway516 5y ago
    Maybe we won't even have languages at all. We'll just communicate through gifs. My point is who knows. *Wow Someone really took offense at Mandarin

blfr 5y ago

Languages change slower once they're written down. Today's English should be readily comprehensible.

FeteCommuniste 5y ago

Five hundred years ago is Shakespeare, roughly. Still readily understandable for the most part. Now if we go back a thousand years…

kevinmchugh 5y ago
Shakespeare and the KJV are both closer to 400 years old. Shakespeare wanted to be accessible, though modern readers still need annotations to understand some of the words and most of the references. The KJV was intentionally somewhat archaic. There's a big difference in how accessible KJV is vs Shakespeare But otherwise yeah, the Norman Conquest did a number on the language
paxys 5y ago
Shakespeare wrote in what is referred to as "Early Modern English". It is no secret that his writings were a big influence in the evolution of the language itself. If you look at some of his contemporaries from the same period, however, their language will be very different and much harder to understand.
- dhosek 5y ago
  My specialty in undergrad was 15th and 16th century poetry. His contemporaries' writing (and writings from the early 15th c.) was no harder to read than Shakespeare.¹ The biggest challenge would be the irregularities of spelling—before the printing press and for at least a century afterwards, English spelling was inconsistent and flexible (and frequently was left up to the compositor for printed materials which led to different spellings for a word in the same document to make line breaks work better). ⸻⸻⸻ 1. A notable exception would be Edmund Spenser who wrote in a style that was archaic even to his contemporaries.

nkrisc 5y ago

It’s still intelligible, though. One thousand years is about the accepted timeframe for a language to be no longer mutually intelligible for speakers at either end of that period. Of course, it’s entirely possible the rate of change within a language is not static over millennia.

ignoramous 5y ago
...but the world wasn't a global village back then. A thousand years on, the world may look more similar than diverse, and less divergent / more convergent than it did over a similar time frame in the past?
- wccrawford 5y ago
  Or it could vary even more rapidly as local language changes can take root internationally on a whim now, where they had major barriers before.
- nkrisc 5y ago
  It very well might. The extraordinary ways we’re able to preserve knowledge might slow the rate of change, or perhaps increasing interconnectedness between different cultures will accelerate the rate of change.
srcreigh 5y ago
Isn't it a bit silly to ask about whether 1000 year old people can understand modern language? If it's not, I would love to know more about this.
- genewitch 5y ago
  a large portion of English, in general, is changes in spelling from prior words, usually traceable to proto-indo-european, which is a catchall group of languages that etymologists are unable to find reliable sources for. It's generally extrapolated backward, and decent extrapolations are used to bootstrap understanding of words that don't quite "fit" with english, and may, in fact, come from other areas of the planet. There are also scads of words that had a contemporary meaning that changed "overnight", morphing into entirely new meanings, which then brokered entirely new words with different definitions. My current favorite word to use an example of this is "filibuster" - the act of obstructing legislation by talking. The word, as so many in english, came from bastardizing the dutch word for "freebooter" or pirate, through a circuitous route of the French adding an S, and the American English removing an S. If you dig a bit more, you find that the "booty" part of freebooter (which means 'loves plunder' from the original dutch) came from a french word first recorded in the 1300s, "butin", which probably came from some mid-german word meaning "haul from plundering". There's also an implication that for a while in the 1500s-1800s freebooter was also the name of a private entity that engaged in exchanging goods - a "free trader", with the negative connotations falling in and out of style. So, if you can parse Shakespeare or Chaucer at all, it's because of the mechanism of how English, and other languages derived from the same roots "evolve". Saxon and old High German, as well as Icelandic all play a huge role in the way we speak and write today, to name a few.

thruway516 5y ago

Assuming anyone is still speaking English, and not say Mandarin or even some obscure African language no one has even heard about yet.

genewitch 5y ago
put me in for $1 on both Lojban and Esperanto.
- necovek 5y ago
  I am saddened to hear you are not betting on Slovio too. :D
t-writescode 5y ago
This is interesting because your go to was an existing, but non-English language, rather than a completely different language that is an amalgamation of other, existing languages, gone through several generations of memes, in-jokes, meaning reversals, etc, to the point of being unintelligible from the former.
- thruway516 5y ago
  Maybe we won't even have languages at all. We'll just communicate through gifs. My point is who knows. *Wow Someone really took offense at Mandarin