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You don't have to go back so far for language to get tricksy. I'm 50, British and speak en_GB_en (lol etc) with a roughly RP accent. My mum also had a similar

You don't have to go back so far for language to get tricksy. I'm 50, British and speak en_GB_en (lol etc) with a roughly RP accent. My mum also had a similar accent when I knew her, except she was a Devonian farmer's daughter born 1942. If she reverted her accent and language back to how her peers spoke in South Devon in the 1950s and 60s then she was quite hard to follow and that was my mum. Granny and Grandad (b. 1902) could really make themselves unintelligible if they wanted to. Mind you, Granny was from Manchester and Grandad from Totnes. We also seem to have forgotten that quite a few other languages have been lost in the UK and far more recently. Cumbric and Cornish for starters. Both are Brythonic ie like Welsh, Scottish and Irish. Cumbric was spoken in Cumbria ie top left of England and Cornish in Kernow - Cornwall - bottom left, next door to Devon. It's not quite that simple but good enough. Cornish is being revived, Cumbric not so much although I'm sure I read somewhere that shepherds still count in Cumbric - someting like yan, tan, tithera, methera. You have to be careful when you pin languages into your display cabinets. Unlike insects the bloody things persist to get up and tell you to piss off in a variety of amusing ways. Sadly what seemed routine and boring to our forebears was often not documented or obliterated and ultimately lost. Painstaking research gets us some of the way but it is absolutely that: painstaking.

toyg 5y ago
Even just the slang evolving can make the nominally-same language into something alien. My parents' '70s slang from a specific Italian city is full of funny words that don't mean anything anymore.
- gerdesj 5y ago
  Quite. We can see SPQR on the manhole covers in Rome and know that the Senate and People of Rome own the place. That's a signature that is well over 2000 years old - it used to also appear on the "eagles" of the legions and in a fair few other places. That is a very well documented and understood message from the past. A few miles (mille passus) from me is Lendiniae - we call it Ilchester these days. The -chester name implies it was a Roman camp/town. What we are talking about here is context and history. Please share where you lot are from and some examples of how slang has changed for you. I might not understand it but I will appreciate it and it gets documented somewhere. There is a really good reason for the Internet Archive to exist. It remembers stuff. We've lost so much already but future generations will have rather a lot of data to pick over.
deleted 5y ago
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jgwil2 5y ago
> Cumbric and Cornish for starters. Both are Brythonic ie like Welsh, Scottish and Irish. Small correction: Welsh is indeed Brythonic, as are Cornish and Breton, as they derive from the Celtic languages spoken in pre-Anglo-Saxon Britain. Scottish Gaelic and Irish, on the other hand, are Goidelic, as they come from the Celtic spoken in Ireland.

toyg 5y ago

Even just the slang evolving can make the nominally-same language into something alien. My parents' '70s slang from a specific Italian city is full of funny words that don't mean anything anymore.

gerdesj 5y ago
Quite. We can see SPQR on the manhole covers in Rome and know that the Senate and People of Rome own the place. That's a signature that is well over 2000 years old - it used to also appear on the "eagles" of the legions and in a fair few other places. That is a very well documented and understood message from the past. A few miles (mille passus) from me is Lendiniae - we call it Ilchester these days. The -chester name implies it was a Roman camp/town. What we are talking about here is context and history. Please share where you lot are from and some examples of how slang has changed for you. I might not understand it but I will appreciate it and it gets documented somewhere. There is a really good reason for the Internet Archive to exist. It remembers stuff. We've lost so much already but future generations will have rather a lot of data to pick over.

deleted 5y ago

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jgwil2 5y ago

> Cumbric and Cornish for starters. Both are Brythonic ie like Welsh, Scottish and Irish. Small correction: Welsh is indeed Brythonic, as are Cornish and Breton, as they derive from the Celtic languages spoken in pre-Anglo-Saxon Britain. Scottish Gaelic and Irish, on the other hand, are Goidelic, as they come from the Celtic spoken in Ireland.