> Does this look recognisably like modern English? https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-eng https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beo

> Does this look recognisably like modern English? https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-eng https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-eng... Oh my... I can't even begin to understand that. It looks about as foreign as Old Norse (or modern German for that matter). How things change over just 1,000 years (that's just like what, 40 generations?!). I am no expert, though I think the language changed a lot after the Norman conquest, right? So perhaps just a few hundred years later it would have morphed into something we could more or less recognize as English? Or was it really a more gradual evolution?