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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. Spellin
by dddgghhbbfblk 8mo ago
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 8mo agoIndeed, 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 8mo agoI 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.
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- nimbleal 7mo agoHmmmm. Which direction are you driving in where you can hardly understand them? I don’t think there’s a regional accent in the whole of the UK that’s “hardly understandable” spoken by anyone under 80 years old, let alone an hour from London. Especially where the conversation isn’t “in group”
- pjc50 8mo agoI 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.
- aardvark179 8mo agoHaving interpreted for a guy speaking with a broad Glaswegian accent on the east coast main line, I can totally believe this.
- noosphr 7mo agoMy funniest moment working in Singapore was translating between an Indian and a Chinese co-worker. The translation was repeating what each said in English in English.
- halapro 7mo agoThis sounds like a Hot Fuzz scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cun-LZvOTdw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cun-LZvOTdw
- clw8 7mo agoI imagine a current generation high school English class would be giggling right from the first line about gooning while on pilgrimages.
- NooneAtAll3 7mo ago> 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc ?
- mh- 7mo agoI was expecting the hooligans from Eurotrip.
- Oreb 7mo ago> 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.
- lefra 7mo agoAs an ESL I'd say it depends on the native language of who's speaking. I'll have no trouble with a thick spanish, italian or romanian language (I'm french), but indians speaking english are completely incomprehensible to me.
- VorpalWay 7mo agoIt took months of being exposed to Indian English on a regular basis for me to start to understand it (and I still find it requires significant mental effort). Context: I'm a Swede who regularly thinks and dreams in English (and when I did an English language test for exchange student purposes I got top marks in all categories).
- pavel_lishin 7mo agoMy college had a lot of Indian & Pakistani students & instructors, and the first few semesters were rough, but by junior year, their accents were totally understandable to me. It was a very useful experience to have, as someone who became a software developer. I wonder what they thought of my Russian accent.
- quadrifoliate 7mo agoIf you want to be able to understand them, you should probably stop thinking of them as a monolithic groupd of "Indians". Individual states in India are comparable in size and greater in population than Spain or Italy; and some cities and their suburbs are comparable to Romania. Overall, India's population is more than 3x that of Europe. A lot of Indians have English that's influenced by the specific region they come from and the native language. A couple examples: - Specific regions of Northwestern India have the "e-" prefixing (e.g. "stop" turns into "estop") while speaking English - Southern Indians tend to y-prefix due to their native languages having more of that sound (e.g. "LLM" can turn into "yell-ell-em").
- tayo42 7mo agoWho 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?
- kstrauser 7mo agoDifferent person, but I learned Mexican Spanish in school. The teacher taught us vosotros “for the test, and it’s not any harder than the others once you learn it, so might as well, but you’ll never need this again unless you go to Europe”. She seems to have been right. To this day, I’ve never needed vosotros.
- well_actulily 7mo agoAnecdata, but I took Spanish all four years in high school in Southern California—I knew of vosotros, but was never really taught it
- lqstuart 7mo agoI 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
- clw8 7mo agoAlso why the non-rhotic American accents are all by the East Coast, they were influenced by the non-rhotic British visitors while the inland areas were spared.
- ranger_danger 7mo agoI didn't think it was possible to speak "without an accent."
- bityard 7mo agoIt depends on who you ask. There is a "dialect" called General American English, which is essentially how national news anchors and some actors are trained, so that they don't sound like they are too obviously from anywhere in particular to the public. A large percentage of Midwesterners and Canadians speak _mostly_ General American, if you allow for the occasional drawl or shifted vowel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English
- nsvd2 7mo agoThis is certainly at least an American accent, and would sound out of place in e.g. the UK.
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- syspec 7mo agoDid you mean it is easier for you to understand Spaniards speaking Spanish than Mexican speakers?
- mock-possum 8mo agoYeah 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.
- jjtheblunt 7mo agothere'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.
- depressedpanda 7mo agoYeah. Try comparing texts written in Old English and Old Norse. It's basically the same language. (I'm not surprised at all that Beowulf takes place in Scandinavia.) But I think they would both be easier to decipher for someone speaking Swedish than English.
- ksenzee 7mo agoThis 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.
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- gfto 7mo agoYou can try this video to see how far back you can understand spoken English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic
- frogpelt 7mo agoI 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.
- thaumasiotes 7mo agoLanguages 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.
- KPGv2 7mo ago> 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.
- dddgghhbbfblk 7mo agoI 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".
- chuckadams 7mo agoScrew these modern sensibilities, I am totally renaming my default git branch to "maiſter".
- noosphr 7mo agoI 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.
- abustamam 7mo agoI'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?
- ETH_start 7mo agoI think he means the latter. This makes learning the spelling harder because you have to learn each word individually, as you would have with hieroglyphs, as opposed spelling it out based on phonemes (that you would have learned from learning how words sound when spoken) and a limited alphabet.
- SoftTalker 7mo agoThat's not how I learned to read or spell in the 1970s. "Sounding it out" was the main strategy. You learned a few rules for how different combinations of letters sounded, and the exceptions to those, as you went along. But most words are spelled as they sound.
- noosphr 7mo ago>But most words are spelled as they sound. English has 45 sounds and 26 letter. There are basically no words over three letter long that are written as they are spoken.
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- carlosjobim 7mo agoWe have the written word from centuries ago available today. Where are you going to find the spoken word from centuries ago?
- CRConrad 7mo agoIn a crashed flying saucer, in the recordings of an old alien ethnographer?
- Terretta 7mo ago> 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/5be1e14b42cf62ec9c235c7cd88dd28c 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.
- zadikian 7mo agoI 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.