5 ms·

It really baffles (and amazes) me that Old English is practically unintelligible to modern day English speakers.

lproven 5mo ago
If you go back half a millennium, most languages are the same. The sign above the door at the primary school outside Karlstejn Castle is unreadable to a speaker of modern Czech. School website: https://www.skolakarlstejn.cz/ https://www.skolakarlstejn.cz/ Better pics can be found easily. It's quite rare for a language to remain close enough to be intelligible. English is a mongrel, with influences from old French and ancient Saxon and Norse and Celtic. Every few centuries you go back, you strip away whole layers of additional vocabulary left by the descendants of successive invasions.
- DonaldFisk 5mo ago
  Anglo-Saxon + Norman French + Latin + Greek. Surprisingly few words from Celtic languages.
- troad 5mo ago
  > The sign above the door at the primary school outside Karlstejn Castle is unreadable to a speaker of modern Czech. What? No it's not. It looks no more than ~100-150 years old, and is perfectly readable if you've ever seen a long s (like ſo).
  - lproven 5mo ago
    It's really not. After a lot of searching I found... my own post from Reddit 3Y ago! https://www.reddit.com/r/czech/comments/17stwmi/can_anyone_read_the_text_above_the_door_of_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/czech/comments/17stwmi/can_anyone_r... It has a relatively clear photo.
    - troad 5mo ago
      That's perfectly readable to me as a speaker of modern Czech, and it appears to have been readable to all the commenters on your post too. > W téchto se dozwédá sjnjch pilné robé, Bohu čjm povinné, bratřjm, wlasti, sobě. This is almost modern Czech, with j for í and w for v (which was the standard orthography for hundreds of years and would be familiar to any educated Czech). Take the most famous poem in Czech, in its original orthography from 1836: > Byl pozdnj wečer - prwnj mág > Wečernj mág - byl lásky čas. This is perfectly readable, like your sign. One of the comments claims the sign is from 1487 - I would find this extremely unlikely. The mention of vlast (homeland) is suggestive of the era of the National Awakening (19th century), as is the orthography, font, and diacritics. (And the overall theme of education for God and country seems pretty anachronistic for 1487.) If we go back in time, to say the Kralická Bible (1593), we're still well within the realm of readable text to modern Czechs: > Na Počátku stwořil Bůh nebe a zemi. Země pak byla nesličná a pustá: a tma byla nad propastj: a Duch Božj wznássel se nad wodami. Y řekl Bůh: Buď swětlo: Y bylo swětlo. Let's go back all the way to the earliest Slavic texts, about 1300 years ago, which largely predate Czech altogether: > Iskonï bě slovo. Ï slovo bě u boga. Ï bogъ bě slovo. A modern Czech would understand most of this, with the probable exception of iskonï ([na] konci, but used here to refer to the beginning). They would probably miss the exact tense being used for bě, but guess that it's a copula (they might see it as a portmanteau of bylo and je, which is close enough). This is probably comparably difficult for a Czech as say Chaucer is for an English speaker (ie not terribly), except it is half a millennium earlier than Chaucer. Your overall point about language change has merit, but not all languages have changed at the same exact rate. Balto-Slavic languages are relatively conservative as a group (many linguists were very taken with Lithuanian when it was first noticed within Western academia, as it is so conservative that it has considerable utility in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European itself). This is probably more detail than you wanted - I hope it's interesting and helpful. :)
      - lproven 5mo ago
        It's fascinating, and thank you. My Czech was terrible -- maybe just approaching B1 level when I left 3 years ago -- and it was not comprehensible to me. But it wasn't to my friend and to my (now) wife when we visited, so I took a photo and showed it to my colleagues at work and friends in the pub. Similarly, still my favourite Czech sentence is the one that terrified me before I moved there: Blb vlk pln žbrnd zdrhl hrd z mlh Brd skrz vrch Smrk v čtvrť srn Krč. I memorised this (poorly) but had great fun showing it to people when I got there. Almost nobody could parse it at all. Now, I'm an above-average English speaker. I am a very fast reader, and at school, I could cope with Chaucer just fine. Once I got my internal ear to hear it, it just made sense to me. (Beowulf, no.) But I was the only one in my class. I can follow poetic and heavily distorted English fairly well, and it's a handy skill for a (former) professional English teacher. But I think I can follow more than most. I certainly can't follow the ZŠ Karlstejn Czech, nor your poetic examples. I am very poor in the language. (It is my 6th foreign language, but they are all very very weak. But saying that, I've put more effort into Czech than all the rest put together, with little to show for it.) I think you over-estimate the abilities of ordinary Czechs!
abanana 5mo ago
That's because we're fed the massively oversimplified idea that English was one language, spoken all over the UK, and developing in a single straight line from Old English, to Middle English, to modern English. It's obvious that today's connected society - leading to any single language being very widespread for mutual intelligibility - bears no resemblance to the way things were many centuries ago. But we're conditioned to think in terms of our own experience until we really think about it or have it pointed out. Back then, the UK was split into many different dialects, largely consolidated later by the use of the printing press. Those dialects had so much difference in some ways, that snippets of them could sound like related-but-different languages. (And there's very little relative difference between modern English and "middle English", which is easy for us to read, notwithstanding differences in the not-yet-standardised spelling.) And most importantly, across history, the literary language has always been the language of the elites, the ruling class, which is often not the same language spoken by the plebs. Since the language they spoke is therefore missing from the historical record, it's sometimes open to interpretation and guesswork. Many historical linguists try to make it known that middle-to-modern English can't have come directly from the dialect of Anglo-Saxon we now call Old English, but overturning (or even clarifying) dogma from the early days of any field, against years of written encyclopedias, is very difficult.

If you go back half a millennium, most languages are the same. The sign above the door at the primary school outside Karlstejn Castle is unreadable to a speaker of modern Czech. School website: https://www.skolakarlstejn.cz/ https://www.skolakarlstejn.cz/ Better pics can be found easily. It's quite rare for a language to remain close enough to be intelligible. English is a mongrel, with influences from old French and ancient Saxon and Norse and Celtic. Every few centuries you go back, you strip away whole layers of additional vocabulary left by the descendants of successive invasions.

DonaldFisk 5mo ago
Anglo-Saxon + Norman French + Latin + Greek. Surprisingly few words from Celtic languages.
troad 5mo ago
> The sign above the door at the primary school outside Karlstejn Castle is unreadable to a speaker of modern Czech. What? No it's not. It looks no more than ~100-150 years old, and is perfectly readable if you've ever seen a long s (like ſo).
- lproven 5mo ago
  It's really not. After a lot of searching I found... my own post from Reddit 3Y ago! https://www.reddit.com/r/czech/comments/17stwmi/can_anyone_read_the_text_above_the_door_of_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/czech/comments/17stwmi/can_anyone_r... It has a relatively clear photo.
  - troad 5mo ago
    That's perfectly readable to me as a speaker of modern Czech, and it appears to have been readable to all the commenters on your post too. > W téchto se dozwédá sjnjch pilné robé, Bohu čjm povinné, bratřjm, wlasti, sobě. This is almost modern Czech, with j for í and w for v (which was the standard orthography for hundreds of years and would be familiar to any educated Czech). Take the most famous poem in Czech, in its original orthography from 1836: > Byl pozdnj wečer - prwnj mág > Wečernj mág - byl lásky čas. This is perfectly readable, like your sign. One of the comments claims the sign is from 1487 - I would find this extremely unlikely. The mention of vlast (homeland) is suggestive of the era of the National Awakening (19th century), as is the orthography, font, and diacritics. (And the overall theme of education for God and country seems pretty anachronistic for 1487.) If we go back in time, to say the Kralická Bible (1593), we're still well within the realm of readable text to modern Czechs: > Na Počátku stwořil Bůh nebe a zemi. Země pak byla nesličná a pustá: a tma byla nad propastj: a Duch Božj wznássel se nad wodami. Y řekl Bůh: Buď swětlo: Y bylo swětlo. Let's go back all the way to the earliest Slavic texts, about 1300 years ago, which largely predate Czech altogether: > Iskonï bě slovo. Ï slovo bě u boga. Ï bogъ bě slovo. A modern Czech would understand most of this, with the probable exception of iskonï ([na] konci, but used here to refer to the beginning). They would probably miss the exact tense being used for bě, but guess that it's a copula (they might see it as a portmanteau of bylo and je, which is close enough). This is probably comparably difficult for a Czech as say Chaucer is for an English speaker (ie not terribly), except it is half a millennium earlier than Chaucer. Your overall point about language change has merit, but not all languages have changed at the same exact rate. Balto-Slavic languages are relatively conservative as a group (many linguists were very taken with Lithuanian when it was first noticed within Western academia, as it is so conservative that it has considerable utility in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European itself). This is probably more detail than you wanted - I hope it's interesting and helpful. :)
    - lproven 5mo ago
      It's fascinating, and thank you. My Czech was terrible -- maybe just approaching B1 level when I left 3 years ago -- and it was not comprehensible to me. But it wasn't to my friend and to my (now) wife when we visited, so I took a photo and showed it to my colleagues at work and friends in the pub. Similarly, still my favourite Czech sentence is the one that terrified me before I moved there: Blb vlk pln žbrnd zdrhl hrd z mlh Brd skrz vrch Smrk v čtvrť srn Krč. I memorised this (poorly) but had great fun showing it to people when I got there. Almost nobody could parse it at all. Now, I'm an above-average English speaker. I am a very fast reader, and at school, I could cope with Chaucer just fine. Once I got my internal ear to hear it, it just made sense to me. (Beowulf, no.) But I was the only one in my class. I can follow poetic and heavily distorted English fairly well, and it's a handy skill for a (former) professional English teacher. But I think I can follow more than most. I certainly can't follow the ZŠ Karlstejn Czech, nor your poetic examples. I am very poor in the language. (It is my 6th foreign language, but they are all very very weak. But saying that, I've put more effort into Czech than all the rest put together, with little to show for it.) I think you over-estimate the abilities of ordinary Czechs!

abanana 5mo ago

That's because we're fed the massively oversimplified idea that English was one language, spoken all over the UK, and developing in a single straight line from Old English, to Middle English, to modern English. It's obvious that today's connected society - leading to any single language being very widespread for mutual intelligibility - bears no resemblance to the way things were many centuries ago. But we're conditioned to think in terms of our own experience until we really think about it or have it pointed out. Back then, the UK was split into many different dialects, largely consolidated later by the use of the printing press. Those dialects had so much difference in some ways, that snippets of them could sound like related-but-different languages. (And there's very little relative difference between modern English and "middle English", which is easy for us to read, notwithstanding differences in the not-yet-standardised spelling.) And most importantly, across history, the literary language has always been the language of the elites, the ruling class, which is often not the same language spoken by the plebs. Since the language they spoke is therefore missing from the historical record, it's sometimes open to interpretation and guesswork. Many historical linguists try to make it known that middle-to-modern English can't have come directly from the dialect of Anglo-Saxon we now call Old English, but overturning (or even clarifying) dogma from the early days of any field, against years of written encyclopedias, is very difficult.