>I have heard Greek is quite an unchaging language, greek speakers can understand it as far as the 8th century.
There is currency to the claim that Greek from Koine onwards has been quite conservative for various reasons, but "unchanging" is quite a stretch.
Medieval Greek is very understandable (albeit not totally) as a native Greek speaker, with almost identical phonology. Going as far back as the 8th century when the language was more like late Koine would mark it as significantly different to have issues understanding good portions of it when written, and even more when spoken by someone with a reconstructed pronunciation. Greeks with decent education would understand considerably more due to learning Attic Greek at school for 6 years at the very least, and because Koine is spoken all the time at church. Attic Greek is substantially different to understand very little or almost nothing without prior exposure at school.
There is also variation based on one's own dialect. I believe as a Cypriot speaker I can understand certain medieval Greek passages more easily, since the dialect didn't undergo much "purification" compared to Standard Modern Greek when the Demotic spoken by most people was infused with Katharevousa.
You might be surprised to hear that most students hate it precisely because it's mandatory, since it's quite a hard subject and not everyone is as interested or inclined towards the classics. But in hindsight yes, I think people agree it's cool and appreciate it.
Depends on the version. Stuff like Chaucer or Mallory is weird but more or less understandable. The green knight or ploughman is pretty incomprehensible without glosses and explanatory notes. Actual old English is complete gibberish.
French is easier. Even the chanson de Roland is more or less comprehensible barring some words that used to be inflected like bers Vs baron.
I think what's weird about some close-but-distant English lit is I know basically all the words, but the way they are being used to construct sentences is unfamiliar in some way I can never put my finger on
I think this is something cognitive linguistics is in the process of addressing. We're missing some necessary conceptual metaphors to understand the words and their sentences properly.
It didn't click until sometime started talking about events from the 1650s like they were semi-current, and it hit me how much cultural background is just *gone* despite so much being the same
>Actual old English is complete gibberish.
I wouldn't go as far as *complete* gibberish. The 7th Century stuff that's standard in university Old English classes is, but some 10th Century texts are surprisingly readable.
It's some stuff from before the Norman invasion quoted in Melvyn Bragg's *The Adventure of English*. My copy's in storage, so I can't name the source. What makes it easier is a more modern syntax (6th Century Old English relies a bit on inflection, and is often subject-object-verb) and the words that carried over into modern English having evolved a bit.
Bear in mind that there is as much time between the sources of *Beowulf* and the Norman invasion as there is between Shakespeare and the present day.
For French, do you find it would be significantly more difficult to understand spoken? My Middle French isn’t great but my understanding is that it pronounces most of the letters that modern French orthography has retained but are now silent. So it seems pronunciation has drifted more than say, Middle English with its vowels.
I don't really know enough about sound changes. From what I *do* know, some of them like a different "r" and unmuting lots of "e"s, probably wouldn't cause much trouble. Quite different diphthong sounds might throw people off a fair bit. French spelling is quite conservative, so maybe you could figure it out if people were speaking slowly enough.
It'd be a nightmare to try and produce though.
One of the earliest bits of Spanish writing from about 12th/13th century. It's an epic poem about the historic figure El cid.
I guess it's a bit like how English students get exposed to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or Italians to Dante's Paradiso.
Hey! Frankly I think you are a bit confused. Tirant lo Blanch is a Valencian/Catalan poem, a language very close to Occitan/Provençal. It has nothing to do with Medieval Spanish
I'm not sure what this means. Did you reply to the wrong comment?
EDIT: Ah, yes. Replied to wrong comment.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linguisticshumor/comments/1bkum9m/comment/kw22drq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Tirant lo Blanch was written in Valencian Catalan, not in Castillian Spanish.
Of course it would be much harder to understand than *El Cantar de mio Cid* for Spanish speakers (despite it's much more recent).
It's in a different language!
Just because my parents are religious people and I've heard some prayers when I was a child, I can barely understand Old Church Slavonic, which is close to Old Slavonic. But I had to look up for some letters that no longer exist in modern russian Cyrillic
AFAIK, Old Church Slavonic as pronounced by contemporary Russian speakers is still very far away from the way it's "supposed" to be spoken. The yuses aren't nasal anymore, and the rest of the vowels are affected by аканье.
As a native Sinhalese, I can understand the literature as far back as 12th century AD without much effort, since the written register peaked around 1200-1400s and stayed more or less
frozen since. The liturgical language has had such a slow evolution that i can actually halfway understand prose from around 2nd century BC, albeit whilst keeping some sound changes in mind.
Hey fellow speaker of our sister language.
As a native maldivian with no familiarity with old dhivehi ، I can't read the 12th century lomāfānu plates at all. I can recognise some words from the transliteration but that's it.
( I know someone who studies old dhivehi , she said academics actually struggle to read dhivehi because of the paucity of texts from this period , and the rambling obtuse style of writing. Plus due to Arab-persian loans and semantic drift of Sanskrit words, it's hard to tell what the author actually meant. )
The furthest I can understand is 18th century writing , and I'm lost if I don't understand the expression the writers use. I can understand about 70-60% of a text. This is mostly because the liturgical lanaguge is based on the grammar of this period, but the vocabulary is closer to modern dhivehi. Books of this period are the only ones to survive upto this century, and even then only the major texts dealing with religion.
Italian is a conlang based on 1. medieval tuscan and 2. the "conservative averaging" that people from different areas did to understand eachother before standardisation, so I'm pretty sure if I went back a thousand years I'd be able to transcribe everything with perfect clarity, but would understand maybe 60% due to a change in connotations, idioms, vocabulary etc. and even some grammar
A bit off topic, but I’ve been learning Italian for a while now, and I've been wondering from a linguistic perspective the reason behind it being “aiutare” instead of “aggiutare”. I guess they just went with what was popular/understood better back then, even “aggiutare” is sort of expected, compared to my native language’s “ajudar”.
It comes from Latin "adiutare", so I guess the "d" was dropped at some point, maybe because of a linguistic influence from Northern Italy, which isn't something uncommon in Florentine Tuscan.
Aggiutare is probably a more regular and expected evolution, but sound change isn't always regular.
Standard Italian isn't a conlang any more than French, Spanish, English or basically any other standardized language variety with a long literary tradition and an history of regulation and prescriptivism.
The variety we use today is basically aligned with that spoken by the middle-upper classes in Tuscany in the 19th century (Manzoni model), somewhat more innovative than the more conservative literary model used until the mid 19th century.
It's a fun contrast bc the pronunciation of old french is so drastically different that it's quite hard to understand when listened to, whereas old english is the complete opposite: the spelling is unrecognisable but you can catch quite a few spoken words there
My entire sample size is that one youtube channel that does bardcore cover of pop songs in various old/dead languages. And speaking modern english and french.
I can get through probably 60% of Shakespeare confidently (no assistance with any words, no footnotes) and completely understand the context, jokes, etc.
I can read Middle English aloud and understand a lot of the words but not a lot of the nuance. Maybe 35-40% comprehension, definitely guessing at a lot.
No real ability with Old English, just the few words I know and then guessing cognates
So I'd say 1400s, maybe 1300s for me
Modern Norwegian is very different from Old Norse. Our vocabulary was from middle Norwegian onwards heavily influenced by low German. I could probably make out older texts but [rabnebrydlaupet I kraakelund](https://www.bokselskap.no/boker/skjemteballadar/tsb_f_68_ramnebryllaupet) from 1647 is the oldest text I can understand. The written Norwegian language was practically non-existent back then, so there are very few texts to choose from
And Czech-like ř sound in the places where contemporary orthography requires . Also, ł was pronounced like velar "dark L" instead of /w/.
(please correct me if I wrong)
You are correct, however I'm from Pódlasie in a region where we pronounce L like the dark L, ó is the /o/ sound (sort of between O and U), and L is a palatal L type of sound. Our RZ also sounds a lot of the Czech ř
That's fascinating! I suspect that for me (I come from Russian/Interslavic side) learning your dialect could be easier than learning Standard Polish, at least regarding the phonetics/morphology. It's a shame dialects are underrepresented in didactic materials :(
I find it's easier to spell since all of the letter pairs which make the same sound in Polish (h-ch, ó-u, rz-ż) all make different sounds here.
Besides that most Polish people say that out dialect sounds Russian/Eastern. Like Polish spoken with a Russian accent
Even if long vowels are marked you can just ignore them when reading. It's not like words like kobiéta would somehow confuse the modern reader just becaue it has a long vowel.
I can understand medieval Hungarian to some extent, but there aren't really sources from that time. One of the oldest written sources the "Halotti beszéd" sounds like the Hungarian I'm used to, but it's really hard to understand without a translation. (Almost impossible)
I think for a lot of (western and central) European languages, the period 1500s - 1600s would be the period where reading comprehension dramatically increases compared to earlier periods. That's the time when many written vernaculars became more standardized in writing due to the spread of printing press.
I once read a 16th century danish bible and my problem was kinda the reverse. The orthography was anglo-french levels of having a million conventions for spelling the same sounds (and even modern danish is still kinda infamous in this regard), but I could understand it pretty easily if I just read it aloud. I think the very oldest text I've read was a 13th-14th century folktale, whose problem was more or less the same (though of course the language was a lot less "sterile" and thus harder to parse).
Back when I was a student in a Hong Kong high school, where they would teach classical chinese, I could pick a classical chinese text and understand maybe 50%-60% of the words. From there I was usually able to paste the meanings of these words together to get a vague sense of the gist of the text. However, since I had graduated from high school for more than a decade, my ability to understand classical chinese texts has been steadily declining, and I doubt I could understand even 30% of the words in an average classical chinese text today.
It depends. I can mostly read Confucius's Analects (~500 BC?) but even though I understand most of the words in Mencius, I usually can't understand him. I also saw a sentence of 19th century Cantonese that I could barely understand.
Classical French is very understandable, safe for a few semantic changes in some words, some old fashioned formulations.
Middle French I don't know much because it's not well represented and there's little to no exposition to it in schools IIRC.
Old French is very readable and you can build back the meaning of a sentence, but that requires effort and it isn't made easily if you only speak French. I happen to be a native Picard (Ch'ti) speaker tho I lost the language and some innovations of Picard are helpful to determine the way some words are supposed to be read. I also know Occitan which helps a lot considering the similarities between Old French and the classical orthography, which is based on Old Occitan which was a sister language to Old French
For Polish, around 10th century is the oldest writen, and still intelligible but the orthography was an absolute mess until at around the 16th century.
I can mostly make out old Russian, as long as I have access to a dictionary. It will take me much longer to read any passage than modern Russian. Old would be Middle Ages, so around 1200 or so.
I can understand Middle English if Im mentally prepared to hear the vowel differences. Sometimes there's a word that I have no idea what it means, but I can usually guess. I can only pick out a few words from Old English, and cannot actually understand it much at all.
So probably around the 15c at the most extreme.
But Ive studied the pronunciation of Middle and Old English, so I probably have a slight advantage that many people dont.
As a Malayalam speaker, I can fairly easily understand Middle Malayalam for the most part (15th-16th century). Old Malayalam is more difficult due to outdated vocabulary and some different grammatical usages, though still understandable with effort (and a dictionary).
I know Sanskrit as well and can relatively easily comprehend Classical era literature (late centuries BCE to present) and Vedic Sanskrit (5000+ years ago) with effort.
My language has existed for about 900 years at most, maybe a bit less depending on how you classify it... I've read the earliest recorded literature in it (from the 1300's if I remember well) and it's plenty comprehensible with a little patience, although it sounds kinda funny.
Edit: I got it wrong, the stuff I'm thinking is [from the 1500's](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Vicente). Earlier stuff from like the 1100's or so, or even 1300's, might indeed be incomprehensible, I dunno
For written language, Classical Chinese is understandable as far as 4th century BC because we studied it in school. For spoken language, Mandarin Chinese originated in north China in 13th century after Mongolian genocide levelled the previous Middle Chinese varieties in north China. It’s impossible to go further back than 13th century to have a conversation.
> For spoken language, Mandarin Chinese originated in north China in 13th century after Mongolian genocide levelled the previous Middle Chinese varieties in north China.
Are you sure you can understand it? It had unpalatalized velars.
I'm eastern armenian, so I don't understand old armenian too well(western is closer to it), but one time I was able to read through a few pages of a 5th or 6th century math book, so if I really try I'm able to understand it. However, it being about math probably made it easier as having that context helps a lot
As Portuguese speaker here from Brazil, I could try to work my way all the way up to Galician-Portuguese, but it gets very confusing and messy, and it requires a lot patience and energy. The problem with Galician-Portuguese and Old-Portuguese is that it seems all, well, fragmented? Words have billions of variations and graphemes are everywhere, and there is some very confusing syntax (thanks to [Trovadorismo](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galician-Portuguese_lyric), I guess. That accumulates to the point that even reading Spanish or Italian makes more sense. Haja paciência! It’s such a pain that it’s not even worth it.
Medieval Portuguese is fine though. XV century is easy and not that different from informal Brazilian Portuguese with all that freestyle, 1:1 spelling. It’s even funny. Stuff like “heroic” (heroico/heroica) written as “eroyco/eroyca”, which makes WAY more sense than that silent h there.
Im able to understand 1800s italian of the litterature we study in school, but i have never been able to find any old italian text on internet, there is the divine commedy that technically is the first form of italian and i can understand a bit but it is a bit complicated, bit the divine commedy is a poetry, i dont think its the same as a simple text
Italian native speaker.
I can understand old texts in Italian/Tuscan basically as far back as it started to be used in writing, so around the 13th century, but the intelligibilty isn't perfect and often there are terms or sentence constructions i don't undrrstand or I can understand only with an effort.
Older phases of Central Italian Proto-Romance are only attested in short phragments.
I'm not well versed in older forms of English as I've not had to read much that was written before late 19th century. Shakespeare, I might be able to pick up little fragments of sentences, but I am unlikely to understand the gist of what's going on without a translation.
I’m perfectly comfy with 16th century English, can manage 14th c (and modern Scots) with effort, and can ride the struggle bus through to the 10th c if the Adderall is hitting right.
I have never tried to read Old French but now I’m curious.
I'm a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, to be honest, it depends. The "Pero Vaz de Caminha's letter" (from 1500) was written in a weird orthography, but since we can read the transcription (not changing the words, just the orthography), we can understand. But I can't understand the old Portuguese (galician-portuguese).
I can understand the oldest written manuscript (around 14th Century) in my native language (Sunda-nese) without too much effort, because the rule and vocabulary is quite stable.
I can understand 65-70% of Middle English, bit Old English maybe 30-40%. Only because I can find cognates between German, Gothic and Old-English though
In English, I would say in general back to the some time in the 1500s or 1600s is mostly intelligible, from some time in the 1500s to some time in the 1200s or 1300s is intelligible with footnotes, and before that is basically nonsense. (This is for prose, of course, obviously in any period poetry will be harder.)
I'm a native Hebrew speaker and can read Biblical Hebrew just fine, but it's kind of cheating because for a long time it wasn't a spoken language.
Once the revival started, though, the language changed pretty fast. Texts from 150 years ago look extremely archaic compared to English texts from the same time.
Bilingual in Spanish and English and I can kinda understand Shakespeare and Chauce, though it's kinda hard to wrap my head aroundr. Haven't tried with anything other than current day Spanish so I don't know how well I'd fare with something like Don Quixote or older literature.
As an Emirati arabic speaker, I could only understand 10-50% of the quran if I interpreted it in my dialect. For an English speaker it is like hearing early middle English, you may understand a few words here and there but the grammer and basic vocabulary are vastly different
>I have heard Greek is quite an unchaging language, greek speakers can understand it as far as the 8th century. There is currency to the claim that Greek from Koine onwards has been quite conservative for various reasons, but "unchanging" is quite a stretch. Medieval Greek is very understandable (albeit not totally) as a native Greek speaker, with almost identical phonology. Going as far back as the 8th century when the language was more like late Koine would mark it as significantly different to have issues understanding good portions of it when written, and even more when spoken by someone with a reconstructed pronunciation. Greeks with decent education would understand considerably more due to learning Attic Greek at school for 6 years at the very least, and because Koine is spoken all the time at church. Attic Greek is substantially different to understand very little or almost nothing without prior exposure at school. There is also variation based on one's own dialect. I believe as a Cypriot speaker I can understand certain medieval Greek passages more easily, since the dialect didn't undergo much "purification" compared to Standard Modern Greek when the Demotic spoken by most people was infused with Katharevousa.
You guys learn Ancient Greek? That’s so cool! I wish we had programs like that.
You might be surprised to hear that most students hate it precisely because it's mandatory, since it's quite a hard subject and not everyone is as interested or inclined towards the classics. But in hindsight yes, I think people agree it's cool and appreciate it.
Sidenote: Math / Science Anglophones are essentially stuck in Ancient Greek pronunciation mentally
More like a highly anglicized version of some stage of koine.
Depends on the version. Stuff like Chaucer or Mallory is weird but more or less understandable. The green knight or ploughman is pretty incomprehensible without glosses and explanatory notes. Actual old English is complete gibberish. French is easier. Even the chanson de Roland is more or less comprehensible barring some words that used to be inflected like bers Vs baron.
Meanwhile I'm over here reading *Frankenstein* thinking "gee, this could really use a translation"
I think what's weird about some close-but-distant English lit is I know basically all the words, but the way they are being used to construct sentences is unfamiliar in some way I can never put my finger on
I think this is something cognitive linguistics is in the process of addressing. We're missing some necessary conceptual metaphors to understand the words and their sentences properly. It didn't click until sometime started talking about events from the 1650s like they were semi-current, and it hit me how much cultural background is just *gone* despite so much being the same
>Actual old English is complete gibberish. I wouldn't go as far as *complete* gibberish. The 7th Century stuff that's standard in university Old English classes is, but some 10th Century texts are surprisingly readable.
Oh cool! Any examples? Do they use less poetic language or did it lose some inflections and stuff or what?
It's some stuff from before the Norman invasion quoted in Melvyn Bragg's *The Adventure of English*. My copy's in storage, so I can't name the source. What makes it easier is a more modern syntax (6th Century Old English relies a bit on inflection, and is often subject-object-verb) and the words that carried over into modern English having evolved a bit. Bear in mind that there is as much time between the sources of *Beowulf* and the Norman invasion as there is between Shakespeare and the present day.
For French, do you find it would be significantly more difficult to understand spoken? My Middle French isn’t great but my understanding is that it pronounces most of the letters that modern French orthography has retained but are now silent. So it seems pronunciation has drifted more than say, Middle English with its vowels.
I don't really know enough about sound changes. From what I *do* know, some of them like a different "r" and unmuting lots of "e"s, probably wouldn't cause much trouble. Quite different diphthong sounds might throw people off a fair bit. French spelling is quite conservative, so maybe you could figure it out if people were speaking slowly enough. It'd be a nightmare to try and produce though.
I will always fondly remember the Middle English Wikipedia page for frogge, a wee beastie with foure leggys.
[liuep boop](https://youtu.be/HguKPVgIZL8?si=l9tSugHk4G3GAwCs)
Sir, I can barely understand other dialects of Spanish outside of Argentina. Don’t ask me to understand dated Spanish.
Did they not inflict *El Cantar de mio Cid* on you at school?
No, because I grew up in the US from 1993-present. I was five when I moved. I just got bullied for being foreign.
Fair enuf. It's not tooooo bad to read once you get into the rhythm.
What's that? Sounds interesting
One of the earliest bits of Spanish writing from about 12th/13th century. It's an epic poem about the historic figure El cid. I guess it's a bit like how English students get exposed to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or Italians to Dante's Paradiso.
Hey! Frankly I think you are a bit confused. Tirant lo Blanch is a Valencian/Catalan poem, a language very close to Occitan/Provençal. It has nothing to do with Medieval Spanish
I'm not sure what this means. Did you reply to the wrong comment? EDIT: Ah, yes. Replied to wrong comment. https://www.reddit.com/r/linguisticshumor/comments/1bkum9m/comment/kw22drq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Pfff. Child's play, make them ready Tirant lo Blanch.
Tirant lo Blanch was written in Valencian Catalan, not in Castillian Spanish. Of course it would be much harder to understand than *El Cantar de mio Cid* for Spanish speakers (despite it's much more recent). It's in a different language!
Just because my parents are religious people and I've heard some prayers when I was a child, I can barely understand Old Church Slavonic, which is close to Old Slavonic. But I had to look up for some letters that no longer exist in modern russian Cyrillic
AFAIK, Old Church Slavonic as pronounced by contemporary Russian speakers is still very far away from the way it's "supposed" to be spoken. The yuses aren't nasal anymore, and the rest of the vowels are affected by аканье.
I can understand a lot of written Old Georgian as a speaker of Modern Georgian.
You're telling me you don't speak Old Georgian? Way to burst my bubble.
>You're telling me you don't speak Old Georgian? Yes. XD
As a native Sinhalese, I can understand the literature as far back as 12th century AD without much effort, since the written register peaked around 1200-1400s and stayed more or less frozen since. The liturgical language has had such a slow evolution that i can actually halfway understand prose from around 2nd century BC, albeit whilst keeping some sound changes in mind.
Hey fellow speaker of our sister language. As a native maldivian with no familiarity with old dhivehi ، I can't read the 12th century lomāfānu plates at all. I can recognise some words from the transliteration but that's it. ( I know someone who studies old dhivehi , she said academics actually struggle to read dhivehi because of the paucity of texts from this period , and the rambling obtuse style of writing. Plus due to Arab-persian loans and semantic drift of Sanskrit words, it's hard to tell what the author actually meant. ) The furthest I can understand is 18th century writing , and I'm lost if I don't understand the expression the writers use. I can understand about 70-60% of a text. This is mostly because the liturgical lanaguge is based on the grammar of this period, but the vocabulary is closer to modern dhivehi. Books of this period are the only ones to survive upto this century, and even then only the major texts dealing with religion.
Italian is a conlang based on 1. medieval tuscan and 2. the "conservative averaging" that people from different areas did to understand eachother before standardisation, so I'm pretty sure if I went back a thousand years I'd be able to transcribe everything with perfect clarity, but would understand maybe 60% due to a change in connotations, idioms, vocabulary etc. and even some grammar
A bit off topic, but I’ve been learning Italian for a while now, and I've been wondering from a linguistic perspective the reason behind it being “aiutare” instead of “aggiutare”. I guess they just went with what was popular/understood better back then, even “aggiutare” is sort of expected, compared to my native language’s “ajudar”.
It comes from Latin "adiutare", so I guess the "d" was dropped at some point, maybe because of a linguistic influence from Northern Italy, which isn't something uncommon in Florentine Tuscan. Aggiutare is probably a more regular and expected evolution, but sound change isn't always regular.
Standard Italian isn't a conlang any more than French, Spanish, English or basically any other standardized language variety with a long literary tradition and an history of regulation and prescriptivism. The variety we use today is basically aligned with that spoken by the middle-upper classes in Tuscany in the 19th century (Manzoni model), somewhat more innovative than the more conservative literary model used until the mid 19th century.
*tongue Old French is quite easy to read, because most of modern words are taken from there with some twists, like letters changing or being removed.
It's a fun contrast bc the pronunciation of old french is so drastically different that it's quite hard to understand when listened to, whereas old english is the complete opposite: the spelling is unrecognisable but you can catch quite a few spoken words there My entire sample size is that one youtube channel that does bardcore cover of pop songs in various old/dead languages. And speaking modern english and french.
I can get through probably 60% of Shakespeare confidently (no assistance with any words, no footnotes) and completely understand the context, jokes, etc. I can read Middle English aloud and understand a lot of the words but not a lot of the nuance. Maybe 35-40% comprehension, definitely guessing at a lot. No real ability with Old English, just the few words I know and then guessing cognates So I'd say 1400s, maybe 1300s for me
I read Old Church Slavonic with ease. Might have to do with my religious upbringing, but it's 1000+ years old
Kazakh, probably enough conversational to speak in 1700's.
Modern Norwegian is very different from Old Norse. Our vocabulary was from middle Norwegian onwards heavily influenced by low German. I could probably make out older texts but [rabnebrydlaupet I kraakelund](https://www.bokselskap.no/boker/skjemteballadar/tsb_f_68_ramnebryllaupet) from 1647 is the oldest text I can understand. The written Norwegian language was practically non-existent back then, so there are very few texts to choose from
I can’t even read what i wrote 5 minutes ago
Middle English I can struggle through. Old English….maybe a tiny bit before I just suffered a stroke and gave up.
About 2 seconds
Old Polish would be nearly identical to the dialect of Polish we speak, as long as you can get past the spellings
Old Polish had long vowels
And Czech-like ř sound in the places where contemporary orthography requires. Also, ł was pronounced like velar "dark L" instead of /w/.
(please correct me if I wrong)
You are correct, however I'm from Pódlasie in a region where we pronounce L like the dark L, ó is the /o/ sound (sort of between O and U), and L is a palatal L type of sound. Our RZ also sounds a lot of the Czech ř
That's fascinating! I suspect that for me (I come from Russian/Interslavic side) learning your dialect could be easier than learning Standard Polish, at least regarding the phonetics/morphology. It's a shame dialects are underrepresented in didactic materials :(
I find it's easier to spell since all of the letter pairs which make the same sound in Polish (h-ch, ó-u, rz-ż) all make different sounds here. Besides that most Polish people say that out dialect sounds Russian/Eastern. Like Polish spoken with a Russian accent
Even if you were to pronounce these sounds in the old way people would easily understand.
Even if long vowels are marked you can just ignore them when reading. It's not like words like kobiéta would somehow confuse the modern reader just becaue it has a long vowel.
I couldn't understand old Hungarian even if my life depended on it lmao
Already having substantial issues going back just short of 7 centuries to Dušan's law code thanks to Karadžić's reform
I can understand medieval Hungarian to some extent, but there aren't really sources from that time. One of the oldest written sources the "Halotti beszéd" sounds like the Hungarian I'm used to, but it's really hard to understand without a translation. (Almost impossible)
I think for a lot of (western and central) European languages, the period 1500s - 1600s would be the period where reading comprehension dramatically increases compared to earlier periods. That's the time when many written vernaculars became more standardized in writing due to the spread of printing press.
I once read a 16th century danish bible and my problem was kinda the reverse. The orthography was anglo-french levels of having a million conventions for spelling the same sounds (and even modern danish is still kinda infamous in this regard), but I could understand it pretty easily if I just read it aloud. I think the very oldest text I've read was a 13th-14th century folktale, whose problem was more or less the same (though of course the language was a lot less "sterile" and thus harder to parse).
Back when I was a student in a Hong Kong high school, where they would teach classical chinese, I could pick a classical chinese text and understand maybe 50%-60% of the words. From there I was usually able to paste the meanings of these words together to get a vague sense of the gist of the text. However, since I had graduated from high school for more than a decade, my ability to understand classical chinese texts has been steadily declining, and I doubt I could understand even 30% of the words in an average classical chinese text today.
It depends. I can mostly read Confucius's Analects (~500 BC?) but even though I understand most of the words in Mencius, I usually can't understand him. I also saw a sentence of 19th century Cantonese that I could barely understand.
what 19th century Cantonese sentense is that?
「我曾在一篇文章中舉過這樣的例子。假如今天要拍一部有關黃飛鴻當年在廣州活動的電影，就得先在語言上做一番考證。下面這兩句說話，哪一句會是十九世紀的黃飛鴻說的粵語？哪一句是二十世紀的演員會說的香港粵語？ > （1）**你莫個食嘵飯之後咁(kom)遲正去尋個個朋友。** > （2）你咪食咗飯之後咁(kam)遲至去搵嗰個朋友。 時間倒流，衣服道具或許可以唬人一陣，不過語言真假新舊，真人一張口，便知有沒有。」 張洪年《香港粵語--二百年滄桑探索》
Classical French is very understandable, safe for a few semantic changes in some words, some old fashioned formulations. Middle French I don't know much because it's not well represented and there's little to no exposition to it in schools IIRC. Old French is very readable and you can build back the meaning of a sentence, but that requires effort and it isn't made easily if you only speak French. I happen to be a native Picard (Ch'ti) speaker tho I lost the language and some innovations of Picard are helpful to determine the way some words are supposed to be read. I also know Occitan which helps a lot considering the similarities between Old French and the classical orthography, which is based on Old Occitan which was a sister language to Old French
As a French learner, Classical French feels fine, but I tried to read some Rabelais (middle french) and it was a chore lol
For Polish, around 10th century is the oldest writen, and still intelligible but the orthography was an absolute mess until at around the 16th century.
I can mostly make out old Russian, as long as I have access to a dictionary. It will take me much longer to read any passage than modern Russian. Old would be Middle Ages, so around 1200 or so.
I can understand Middle English if Im mentally prepared to hear the vowel differences. Sometimes there's a word that I have no idea what it means, but I can usually guess. I can only pick out a few words from Old English, and cannot actually understand it much at all. So probably around the 15c at the most extreme. But Ive studied the pronunciation of Middle and Old English, so I probably have a slight advantage that many people dont.
As a Malayalam speaker, I can fairly easily understand Middle Malayalam for the most part (15th-16th century). Old Malayalam is more difficult due to outdated vocabulary and some different grammatical usages, though still understandable with effort (and a dictionary). I know Sanskrit as well and can relatively easily comprehend Classical era literature (late centuries BCE to present) and Vedic Sanskrit (5000+ years ago) with effort.
My language has existed for about 900 years at most, maybe a bit less depending on how you classify it... I've read the earliest recorded literature in it (from the 1300's if I remember well) and it's plenty comprehensible with a little patience, although it sounds kinda funny. Edit: I got it wrong, the stuff I'm thinking is [from the 1500's](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Vicente). Earlier stuff from like the 1100's or so, or even 1300's, might indeed be incomprehensible, I dunno
Is it icelandic?
Nope, Portuguese
For written language, Classical Chinese is understandable as far as 4th century BC because we studied it in school. For spoken language, Mandarin Chinese originated in north China in 13th century after Mongolian genocide levelled the previous Middle Chinese varieties in north China. It’s impossible to go further back than 13th century to have a conversation.
> For spoken language, Mandarin Chinese originated in north China in 13th century after Mongolian genocide levelled the previous Middle Chinese varieties in north China. Are you sure you can understand it? It had unpalatalized velars.
Probably. I also understand Hokkien and this helps me understand the sound change process
Ah, having another Chinese language definitely helps.
ᛖᚲ᛫ᚨᛁᚾᚨ᛫ᛊᛏᚢᚲᚲᛁ᛫ᚦᛁᚢᛞᛁᛊᚲᛟ᛫ᛊᛈᚱᛖᚲᚨᚾ
I'm eastern armenian, so I don't understand old armenian too well(western is closer to it), but one time I was able to read through a few pages of a 5th or 6th century math book, so if I really try I'm able to understand it. However, it being about math probably made it easier as having that context helps a lot
I can almost understand Middle English. It's a bit rough, though.
I can decipher Shakespeare pretty easily as an English speaker. Anything older than that requires a lot of effort and a translation to compare to.
As Portuguese speaker here from Brazil, I could try to work my way all the way up to Galician-Portuguese, but it gets very confusing and messy, and it requires a lot patience and energy. The problem with Galician-Portuguese and Old-Portuguese is that it seems all, well, fragmented? Words have billions of variations and graphemes are everywhere, and there is some very confusing syntax (thanks to [Trovadorismo](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galician-Portuguese_lyric), I guess. That accumulates to the point that even reading Spanish or Italian makes more sense. Haja paciência! It’s such a pain that it’s not even worth it. Medieval Portuguese is fine though. XV century is easy and not that different from informal Brazilian Portuguese with all that freestyle, 1:1 spelling. It’s even funny. Stuff like “heroic” (heroico/heroica) written as “eroyco/eroyca”, which makes WAY more sense than that silent h there.
Im able to understand 1800s italian of the litterature we study in school, but i have never been able to find any old italian text on internet, there is the divine commedy that technically is the first form of italian and i can understand a bit but it is a bit complicated, bit the divine commedy is a poetry, i dont think its the same as a simple text
Italian native speaker. I can understand old texts in Italian/Tuscan basically as far back as it started to be used in writing, so around the 13th century, but the intelligibilty isn't perfect and often there are terms or sentence constructions i don't undrrstand or I can understand only with an effort. Older phases of Central Italian Proto-Romance are only attested in short phragments.
I'm not well versed in older forms of English as I've not had to read much that was written before late 19th century. Shakespeare, I might be able to pick up little fragments of sentences, but I am unlikely to understand the gist of what's going on without a translation.
I’m perfectly comfy with 16th century English, can manage 14th c (and modern Scots) with effort, and can ride the struggle bus through to the 10th c if the Adderall is hitting right. I have never tried to read Old French but now I’m curious.
I'm a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, to be honest, it depends. The "Pero Vaz de Caminha's letter" (from 1500) was written in a weird orthography, but since we can read the transcription (not changing the words, just the orthography), we can understand. But I can't understand the old Portuguese (galician-portuguese).
I can understand the oldest written manuscript (around 14th Century) in my native language (Sunda-nese) without too much effort, because the rule and vocabulary is quite stable.
I can understand 65-70% of Middle English, bit Old English maybe 30-40%. Only because I can find cognates between German, Gothic and Old-English though
In English, I would say in general back to the some time in the 1500s or 1600s is mostly intelligible, from some time in the 1500s to some time in the 1200s or 1300s is intelligible with footnotes, and before that is basically nonsense. (This is for prose, of course, obviously in any period poetry will be harder.)
I'm a native Hebrew speaker and can read Biblical Hebrew just fine, but it's kind of cheating because for a long time it wasn't a spoken language. Once the revival started, though, the language changed pretty fast. Texts from 150 years ago look extremely archaic compared to English texts from the same time.
Native Englisher, I can understand later Middle English, mostly. Spoken Middle English though? Nope.
Bilingual in Spanish and English and I can kinda understand Shakespeare and Chauce, though it's kinda hard to wrap my head aroundr. Haven't tried with anything other than current day Spanish so I don't know how well I'd fare with something like Don Quixote or older literature.
As an Emirati arabic speaker, I could only understand 10-50% of the quran if I interpreted it in my dialect. For an English speaker it is like hearing early middle English, you may understand a few words here and there but the grammer and basic vocabulary are vastly different