This is really cool. Going back 100 years at a time, you can see how language (not just words, but letters and phrases) shifts, with parts still being recognizable even when the whole isn't. I also love that we get explanations at the end, including annotations of the styles the author was using.
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Interesting.
1400 is still ok if you know some basic German or Dutch and read phonetically, 1300 has a Frisian or Danish (?) feel to it and is much much harder already... 1200 is babylon for me.
“Brea, bûter en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.”
“Bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Frisian.”
Thanks Duolingo!
It's like reading Canterbury Tales
Whan that Aprille...
Canterbury Tales was the first thing that came to mind for me when I read those earlier sections, too.
Wow. That is wild. I am really struggling once I get to 1400. I can't decipher all the words in 1500 but I get the gist of it. 1000 definitely looks like a totally different language.
Yeah, I went from, "okay, I just need to be a bit more deliberate and I can work it out" to "this is English? at around that point.
love it!
Naah you don't even need to go so far. Here is an example:
these comparisons are absolute amazing... It's so obvious, too, when you read similar-ish (e.g., famous novelists) from various time periods -- in my case, economists from the late-19thC, or Jane Austen or Dickens from the early 19th C (beautiful and elaborate), compared to Shakespear from 16th C (HOPELESS!)
Yeah, though it's also kind of amazing when you see Shakespeare performed to see how much easier it is to understand verbally (probably because there's more context and it's harder to get caught up on one word).
I got as far as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and then it was like, fook eet, this reads like Swedish now.
you mean albionese?