I get the gist of 1200, but 1100 is inscrutable. If you’re having trouble through 1300 and 1400, my best advice is to read it aloud — your ear is better than your eye.

ſaid he, “My hens are fat and luſty, and you may haue them cheap.”

Did he just call his hens lusty?

This was fun! Anyone know about the ſ character? How come in the 1600s it only sometimes seemed to take the place of s?

I did better than I thought I would but by 1300 it was starting to get confusing.

About to 1400, then it starts to look more like Dutch or something. A few hundred years more and it starts to look like Danish or something. I bet it's harder to understand verbally.

I muddled through the 1200s with context clues, and was still catching words in the 1100s, but gave up on the 1000s. It was too brutally yuele.

I would love to find an audio version to see how far I could get on spoken word alone. Being from the Appalachians, I've always been told our dialect is older.

That was great, thanks for sharing! The þorn guy around Lemmy might learn from it a few more ways to be archaically misunderstood.

Just reading text isn't really a fair representation of the English language as you go back to beyond the 14th century. The grammar remains pretty similar if you sound it out and most vocab is similar (or can be figured out by context clues).

The non-standardized spelling and premodern characters make it feel alien but it's mostly someone with a heavy accent using phonetics to write [approximately] what they're sounding like. I bet most people wouldn't struggle if the text was massaged a bit.

Written English has been remarkably stable over the last 300 years

And yet the College Board will use the most incoherent journal entry that makes the westing game look like a picture book

Around 1200, I start having a little trouble, but I can still read most of it fairly well. 1100 is when I start to lose a lot of it, struggling through. 1000 is what I remember from trying to write papers on this stuff in University wherein I'd use translated copies side by side.

Maybe I can go back further than some others because I'm so damned old. 🤣

How far north of London can you go and still understand English?

I was able to make it all the way to 1500 with no issues. I was lost at 1400 due to the unfamiliar lettering.

As a person that is native Icelandic speaker, took Danish in school and speak Dutch it was really fun. I whish they kept going so it becomes more like Icelandic again.

Dear lord I did poorly lol. And I use to read some middle English books for school!

Oh no þis article has þe þorn character, nobody panic

1300s I can understand.

1200s I can make out the odd word.

In my a-level English lessons we did a term on the Canterbury Tales and Middle English so we had to learn how to read it.

gets to 1500s:

"I get the gist, I reckon I could do this"

gets to 1400s:

1700 got a little hard and 1600 was mostly nonsense

At a certain point it feels like reading math

As a nonnative, I stuck at 1600. Too many different spellings really gives me trouble...

I could understand more-or-less everything at 1300, got the gist of the story at 1200, and could make out some familiar roots and morphology from other languages at 1100 and 1000 but not enough to puzzle things together.

It was a good thread here too: https://lemmy.world/post/43447694

I guess the nature of the fediverse means that some post duplication is necessary for exposure coverage, lol, so who am I to accuse a repost of not suitably linking the source.

This is all quite interesting, but did the farmer really offer the traveler his lusty hens?

I crap out at the 1200's. Which is ironically how far back i can trace my paternal line

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4a9LfdavRlVMaSSWFdIciA

Rob words YouTube channel is amazing!

I can't believe what pretentious twats they sounded like in 1900

Seems to me that 1400 is harder than 1300.

ja e noske nove mo

For a person who barely speaks English as me, going beyond 1700 it's impossible.

Anyone else hate the 1900 section. It felt like it was trying to be harder to understand on purpose. 1800 was perfectly clear and required so much less processing than 1900, imo.

The written phrase “and let me tell you” screams of AI usage right off the bat. This and that to the torque had me crazy in how this English changed

With enough patience I could maybe make it through a 1500 novel

From 1400 and back, it's more phonetic. Less differentiation between how it sounds and how it's written, plus the accent shifts.
I feel an old Scots(wo)man might be more at ease with it, if read aloud. As both their words and this seems like the same kind of gibberish to me.

I'm good up until the letters start changing to be something other than the 26 characters we have now.

I still think that 1800s Charles Dickens English was the high point of the language and the version we should aspire to

I was doing pretty well (albeit really slow and deliberate) through 1300, 1200 I was able to make out a few lines, but the rest is gibberish to me.

Edit: I had another wack at it and was able to pick out a little bit of 1100, still no luck on 1000

Interestingly, DeepL has no problem translating the sections before 1200 into modern English if you tell it it's in Icelandic

Shakespeare is modern English. Even that is challenging for most people. Beyond that it's not longer the English we think of (with the heavy French influence).

1200 was where I got lost. Ive been reading through 1600s documents recently for my history coursework so ive got a bit of practice!

I was able to read every sentence in the 1300 section with difficultly, occasionally getting stumped by individual words.

I could figure out the basic events of the 1200 section, but missed some specific details - I didn't realize that the person who saves the blogger is a woman, for example.

1100 was beyond me, or at least beyond the effort I was willing to put into it.

Only after languages were institutionalized and formal education became more common, that the languages sort of stabilized and the rate of change became slower. Back then, languages were more "freestyle" and people sometimes didn't even properly understand each other

I've been a Rob Words channel fiend lately, about the same as you OP. I suspect if I was teleported back in time earlier than 1400 that I could learn quicker than someone who has never learned any form of English to a point, but it'd still be quite the effort. Then again I'm only considering listening and reading. I think learning to speak well enough to be understood in return is probably harder still, possibly worse than blank slate?

I lose the plot at 1500. Not a native english speaker

Now do a translation into brainrot.

Is it some kind of social commentary that the writer seems progressively more superstitious and easily frightened as the centuries roll back?

Dude talks about a walk back to his B&B like he's a Hobbit dodging nazguls

if you can understand OLD english that is how far.

I think it would be more of a gradient than a cutoff. Unless you have a more specific definition for "understand."

I'm pretty sure I understood one whole sentence of 1100 but other than that 1200 is where I tap out.

I got to abt 1200, but looking furðer, it feels like i should be able to read it, I just lack knowledge of ðe sounds produced by ðose letters.

I stop being able to clearly understand at around 1000, could probably parse it if I wasn't a lazy bastard though. It's just a bit too archaic for me to read clearly so it just resulted in me being able to read every other word.

There were a sentence or two in each of the 1300 and 1400 passages I didn't really understand, then 1200 was mostly gibberish. Also 1800 was remarkably difficult to read with that sentence structure.

1400 onwards is also where it really started reminding me of dutch.

Also at some point during 1500 I started reading it with a heavy scottish accent which somehow helped me actually understand it.

I'm really surprised how far back I was able to understand it, it really took until the 1200s for it to be incomprehensible to me. I'd always assumed if I was ever thrust back in time I'd be helpless, now at least I know that I'd be able to argue that I wasn't a witch and they could understand me.

Got about half each of 1300 and 1200, but 1100 was complete gibberish to me. Gotta say tho, I'm well aware of the long s but have read little with it prior to this, and that tripped me up. It was like running into a wall over and over again and having to mentally adjust before I continued. That was a fun exercise!

I can go as much as Wednesday last week.

After 3 months this is bit of necro post, but if anybody is interested in the same concept but spokn, heren is a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic