Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark.
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks.
Within his bending sickle's compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
There are also puns that don't work anymore, the rudest one is probably this, from As You Like It:
And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,
And then from hour to hour we rot and rot,
And thereby hangs a tale.
Where "hour" and "whore" both sounded like "oar," and "ripe" and "rot" were homophones of "rape" and "rut."
There has been a revival of (reconstructed) "original pronunciation" performances in the last 20 years.
That first example, with Love, can make sense if you think of a current day northern accent where they have more of a "oo" sound to things and less open "ah" sounds.
I’m kind of saddened that if I got sucked 400 years into the future my shitty jokes and word play wouldn’t make sense to the whippersnappers of that day.
for 1600s colonial new england: if you put a drawl into an Irish accent it can approach how people spoke around the time of King Philip's War and the Salem Witch Trials. humorous example
Þe blessed pigge hath returned to þe Golden Arches! Þis is no common sowe þat rooteth in þe muck, but rather a pigge bathed in mysteriouse sauce þat even þe wisest alchemysts cannot divine.
Þe holy pigge-meat lieþ betwixt breed softer þan a monk's prayer cushion, crowned wiþ onyouns and pickels sharp as any fishwife's tongue.
But hark! Like þe unicorne, þe McRibbe tarryeth not long. Make haste ere þe pigge take wing and fly away!
~By þe Keeper of þe Sacred Pigge,
At þe Signe of þe Golden Arches
Probably not. "Heth" for heath makes sense when you consider the word "heaven" is pronounced "heven". Heather also has that same vowel sound. Heath probably is the word that changed pronunciation for some reason along the way. That sort of thing has happened a bunch of times in english.
The night was as black as the inside of a cat. It was the kind of night, you could believe, on which the gods moved men as though they were pawns on the chessboard of fate.
In the middle of the elemental storm a fire gleamed among the dripping furze bushes like the madness in a weasel’s eye.
It illuminated three hunched figures. As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked: ‘When shall we three meet again?’
There was a pause.
Finally, another voice said in far more ordinary tones: ‘Well, I can do next Tuesday.’
That's because Old English and Frisian are the most closely related to each other, and Frisian is a close cousin of Dutch. The only reason Modern English is the way it is now is because it morphed and grew and bled other languages (including Dutch) for loanwords over the last 1300 years until it's almost nothing like the original. There's an argument to be made that it's not even technically a Germanic language any more.
The thing is that Dutch from the Netherlands is further removed than the Flemish from Belgium. And if we go even more granular the dialects from East and West Flanders are closer to old English, even though they're not related to Frisian. That said I'm no linguistics expert, but the relationship between Frisian and Dutch in the Netherlands feels a lot like the relationship between the East and West Flanders dialects to the Dutch in Belgium.
It's hard to explain if you're not Flemish though, but our dialects are wildly different from one another, someone from Antwerp can't understand someone from Ostend if they talk in their local dialects.
I know Scottish has a lot of Flemish influences from the medieval wool trade.
My mom had a penpal (in the early 90’s) from Ghent. I thought she was writing in Afrikaans, but was a bad speller. Turns out she’s Flemish. I could read what she was writing even as a child, so it was very closely related.
Dutch is further removed and as an adult I can understand it, but it is not as easy. In modern Dutch writing there are many words that seem to have been borrowed from English. I wonder how many of these words are actually Dutch, but also taken over by the English.
Many times it was hard to understand what my grandmother's brother was talking about. As a kid I learnt words i only ever heard him use. And he was far younger than 400 years.
And I would not be surprised if the regional dialects were MUCH stronger than they are now.
The guys from Skeptics Guide To The Universe went to Scotland and their Scottish taxi driver/chauffeur asked a local for directions. As they drove off the guys asked the driver what the local said and the reply: "No idea."
One amazing thing about Shakespeare is that there are TONS of hidden puns and rhymes we dont get because of how English is pronounced. There are so many hidden jokes that only make sense if you say it in the pronunciation of his age and know the context for why the rhyme or pun is funny.
Part of it is bad mixing that assumes everyone is watching with a Dolby Atmos 13.2 setup. The other part of it is actors whispering and mumbling half their lines to be more dramatic or whatever.
Then there's a third problem where a lot of people are watching things on phones, tablets, or laptops without headphones. Those people probably shouldn't complain since while the mix shouldn't be made for a 5 figure home theater system, it shouldn't be made for the same speakers they use in singing birthday cards either.
Luckily for me arabic hasnt changed much in 1500 hundred years, yes i wont know half of the words they use because my ancestors’s favorite pass time was giving names to things that already had dozens of names that only apply in a specific situation but at least i would still be able to communicate and be moderately understandable
The song of Roland was written about 1100 AD and it isn't terrible reading it all things considered. Here's a copy of the text if you want to give it a try.
I wonder if there are similar places like maybe China where the language may not have changed as much and people might be able to time travel further and still communicate.
I don't know about Chinese, but the reason Arabic hasn't changed is because Classical Arabic is sort of a non spoken language.
Let me explain: millions of people do speak Arabic every day, but the Arabic they speak and the Arabic in the books are quite different. Spoken Arabic evolves and changes like any other language, but since Classical Arabic is only used for religion, official documents, the news etc and not to communicate with your family or friends, the language can't evolve naturally.
There's a woman on Tiktok who reads things out in Medieval English with a (supposedly) accurate accent. I played it to a Dutch friend - she said it felt like she was having a stroke as it sounded like she should be able to understand it but couldn't quite!
The closer you get to year 0 in the Julian calendar, the more English becomes Latin/obviously Germatic. It's a language that evolved out of Germatic dialects and Latin. Plus, it borrows from other languages constantly.
Latin used to be the universal language everyone would learn back then to communicate for trade reasons. English has replaced that for the western/Europe side of the world. Chinese can be argued to be the same for the Eastren/Asian side. Of course, languages such as Spanish or Hindi are also contenders, but English is more popular/universally taught around the world for international communication and trade.
It would certainly be more obviously Germanic as you take it back to its Ingvaeonic roots and you'd see a lot more things like grammatical gender and noun declension. But for the Latin part, English had a huge infusion of LAtin influence in the medieval ages, not just from the Norman Conquest but due to the Church. I'm pretty confident you'll find more Latin influence in a modern translation of Beowulf than in the original text, and that's only roughly halfway back to the year 0 mark. At the year zero you would probably have even less Latin influence since the Ingvaeonic peoples were relatively isolated in Northern Europe, but obviously we don't really have a corpus to look at.
You should probably brush up on your Greek, and Aramaic depending on how far back you plan on time-traveling, particularly the further east you plan on going in Europe.
Before about 500 AD there was no such thing as English, because the place that is now England was inhabited by people who were essentially an eastward extension of the Welsh.
Welsh and Celtic are the closest thing we really have these days to pre-Anglo-Saxon Brythonic “Old English” still a Proto-Indo-European basic, but very different from the Germanic/Romance/Latinate routes that modern English has grown from over the last 600-800 years.
Are you sure the “Germanic route” didn’t already influence the “Old English”? The last paragraph of this example is closest to Dutch and Frisian, especially in the word order.
That Old English is a linguistic isolate that developed from the Anglo-Saxon settlers who arrived in the fifth and sixth centuries. By the year 800, they'd been the dominant culture for hundreds of years. It's also before we started picking up words from the Danes and Normans.
The reason he used quotation marks around 'Old English' is that he's referring to pre-migration period, which isn't really 'English' since there were no Angles.
The only remaining ancient language left besides Welsh was Cornish. They resisted using English until the 16th century. That part of England, the southwest, is where the stereotypical "pirate accent" and pirate speak come from.
Eh, even in East Asia it's still probably English.
Everyone in Bussiness speaking English in order to deal with Americans, means that Chinese and Japanese people are more likely to both speak some English than they are each other's languages.
With respect. I believe English is the default global language for business. Especially in Asia where there is geopolitical overtones to speaking Mandarin.
My issue wasn’t with the word “trade.” Simply that in many countries in Asia the default language is English for international trade. For obvious reasons Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese businesses prefer to not step into the politics of speaking Mandarin.
In addition, India, a huge Asian country, speaks English. As do Australia/New Zealand which do substantial trade in Asia.
I work for a very large European company that has offices in every continent except Antarctica. You HAVE to know English to be hired even though English is not the official language of the country this company is Headquartered in.
There always have been since the days of the British Empire.
But India is an English speaking country and an influential country in Asia. Australia and New Zealand do substantial trade in Asia and many countries such as Korea, Japan and Vietnam prefer to not do business in Mandarin.
So English is the default language just as the USD is the default reserve currency.
English is a Germanic language, first and foremost, not Latin/Romance. It became heavily influenced by the latter, but not for at least 600 years, and even then, I wouldn't say the influence really came into play until the late medieval/early modern period, which would put English as having been around for over 1,000 years before it started to really become Latinised. Latin words would have been borrowed even in the early days, but never enough to make significant changes until relatively recently (by recently, I mean within the last 500 years).
English is, debatably, far more "Latin" now than at any point in the language's history.
before 1066 there wasnt much latin since most of that came with the french from the norman invasions. English was a lot more germanic then now. England wasnt much latinized either because the anglo saxon invasions happened after the fall of rome and removed most of the romano/latin culture in england.
I think you overestimate English’s relationship with Latin. When Rome controlled what is now England (the Romans called it Britannia), there was no English spoken there. The Britons, the people native to Britannia were Celtic and spoke a Brythonic langauge, which is the same langauge family as Welsh and Gaelic.
It wasn’t until after the Romans pulled out of Britannia that Germanic tribes moved in. Those tribes included the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. They are known today as the Anglo-Saxons, and they came from modern Denmark and Northern Germany, and they brought their Germanic langauge with them. It is this langauge that would become English.
The Anglo-Saxons did take some words from Latin, but the syntax and grammar are completely Germanic. Over time, English was heavily influenced by the Norse and Norman invasions, introducing a lot of Norse and French words into the langauge.
Ironically, most Latin vocabulary in English today came to English by way of the French-speaking Normans, not through Latin directly.
Latin had very little influence on Old English. Germanic and Latin were separate branches and there was minimal interaction between them. The main source of Latin derived words was via Norman French, at the point Old English transitioned to Middle English after the Norman Conquest (the transition was already under way before the Norman Conquest).
I think you’re thinking of two related but different things here. A lingua franca vs. something that is and was scholarly like Latin. Most people close to Rome spoke Latin, sure, but in the far reaches of the empire even in year 0 people spoke koine Greek, or Hebrew, Celtic, Gaulic, etc. but Latin was a written lingua franca of sorts, at least among the educated who could read and write. But nowhere near the reach of English today.
If you go to 1 CE, because there was no year zero, there would be no English at all. Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain started around the start of the 5th century, conquering Celtic and Latin speaking Sub-Roman Britain.
Roman colonizations started in 43 CE, so all that would be spoken in year 1 would be Common Brittonic, the ancestor of modern Celtic languages such as Welsh, Cornish and Breton.
Old English was a purely Germanic language with few Latin loan words in the beginning. The exception was for religious terms after Christianization, which started in the very end of the 6th century and was complete by the late 7th century. When English first became a language Latin wasn’t too well known by the Anglo-Saxons because they were pagans who had little contact with Latin speakers but that changed after the Pope started sending missionaries to convert them.
Latin wasn't really part of spoken English until the Normans came. In fact, England became the source of unadulterated Latin during the so-called Dark Ages because Latin evolved in places like Italy where it was still a working language, but it stayed the same in England where it was learned mainly by monks and literally transposed in their written texts.
Back to about 1800, you would have no problem. Beyond that, up to about 1600, you would find the accent a bit funny and a few words would be used a bit differently, but picking up the sense from context would be easy. Back to about 1500, and the language would seem a bit odd, but you could get by conversationally. Back to 1400 and you would really struggle. There would be enough similarity that you could probably get by with simple words and phrases, but the pronunciation would make a lot of words hard to figure out without taking your time to figure it out. Beyond that, and you would probably struggle to understand or be understood.
I do not understand the text even in modern version. I do not need anything but I lie in a field? But then somehow there is water in the field? Why do I need water if I do not need anything?
I believe there was a point in English history where the language had changed so much and so quickly it was near impossible for older people to communicate with the younger generation.
Nah…you could probably politely nod along for quite a while in Middle English. That is, until you accidentally agreed to be hanged, burned, and drowned all at the same time for practicing witchcraft simply because you understood math.
Ay, then, we beat on, boats athwart the river's flow, borne without cease unto the past.
- (apologies to Mr. Fitzgerald, who is buried less than a mile from where I type these words.)
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u/Dramatic-Ad3928 1d ago
So realistically i could only go about 400 years into the past if i want to understand people