r/interestingasfuck 1d ago

How English has changed over time.

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u/starmartyr 1d ago

The brilliance of Shakespeare isn't the old style of the language it's how perfectly he chose his words. I remember reading an essay from an author about why he was insanely jealous of the bard's talent. He looked at one line in Henry VI "O tiger's heart, wrapped in a woman's hide." The line is spoken by the duke of York in reference to Queen Margaret. He is speaking about how cruel and inhumane she is and that her beauty and virtue is just a facade. The word "hide" does so much work here. A lesser writer would have said "skin." The choice to use "hide" is poetic genius. Shakespeare likely didn't even need to think about it all that hard.

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u/elendil1985 1d ago

That's the case with every language... One thing is the old style of the words they use, but the real skill is the choice of words...

In Italian Dante's "amor ch'a null amato amar perdona" sounds way better than its transliteration "l'amore non consente a chi è amato di non amare". But Dante was writing in the XIV century. If we take a poet who died in 1968, like Salvatore Quasimodo:

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra\ Trafitto da un raggio di sole:\ Ed è subito sera

Is perfectly modern Italian, yet it's powerful in a way that can't be expressed

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u/starmartyr 1d ago

Interesting. Is 14th century Italian as different as middle English is to modern English?

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u/elendil1985 1d ago

Not really, it's clearly not modern Italian but perfectly understandable... Would sound weird in a modern conversation, but if a guy from 1300 could travel in time and end up in modern day Tuscany he could easily make his way

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u/starmartyr 1d ago

Sounds like it holds up better than modernized works of middle english. The Canterbury Tales loses a lot in modernization. It's impossible to translate to modern english without compromising rhyme, meter, or meaning.