How far back in time could you go and still understand English?

[yuiyoshida]

[The_REAL_Ecumenist]

1. WELL, it depends on what side of my family I'm going back in

time on. My mom's side? APPROX 2 generations my father's side is also ABOUT 2 generations..

[chowder66]

2. Can I bring my middle english to english translation book? nt

[hlthe2b]

3. I think a lot of Americans would have difficulty with quite a few British English dialects

today--much less those of antiquity. Not to mention that spoken in former British colonies, including some parts of India.

I love accents, and I think develop an ear for them pretty quickly. But, admittedly, I've heard a few that I could not really decipher.

[Cirque du So-What]

11. About 15 years ago, I saw an indie film set in the north of England

Manchester, perhaps. The actors all spoke in the local dialect. The film was subtitled. It was necessary.

[burrowowl]

14. Yes the Manchester idiom is very difficult

I had some friends over and a good thing Peter (wh0 had spent some time in Manchester) was able to translate Marla when she was excited. I am American and others were from Scotland, Leeds, London, etc.

[guillaumeb]

4. Back to when I was 6 or so.

Prior to that we spoke French exclusively at home.

[LisaM]

5. That's super fascinating

It would probably be helpful if you spoke some Germanic or Scandinavian language (along with English).

I have one tiny quibble with their blurb on the 1500s - they didn't "speak like the Bible", the King James Bible was written according to the way they spoke at the time!

[cab67]

6. I once heard someone reading 13th century English.

It sounded like the Swedish Chef trying to speak French.

[Binkie The Clown]

7. Since first I heard it, I've been fascinated by the following thought experiment:

At a long table in heaven, sit people, each with their English-speaking children to their right and their English-speaking parents to their left. This goes on for hundreds of generations. As you walk along the table you find that every person there is able to converse freely with the people several places to their right and left. But walk 20 or 30 seats further down and you can detect differences in the way people speak. The further you walk, the harder it is to understand them, until you are hearing proto-Indo-European, the ancient ancestor of English (and of most Western languages and quite a few Eastern ones as well).

It's not so strange that people at one end of the table can't converse with people at the other end, but what is strange is that everyone CAN converse with their neighbors, and there is no break anywhere in that chain.

[BigmanPigman]

8. I can barely understand a Scottish accent so I guess it depends on the region

as well as the date.

[yuiyoshida]

9. I HAVE HEARD that Welsh is

totally different from Irish and Scottish Galic...its amazing that one tiny island had so many cultures under the same roof, without immigration.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

10. "without immigration" ?!? English is the way it is because of MASSIVE immigration

Picts, Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Fresians, Danes, Norse, Normans, French, ....

[ChazInAz]

12. Guess I'm lucky.

I could manage fairly well in Middle English.
I studied it, long ago, but there just aren't very many people around for me to practice on.

[burrowowl]

13. Thanks for link!!!!!!

[Nitram]

15. Pronunciation and slang would probably make it very difficult to understand even 100 years ago.

Spoken speech is very different from written literary language. In 1961 I could hardly understand a word a kid living in rural Virginia said to me. In fact, a few years ago I picked up a hitchhiker in rural Virginia who had left his mountain hollow for the day and I understood about 30% of what he was saying to me.