And here's the Simon Roper videos acknowledged in the article: "From Old English to Modern American English in One Monologue" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic (short version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_pS3_c6QkI ). This runs forward rather than back in time. However, Roper's "How Far Back Can You Understand Northern English?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Zqn9_OQAw does run backwards in time.

I can comprehend most of the text back to 1300, if slower than Modern/Present Day English. It helps to know the old letter forms, and some of how Shakespearean (Early Modern), Middle, and Old English work. It also helps sounding it out.

Past that, I'm not familiar with Old English enough to understand and follow the text.

for a very specific dialect of Northern English. I struggled to understand much beyond 1950, and I had a good ear

I'm heading to Stornoway next week, I don't hold out much hope

Indeed, I remember being in Oxford in the 90s and an older man approached me and spoke to me in English and I couldn’t understand a word he said. My ex-wife, who’s an ESL speaker who speaks fluently and without an accent has trouble with English accents in general. Similarly, in Spanish, I find it’s generally easier for me to understand Spanish speakers than Mexican speakers even though I learned Mexican Spanish in school and it’s been my primary exposure to the language. Likewise, I generally have an easier time understanding South American speakers than Caribbean speakers and both sound little like Mexican Spanish. (The Spanish I understand most easily is the heavily accented Spanish of non-native Spanish speakers.)

Accents have diverged a lot over time and as I recall, American English (particularly the mid-Atlantic seaboard variety) is closer to what Shakespeare and his cohort spoke than the standard BBC accent employed in most contemporary Shakespeare productions).

Yeah it’s really just the glyphs that are changing here, and occasionally the spelling, otherwise the words themselves are still fairly recognizable if you’re well-read.

At 1400, they add in the thorn "þ". If you don't know that's supposed to be "th", you'll get stuck there.

Don't get the reference compared to the text in the article for that timeframe.

Is there something specific in there?

In 1500 a lot of pronunciation would've been different too, it was in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift [1]. And of course while the UK is still (in)famous for its many accents and dialects, some nigh mutually unintelligible, the situation would've been even worse back then.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

> worse or better then now?

*than.

Which I realize is an ironic correction in this context. I wonder if we'll lose a separate then/than and disambiguate by context.

There is an interesting review of The Wake on the PSmiths literary substack:

https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/guest-review-the-wake-by-paul-k...

Shakespeare is a definite barrier.

I was able to get the gist of 1200, with some effort. By paragraph:

P1: Unclear, but I think it's basically saying there is much to say about all that happened to him.

P2: Unexpectedly, a woman ("uuif", wife) appeared at "great speed" to save him. "She came in among the evil men..."

P3: "She slaughtered the heathen men that pinned me, slaughtered them and felled them to the ground. There was blood and bale enough and the fallen lay still, for [they could no more?] stand. As for the Maister, the ? Maister, he fled away in the darkness and was seen no more."

P4: The protagonist thanks the woman for saving him, "I thank thee..."

On first reading, I didn't know what "uuif" was. I had to look that one up.

Yeah same. The explanation at the bottom is interesting, lots of the words imported from Normandy drop off then, and the grammar changes more significantly.

This is, roughly, a measure of how old your civilization is.

Some early English translations of the Bible were unintentionally comical, e.g., “and Enoch walked with God and he was a lucky fellowe.”

Of course that’s not limited to the 16th century. The Good News Bible renders what is most commonly given as “our name is Legion for we are many” instead as “our name is Mob because there are a lot of us.” In my mind I hear the former spoken in that sort of stereotypical demon voice: deep with chorus effect, the latter spoken like Alvin and the Chipmunks.