ancient languages?

Question

i live near london, if i were to go back in time in the area i am in now, taking in to account the fact that you can sort of understand local dialects and cirtain words from french german and latin as our language is based in these, how far back in time could i go and still be able to get the general idea of what someone's saying and have them understand me?

does that mean if someone with either a strong irish / scotish / welsh / devonshire accent would be able to understand people further back especialy if they spoke the local languages, although i was disapointed with the lack of people who spoke welsh when i went to wales.

"Why were you surprised at the amount of Welsh people that don't speak Welsh - Most of the population of England can't even speak English" good point lol :)

Answer 1

I think it's only about 500 years. Shakespeare is barely intelligible to us now, so anything before him might be difficult to understand. The basic meaningful words - man, home, love, god, etc. - have essentially been the same for the last 1000 years. It's the rest that's changed over the course of time.

Of course, that's the written word, which is usually far easier to understand than the spoken word.

Etymology is the study of the history of words. I've added a link to an online etymology dictionary that I like, if you're interested in that kind of thing, and it sounds like you are.

Answer 2

Cassie and Taivo are correct: Shakespearean English (whether with a London accent or a Warwickshire accent, it makes no significant difference to this question), that is about 1600, is comprehensible: it's performed at the Globe with authentic accents. It sounds like a peculiar regional accent - but it's not greatly more similar to one southern region or another of today.

Before that, the Great Vowel Shift changed the language a lot. With training, you can learn to understand spoken Chaucer, but you have to mentally 'translate' vowels on the fly. You'd be unlikely to pick up whole sentences of Middle English, but odd words would be familiar. But Chaucer is unrepresentative anyway, since standard Modern English was significantly influenced by his London dialect: other English dialects from the same period would be even harder to understand.

As for the two-thousand-year-old ancestor of Welsh spoken in pre-Roman times, no Welsh person could understand that any more than you or I could understand the Proto-West-Germanic spoken on the Saxon shore 2000 years ago.

Answer 3

two authors colour most people's understanding of "olde worldy" english - chaucer and shakespeare.

even if you look at dickens you can see that english usage has changed and continues to change at a great pace.

shakespeare was from the midlands and his writing contains a few slang terms or flower names etc that were peculiar to that region. some time ago some actors were taught the accent and dialect that was peculiar to stratford at this time and performed a play at the reconstructed globe using this accent. it was very very different to the shakespere we're used to - much more guttural and earthy sounding, but the rhythym made more sense. i think that we would be able to get by in the london of elizabeth I.

chaucer is another story. middle english was a much more mixed up affair with different words being used to describe the same items in areas that these days we would describe as geographically close to one another. i find middle english impossible.

before that i think we'd be lost until possibly pre-roman times.

apparently academics now believe that the local tribes spoke a language not dissimilar to welsh, so i'd be alright!!

in fact, welsh has changed very little over the years, (for example, i can pretty much understand the first written poem "y gododdin" and i saw a copy of the first bible recently (1588 i think) and it could have been written yesterday - very little change in spellings etc., especially compared to shakesperean english.

that doesn't mean that welsh is backwards - a colleague made fun of our spelling for ambulance - "ambiwlans". but the word isn't english at all! it was invented by a frenchman who put two greek words together. by comparison, police is "heddlu". in fact i'm constantly surprised by how adaptable it is.

sorry to hear that you didn't hear much welsh during your visit. you hear it a LOT more now than when i was little (in the 80's). if you want to hear it online, i can point you in the right direction, either post another question or contact me through the link.

Answer 4

Yeah, probably Middle English. It gets a very confusing with Old English especially as they used some different symbols and characters in their alphabet. I would say it was like a cross between German and Norse (Saxon and Viking influences).

Also, it is kind of sad that many Welsh people don't speak their language, but it is becoming more popular and there are a lot of Welsh resources avaliable too if you want to learn.

Answer 5

Why were you surprised at the amount of Welsh people that don't speak Welsh - Most of the population of England can't even speak English

Answer 6

It all depends how for you want to go back. I am from Scotland, but there is a story in our family, that some of th clan actually threw Spears at the Romans, as they tried to land on the South Coast of what is now called England, but was then part of one Country, before the wall was built. Everyone spoke as brand of British.

Victor

Answer 7

Go with the first answerer. AndyB is wrong. Chaucer would be generally unintelligible to you if you tried to talk to him. The spelling looks the same, but all the long vowels were pronounced completely different. You would pronounce the word "meet" to rhyme with "eat", but Chaucer would pronounce it to rhyme with "ate". You would say "house", but Chaucer would rhyme it with "loose". In other words, you wouldn't understand a speaker of Middle English. Shakespeare's time is about as far back as you could go.

EDIT: It doesn't matter what your dialect is. ALL dialects are constantly changing and you could understand Shakespeare with difficulty, but NOT understand Chaucer. Of course, the Welsh speaker could understand written Welsh of about 500 years ago, just as we could understand written English of 500 years ago, but Welsh pronunciation has changed just as English pronunciation has changed and Modern Welsh speakers would have just as many problems understanding spoken Welsh of 500 years ago as you would have understanding spoken English of 500 years ago. ALL languages and dialects are in a constant state of change and 500 years of understanding the spoken language is about all that we find in any language.

Answer 8

No, Middle English, as seen in Chaucer, would be more or less inteligeble, but it would be reasonably hard to communicate, much like talking to a very thick Yorkshire accent, and that's around 800 years ago.

Before that you're getting into Old Englsh, which is very like Dutch and German.

Answer 9

Minoan, Vestinian, Skalvian, Punic, Mycenaean Greek, Mayan, Egyptian, those are all historical languages of historical civilization, all are extinct. I attempt to no longer supply you a language that have not been given with the aid of different answerers. have relaxing! ;)

Answer 10

I think our ancient languages were the languages of all ethnics and races in our old world.There were so many thousand dialects
languages until now.I think such as Greek and Ibrani languages were our ancient languages among others.And some of my teachers told me that Arabic language is the most complete language in this world so God gives His Guidance to us originaly in Arabic language..Language is a tool of our communication among ethnics and races.It is very important in our life.