If someone from the present could go back to Shakespeare's time would they be able to converse?

Question

How far back would we have to go that we would be mutually unintelligible?

chanceli...explain vowel shifts please.

Great link from Caicos Turkey(as usual)
one thing intrigues me...how do people today KNOW that that is how these were pronounced.There are no recordings.

Answer 1

Anyone steeped in the language of the King James Version of the Bible would be able to get on very well with an English speaker of Tudor times, just as a person brought up in the tradition of the Bishop Morgan Bible would be able to acquit himself creditably well on the other side of Offa's Dyke. Verily, methinks it were not too difficult a matter to converse with such men as be of good understanding if one utter one's discourse thereafter.
But I have serious doubts about speakers of dialect. We are used to the idea of a standard form of the language, propagated through the media. I have a suspicion that dialectic variations were far more extreme in those days, with speakers of certain dialects being probably unable to converse readily with speakers of the standard version of the language, and vice versa.
I think the bafflement would begin with the times of Chaucer, when I suspect that French and Latin would perhaps be useful allies in speaking to the more educated element (if they would deign to speak to the likes of me.) http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng211/middle_english_phonology.htm
http://members.fortunecity.com/rapidrytr/Spell/vowelshift.htm

Answer 2

Shakespear's time would be virtually no problem. If the person was to travel back to the Dark Ages, pre-900 CE there would be a problem.
During the post Roman period 412-600 some of Britain spoke Latin from the 400 year Roman occupation and some would have spoke Brithonic, the indiginous language.
Around 600 CE the country had succomb to the Saxon invasion and later the Norman invasion. Languages would have changed at least twice in this period.

Answer 3

Probably,because it's only a few hundred years,and languages only change slowly. The biggest obstacle to understanding him would have been regarding which part of England you came from,as,before the era of printing ,different parts of Britain had its own dialect,with many words which were peculiar to that specific area,so a person from,say,Yorkshire might have difficulty understandina someone from Kent and both of them might have difficulty understanding someone from Devon.
it was only really with the advent of printing that both spoken and written(spelling) English became fairly standardized-the only non-standard dialect of English which is still fairly extensively used is Scots English.(A Scot speaking in pure 'Scots' would be unintelligible to someone from another part of Britain,even without taking the different accents into account.)
It is probably more because the SE of England was the main commercial area of Britain that 'Southern English' became the standard-if all early books had been written in the north of England, then a northern dialect would probably have become the dominant one,in which case people nowadays would have considerable difficulty in following a conversation in 'Queen's English'.

Answer 4

I suspect one could go back to the Elizabethan era and be understood... it's possible to read Shakespeare or the KJV without insurmountable difficulty. About two hundred years before that, and you start getting into vowel shifts that would make English incomprehensible to the modern ear.

Answer 5

I think it would be more like thousands of years rather than hundreds, the English language has changed slightly over the past centuries, but I think we could still understand and communicate with Shakespearian times.

Answer 6

Well I would 'cos I'm pretty good at picking up on different accents and dialects. I even understand Geordies!

Answer 7

Accent's not the problem, dialect is.