How far back in time would written English be more or less fully decipherable to a modern English speaker?

Question

Are there any websites that illustrate how the English language has developed over the last 1000-1500 yrs?

Answer 1

About 1550-1650. Shakespeare is a good example of a writer who is more or less fully decipherable, though an annotated edition of his plays is useful to explain some of the archaic words and phrases. You can probably find reference copies on line of articles from early London newspapers and broadsheets from the 17th. & 18th centuries which you should find interesting reading regarding the use of the language in those days

Answer 2

Depends on the speakers dialect, regional dialects tended to be much stronger in the past. You could probably understand a well-educated speaker from a couple of hundred years ago. Listen to a recording of Tennyson reciting "The Charge of the Light Brigade".

http://charon.sfsu.edu/TENNYSON/lightbrigadewax.html

He spoke 120 years ago and I have no problems understanding his accent (although the recording is bad), listen carefully and look at the words.

A speaker with a strong dialect from 100 years ago would probably be very hard to understand.

There are plenty of places on the Internet which show you how English has changed over the past 1 500 years; a good starter is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_English_language

Answer 3

Not far only about 100 years or so, then you will find some changes to meanings and paragraphs which will not make sense in the Modern way. go back 200 years and you will realy start to have difficutly, by 300 years forget it unless you have good translation skills and understand dialects. Further than that and you will need skills in Latin as well.

Answer 4

It depends upon the educational level of the reader. Someone with minimal English language skills would probably be totally floored by anything earlier than 1750. (Although they probably wouldn't have any desire to read something written that long ago!)

And you'll usually find that people who claim they don't like Shakespeare probably dislike it because they don't under-stand much of what he wrote.

Answer 5

Judging by the standard of English used by many contributors I would say not more than a week. Otherwise..probably late Tudor...most educated people can understand most of what Shakespeare wrote, although not all of it and not without some effort from time to time.

Answer 6

You'd have to say WHICH modern English speaker.
Many today would be floored by anything more demanding than the Sun and the Sunday sport.
But I suppose an educated person would be able to deal with anything later than 1660.

Answer 7

Etymology websites show the origins of words. They trace right back to where English words first started.

Answer 8

Late 17th century. You would still have a few problems as words change meaning for instance what does "gay" mean? Check the OED

Answer 9

Probably back to the time of Chaucer, who wrote in the vernacular, but even then you have to know a lot of words and probably have to understand a bit of German to comprehend.

Answer 10

Having read some manuscipts, I can comfortly read manuscripts going back to about 1700. However it depends because some manuscripts are in Latin or have latin phrases which can be tricky to read.