Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire How far back could you understand English?

Lost, totally lost with Billy Shakespeare, and my grades reflected that as a schoolboy. Ye olde Bible was worse yet, clueless.

Beowulf was a little strange in high school, that and Canterbury tales. But I made it through

I still get haberdashers and carpetbaggers mixed up.

That damn Finklestien shît kid

A big fan of the Bard from Stratford upon Avon, here!


Else the Puck a liar call, so good night unto you all!

From the time I started talking I guess.

I don't understand a lot of current shix that's said.

Take a crack at the Wycliff Bible. It was the 1st English language Bible. It was illegal to have a Bible other than the official Latin version and Wycliffe was burned at the stake for his efforts. The Catholic church didn't play nice if you didn't follow their rules.

Aww, hell no!

I see “pus”

And “Godzilla”near the end

They lost me at Charles Dickens. Dude could write three chapters and not say a gawddammed thing.

What would be interesting would be to be able to bring someone from past times to the present and see how much they could understand of the current language. (To totally baffle them, we could present them with some of Stick's posts.)

Early Modern English no big deal to read. Middle English very tough to make out. Old English only the odd word here and there can I recognize. I guess my cutoff would be sometime in the 16th century.

Going in the other directions, I understood a greater percentage of the then-current English fifty years ago than I do today of the now-current English.

With the sound of old English... it reminds me of how a Scotsman speaks, if they are old school speaking English...

Living over there, we also had neighbors who were Welsh and spoke it at home..

wonder how much old English is related to Gaelic....

personally I love the old things.. take me back to our roots...

The example of old english in the video sounds like italian to me.

Dog Dog Dog Dog Dog Dog Dog Dog.

I still remember that from when it likely first was aired.

Always liked Michael Ansara.

Geno

I've spent a lot of vacation time on the outer banks of North Carolina. Back when I first started going out there in the 70's it still was mostly populated by the "legacy" families,...especially the southern part. You can still find people out there who speak like the old timers. But people my age or a bit younger are probably the last generation of it.

Bob, you'll like this I bet.

My cousin did some digging to see where Gramp's family came from in the old country. Nearest she could pin down was an area in Sicily known as the Piana degli Albanese (Plain of the Albanians) and a town known as Mezzojuso. These areas are home to the Arbëreshë, Albanian folks that moved there in the 1400's or so when granted lands for attempting to keep the Turks out of the Balkans. Which is probably why some folks don't recognize our family name as Italian. Some ask if it's Greek even.

http://www.sicily.co.uk/nearby_town/piana-degli-albanesi/

I read an article once that linguists were fascinated with the areas, because due to their isolation from their country of origin, their dialects, when compared to modern Albanian, were akin to finding an enclave in the Appalachians that spoke Shakespearean English. Now that would be cool, too, eh?

Some of that older English in the video here sounded close to listening to some Scots.

Geno