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

Cool stuff Bristoe.

Geno

The Plainsman

Sometimes can barely understand people from the British Isles now.

There is a time-travel short story about that. Wm Shakespear was brought forward.o present (at the time- i Ihink the 60's or 70's)

And was failed in the university English class he took.

Someone once said that the Brits and Americans ar two peoples divided by a common language.....

Well just where is Chiner or Canader on the globe?

One cool thing though they drop nonessential words. Such as...she went to hospital as opposed to "the hospital".

Watch CSPAN when the House is in and you'll wonder if you understand English today. Certainly not Logic.

Okay! Time for the bonus round!

This is Frisian. It's about as close as you can get to the mother tongue of Old English. It's spoken by Frisians, the modern-day inhabitants of the place where the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons left to come to England.



To me, it feels like its right on the edge of understanding. I don't mean I can understand a word of it. It just means something triggers my brain into thinking there might be something there I can catch.

Mother is English, I went to school in England for the 1st grade, present day English brogue is usually no problem, same with the Irish, a Scotsman, on the other hand, I need to listen very closely............ Welsh, BYE A FRICKIN VOWEL.....

my 21st Great Grand-Father is Edward I Plantagenet..........

To me, regional accents are just as bad as ye olde English. In the 70's a company I worked for in Prudhoe Bay hired a couple push boat skippers out of Lousiana. I guess they were Cajuns, nice guys and all, great boat handlers, but communications on the FM radio work channels was an absolute disaster. Nobody from the West coast could understand them, which frustrated the Cajuns, and their speech patterns and accents got louder and faster, things got more confusing, tempers flared. I was a barge engineer, one day trying to shift anchors, it got so out of hand that I called an "all stop'' (to the tune of about 25,000 bucks an hour) and requested the Cajuns to bring a deckhand up to the wheelhouse to do the communicating. Through no fault of their own, they were not hired back the following season.

Shakespeare and before always kicked my ass, but I was pretty good at "Pidgen Engrish" from the Sand Pebbles...

I went to church with my folks (a lot) as a kid and for whatever reason paid attention. I was familiar with the King's English from hearing the King James Version read and expounded on all the time and reading it myself.

I was an average student in an advanced placement class all through high school and went from zero to hero in my English teacher's eyes because I understood Shakespeare much better than the (genuinely) smart kids. I think she thought I was some kind of savant or something!

People from England will speak muzzie before long.

Bring back the Navajos for the radio work.

George Bush

Well, it's a feather in my cap to have learned to decipher Gus. But to be serious, when I was in grade school I could read Gulliver's Travels, and follow it well. Today, not so easy. What is easy today?

In my younger years, I read a lot of English literature. Once you catch on to it, English humor can be pretty funny. Many people don't know that Dickens wrote more than Oliver Twist and Christmas Carol. He wrote some hilarious stuff. Now days, I can hardly make heads or tails out of it. I'm getting old, I guess. P G Wodehouse is about as English as I can get now.

I like the King James Boible mpore than the modern versions and I dig Shakespeare.

But that's as fatr as it goes.

"Whan tha April with hys shoures soote, the droot of Mark hat perced to the roote..."--Chaucer

" When April with his sweet showers has piered the drought of March to the root..."

"Whan that Aprile, with his shoures soute
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne, in swich Liquor
Of wich vertu engendred, is the fleur"

Off the top of my head. The start of Canterbury Tales. I learned that in 12th grade in 1968. I love studying the old English.

I learned in my studies that in the whole world, the place where the English currently spoken, is the closest to Shakespeare's English, is here in the Appalachian Mountains.

Only back as far as the '60s. I dated a girl from England and when it came time to meet the parents we had dinner at her home. She brought another girl with to act as a translator an I for sure needed it. I flat out couldn't understand enough of what was said to make sense of it. The odd word I knew, but that was it. I'd have been better off with German, Latin or French.

Rather than being cool, that one drives me to near rage - especially when people here do it - "Doctor will see you now."

Not sure where to place the blame for this one, but the absolute, f'ing stupidest-sounding example of this is the toothless, drooling, "graduated high school" in place of the correct "graduated from high school". I can only surmise that said high school must not have had much in the way of English requirements for graduation.

Just one of those Thanes I reckon....

I could facetiously say that I understood English back as far as about 1948. Being an English Lit major, I spent a lot of time deciphering Chaucerian and Shakesperean texts.

Some "Britglish" is indeed lacking in articles, but we're not immune to dropped words. Witness the common use here of things like "needs strangled" (which sets my teeth on edge). Not to mention the grammatically horrible but almost universal "Me and him did something."

Poor grammar, spelling, and punctuation is now not only common but seemingly encouraged - hence the howls of Grammar Cop when anyone attempts to point out an error.

Dizzy Dean, 'People know what I mean when I say Ain't."

Some people seem to take great pride in ignorance.

Actually, it wasn't the first English translation. And it was a horrible one at that. Lots of Wycliff's heretical agenda buried in it. Another thing to keep in mind is that the Bible is a Catholic book - written, translated and compiled by the Church.

If you wrote a book, would you want someone to re-write it to include things that were personal insults directed at you?

I think I'm dumb...

My family traces back to Portsmouth Island - my maternal grandmother was the schoolteacher there for several years. My mom and all her siblings still have that outer banks twang.

Moms maternal side is from NE North Carolina some fought at Bacons Rebellion so they've been there a while, mix that southeastern Virginia/northeastern North Carolina twang with Appalachian twang and see if you don't get some funny looks when traveling around the country.

If friend kaywoody would get aboard, I'd joke about bein' in school back then, chips flyin' about from our stone tablets.

Fern salad, an' hard boiled dinosaur eggs pack in our mammoth skin lunch bags.

Remember then days Bob?

Because it has all the same rhythms as English. It’s English, just with different words. Someone from China would not be able to distinguish those people from two people speaking English. It would all sound the same because of the rhythm and the pauses and the word lengths are all the same as ours.

Many people speak the dialect of their region. I don't think it's a sign of ignorance to communicate in the way that one heard the language used all their life.

It's been said that people from Appalachian regions don't talk,...they sing. I enjoy listening to them talk. In fact, a lot of their inflection can be heard in the way that many people in central Kentucky talk.

My point was not about dialects, it was about the use of proper grammar. I, too, enjoy listening to many of the varieties of speech from different areas.

John, remember those Canadian gals? The way they talk? It must be heterosis.

I sure couldn't speak Scottish in 1974.

I was in uniform in front of the American Headquarters in West Berlin when a pretty red headed young woman approached and asked me, and I can only approximate the brogue here:

E-cu' m', cu' ya' te' muh' whe' th' soobwa' is?

I replied, "say again?"

She repeated it more slowly.

E cu' m', cu', ya', te' muh' wh' th' soob-wa' is?"

Finally dawned on me she was asking where the subway was, so I pointed to the Bahnhof station about a block down the street.

I remember sitting in the MacDonald's in Dryden, next to a group of men of mature age. At first, I thought that they were speaking a different language. When I sort of relaxed my hearing, I came to realize that it was English, but spoken in a very different tempo/syntax than I was used to hearing.

Many Appalachians were isolated from or cutoff from the rest of the country, 'proper grammar' weren't learned by many in the region for many generations.

I've spent my life bouncing around in three different Kentucky dialect regions. I've more or less settled in on basic central kentuckian, but working with so many appalachians has touched my inflection and added to my vocabulary, also.

But I grew up in the Jackson Purchase area of far western Kentucky. So when I'm on the phone with somebody down there I fall right into the original way I learned to speak.

I don't notice it. But my wife tells me, "You talk different when you're on the phone with people from down there."

People in western Kentucky say "y'all". People in eastern Kentucky say "youin'ziz".

I use both interchangeably,...depending on where am and who I'm talking to.

I wonder how long ago one would have to go to hear English spoken like a Scot in Appalachia.

My grandfather was second generation out of Cornwall. He didn't speak like a Cornishman, but he pronounced certain words differently.

The road was the "rud", for example.

Ahhh!!! The "salad days" of our youth Richard!

(Fyi, from Antony and Cleopatra 😉)

You ain't failed me yet Bob! May God Bless you, an' yours in these hard times.

This is awesome!

I'm not sure how far back, but last time I was in Louisiana I couldn't order in drive through.

As is this!

And for we few, we happy few,,,,

Seem to recall the language back to around 1951 or so. It had a little bit of cracker twang as I remember.

All y’all have a good day now.

Just as one bit that people consistently misunderstand is the famous line from Romeo and Juliet, when J says "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" and today's witless wits think she's asking where he is. Back then, "wherefore" meant "why" and she was bemoaning the fact that R was from a family feuding with hers.

If it were written today, she might ask, "How come you're Romeo?" (And the witless ones might answer "I drove." )

Not witless here Rock, I gots at least a half.

My half is fairly dim.

I've long said that of you, Wabi!



(When this is over we need to go fishing.)

It'd be pure pleasurer to enjoy some fishing with a lot of folks on the place. Maybe someday.

Agreed. When I hear that I imagine something like: "Billy Bob was the first in our family to graduate high school". Sadly, you even see it in semi-formal writing like announcements or news stories.

Paul