It’s easy to imagine the myriad difficulties with which you’d be faced if you were suddenly transported a millennium back in time. But if you’re a native (or even proficient) English speaker in an English-speaking part of the world, the language, at least, surely wouldn’t be a problem. Or so you’d think, until your first encounter with utterances like “þat troe is daed on gaerde” or “þa rokes forleten urne tun.” Both of those sentences appear in the new video above from Simon Roper, in which he delivers a monologue beginning in the English of the fifth century and ending in the English of the end of the last millennium.
An Englishman specializing in videos about linguistics and anthropology, Roper has pulled off this sort of feat before: we previously featured him here on Open Culture for his performance of a London accent as it evolved through 660 years.
But writing and delivering a monologue that works its way through a millennium and a half of change in the English language is obviously a thornier endeavor, not least because it involves literal thorns — the þ characters, that is, used in the Old English Latin alphabet. They’re pronounced like th, which you can hear when Roper speaks the sentences quoted earlier, which translate to “The tree is dead in the yard” and “The rooks abandoned our town.”
The word translate should give us pause, since we’re only talking about English. But then, English has undergone such a dramatic evolution that, at far enough of a remove, we might as well be talking about different languages. What Roper emphasizes is that the changes didn’t happen suddenly. Non-Scandinavian listeners may lack even an inkling that his farmer of the year 450 is talking about sheep and pigs with the words skēpu and swīnu, but his final lines, in which he speaks of possessing “all the hot coffee I need” and “friends I didn’t have in New York” in the year 2000, will pose no difficulty to Anglophones anywhere in the world. Even his list of agricultural wealth around the early thirteenth century — “We habben an god hus, we habben mani felds” — could make you believe that a trip 600 years in the past would be, as they said in Middle English, no trouble.
Related Content:
Tracing English Back to Its Oldest Known Ancestor: An Introduction to Proto-Indo-European
Hear the Evolution of the London Accent Over 660 Years: From 1346 to 2006
What Shakespeare’s English Sounded Like, and How We Know It
Where Did the English Language Come From?: An Animated Introduction
A Brief Tour of British & Irish Accents: 14 Ways to Speak English in 84 Seconds
The Entire History of English in 22 Minutes
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Old English “to modern American”??
As if that childish dumbed-down dialect is supposed to be some kind of evolution of English? As they would say in “Modern American”, (there is NO such language) GTFOH.
Ok
I started understanding Around 1000.
I started understanding around 900 CE. I believe this is because I also speak German and have some exposure to Swedish, Dutch, and Gaelic. There was considerable trading and mingling across the channel between Britain and the continent at the time, and languages influenced each other. There was a television show some years ago about Vikings in northeastern Britain, and all the dialogue was in the appropriate old versions of the languages. I could mostly understand and follow the dialogue of the Britons, and occasionally understand the Scandinavian Vikings.
If you can’t say something nice, shut up.
I enjoyed this very much. The transmogrification is fascinating. I could probably *just* get by almost exactly a millennium in the past, but not earlier. I’m glad that you have this interest and have taken the time to present this history. Near the end, I wanted to read your notes, but YouTube adds annoying graphics on the bottom of everyone’s videos. I hope that you consider Vimeo as well for your work. Thanks again!
I started to understand at about 890 CE, English isn’t my first language so I’m pretty used to disiphering words and that’s pretty much how I understood it.
I thoroughly enjoyed this. I consistently started understanding at 1500, but I heard some familiar words at 900. Excellent portrayal of English evolution. Fascinating!
900 AD, but knowing words and understanding expressions are two different things
900. I studied English Literaturw and I have an MFA in poetry. I read Beowolfe and Chaucer
Fun project.
Goode
I had a moment at 1200CE where words made sense. Then I understood nothing until 1500CE.
Fascinating stuff. Thanks!
Hello Simom,
This is very interesting. I think that I was able to understand from about 600 AD. It’s of particular interest to me because I’ve speaking reading and writing stardard Japanese about 50 years. And have recently started stuying/speaking [Sakat-shi Yamagata] “dialect
(方言)(ほうげん] [hougen] e.g. ありがとうございます in standard Japanese becomes [ もっけだの。] [mokkedano ] in
one of the Yamagata dialects. Classical Japanese spoken by the aristocracy is much more difficult and generally divided into East and West Japan
.
Hope to seem more of your posts.
Ken
A few familiar sounding words around 900, but only after 1500 could I make continuous sense of it.
The accents seemed to move around geographically, from Scandinavian to Germanic to what seemed to me like eastern European and then to English with a touch of Scots and finally English.
We should be asking, which English among many could we navigate today. Chaucer’s late 1300 English is rough, but navigable. At the time as Chaucer, however, was Midland English, of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, which is opaque to us.
This is fascinating. In college, I studied Old English and Middle English. I could read the Canterbury Tales in the original When your timeline hit the 14th Century, I started to understand some words and by the end of the 15th and the start of the 16th century, I could understand whole sentences.
Thanks for posting this video!
Fascinating. I first started to understand at about 1200 and could understand well by 1600.The 1600 shift seemed quite sudden.
Fascinating. I first started to understand at about 1200 and could understand well by 1600.The 1600 shift seemed quite sudden.The word chicken appeared very early.
This is not a duplicate comment.
Wow, you definitely seem to have a bug up your backside about American English. You must be British! Hmm, how about Indian English? With 128 million speakers in India, their version of the language deserves to be taken seriously. Or Nigerian English? Our language has a great feature – adaptability – and the fact that it is taken up by cultures around the world, and flavoured with the local style, is something to be celebrated, not sneered at!
A glimpse at 900 and pretty hod at 1300
Language will never care about your opinions. It’ll just keep on becoming what it will be next, gatekeepers be damned.
I started to recognise some words around 900, but didn’t understand whole sentences until about 1500.
Ho
All fine and sound. But- in 1967 I was driving through a village in Yorkshire. A cop pulled up next to me and started yelling
I couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying, and said so. He just grimaced and drove off.
Reasonable I guess. But I am a scholar of Medieval English specializing in the Northern Dialect. Hearing modern English with such a deep regional accent was something much harder.
So even if you could make sense of it on a page wouldn’t help understanding a Medieval person.
Anyway, the smell would be tough enough.