Talking to the ancestors

[AndiFlatland]

Didn't quite know which category to place this one under, but I guess Science pretty much covers it...
This can only ever be a thought experiment, as whatever we believe to be the answer can never be proved: I've often wondered whether, if we could communicate in some way with people from the distant past, how far back in time it would be before our languages became mutually incomprehensible. Even if you look at clips from TV from 20 or 30 years ago, many of the idiomatic expressions have fallen into disuse, and the current generation would perhaps have difficulty getting the meaning of some of it; and going further back to, say, the middle of the 20th century, much of what we hear doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, even though it's still recognisably English. A lot of comedy from that era now seems hard to laugh at, because the situations and public perceptions have changed so much since then. If we had recordings from the Middle Ages or the Mediaeval era, would the language have changed so much that we could no longer communicate in what we know as English? A lot of written material from those times contain few currently recognisable letters, and only a few words seem to stand out as being similar to our own. Could I have an easy conversation with Henry Vlll or Chaucer? My guess is, no, we would need an interpreter.

[dotty.]

i can read a will from 1650 without any problems, the writing is something you get used to but the scribes that compiled a will were generally all taught the sme way and so there is a similarity which helps. the church ran the whole show and so it is quite standardised, early manoral records are quite easy too as they all used the same terminology and construction and are quite repetitive, each entry in each circumstances simply had a name change as required, as for the spoken word, i much prefer the terminology of the 50s and 60s to the text speak and vocabulary of the modern age.

[Old_Geezer]

Linguistics is more an art than a science isn't it ?

Aye but you don't hear the accents they used when they wrote it ;-)

Some time back I recall the BBC history pages showed things you could click on and hear folk speaking in language used at the time. You could try to check to see if it is still there.

[Negomi]

There was something called the Great Vowel Shift (is on wikipedia) in middle ages when vowel sounds changed from more like french or scottish to current english