The producer of this video has a monologue that starts off in Old English of approximately 450 AD and then changes slightly every couple sentences or so to transition slowly through the intervening years until reaching modern American English (although it still sounds a bit off because of the author's accent). I wonder if he decided to end with American English because it has had less drift in the past 200 years than British English.
The quiz is: when can you start to understand what is being said? The first word that I was pretty sure about was "chicken" in about 800 AD, and then I started picking out more words in the 1000 or 1100 period (which makes sense since that was the period of the Normal invasion); but, for me, it was really wasn't until about 1600 that I felt I could pretty much understand everything being said. He has the monologue without subtitles and translation at the beginning of the video, then has some discussion, and then the monologue again but with subtitles toward the end of the video. Give it shot and see how well you do.
VIDEO: "From Old English to Modern American English in One Monologue"
Simon Roper (10 min.)
Very interesting. I really wish he would have spoken a single sentence in modern English...then repeated that same phrase throughout the centuries long timeline. I began to understand snippets beginning around 700. By 1500 it was comprehensible. Funny thing is, even today, in the 21st Century, sometimes it's impossible to understand people from Scotland. I used to work security for a company with facilities all over the planet...but it was calls from our Edinburgh facility that I dreaded the most LOL.
ReplyDeleteI understand that even the English cannot always understand the Scots.
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