It’s straightforward to imagine the myriadvert difficulties with which you’d be confronted if you happen to have been suddenly transported a millennium again in time. However if you happen to’re a local (and even professionalficient) English converseer in an English-speaking a part of the world, the language, a minimum of, positively wouldn’t be a problem. Or so that you’d suppose, till your first encounter with utterances like “þat troe is daed on gaerde” or “þa rokes forleten urne tun.” Each of these sentences seem in the brand new video above from Simon Roper, during which he delivers a monologue startning within the English of the fifth century and finishing within the English of the tip of the final millennium.
An Englishman specializing in movies about linguistics and anthropology, Roper has pulled off this kind of feat earlier than: we previously featured him right here on Open Culture for his performance of a London accent because it advanced via 660 years.
However writing and delivering a monologue that works its manner via a millennium and a half of change within the English language is obviously a thornier endeavor, not least as a result of it entails literal thorns — the þ characters, that’s, used within the Outdated English Latin alphawager. They’re professionalnounced like th, which you’ll be able to hear when Roper speaks the sentences quoted earlier, which translate to “The tree is useless within the yard” and “The rooks abandoned our city.”
The phrase translate ought to give us pause, since we’re solely discussing about English. However then, English has underneathgone such a dramatic evolution that, at far sufficient of a take away, we would as effectively be discussing about different languages. What Roper emphasizes is that the modifications didn’t happen suddenly. Non-Scandinavian listeners could lack even an inkling that his farmer of the 12 months 450 is discussing about sheep and pigs with the phrases skēpu and swīnu, however his last strains, during which he speaks of possessing “all the recent cofpayment I would like” and “pals I didn’t have in New York” within the 12 months 2000, will pose no difficulty to Anglotelephones anythe place on the earth. Even his listing of agricultural wealth across the early thirteenth century — “We habben an god hus, we habben mani felds” — might make you consider {that a} journey 600 years up to now can be, as they stated in Middle English, no trouble.
Related Content:
Tracing English Again to Its Outdatedest Identified Ancestor: An Introduction to Professionalto-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
The place Did the English Language Come From?: An Animated Introduction
A Temporary Tour of British & Irish Accents: 14 Methods to Communicate English in 84 Seconds
The Complete History of English in 22 Minutes
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social internetwork formerly generally known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
