Reading English from 1000 Ad

I think it was earlier this week, or maybe last week, that someone on one of the frontpage posts recommended "The History of English Podcast".

I haven't finished the first episode yet, but it's already seeming promising and I know I'm going to continue with it.

In that first episode (which is basically an introduction), the host explains that the history of the English language can be divided into three periods: Old English, Middle English, and New English.

After establishing that there are three periods, he asks where we think Shakespeare falls, and I immediately thought it had to be Middle English.

Then the host proceeded to say he wouldn’t be surprised if most listeners guessed Old or Middle English—and that he wouldn’t be surprised at all if nobody guessed correctly. Because Shakespeare’s plays are actually classified as New English!

I smiled in surprise.

But he explained that if you can more or less understand the English being written or spoken, then it still falls under New English. The King James Version of the Bible is considered New English too.

Keep in mind, Shakespeare wrote his plays between 1589 and 1613.

The King James Bible was published in 1611.

So when I opened that link in this thread’s header and realized I couldn’t understand a damn thing, it all suddenly made sense!

For a while, I mistakenly thought that “Germanic” meant related to German specifically. Old English makes more sense if you’re aware of Frisian, Dutch, and other non-Scandinavian Germanic languages, since that’s the area it originated from. German and Spanish make this distinction explicit (Deutsch/Germanisch and Alemán/Germánica).

That's a nice reconstruction. My old dead-tree Webster's Collegiate Dictionary has an essay in its foreword that covers the evolution of English in reverse order, ending with texts in Old Anglo-Saxon. The further back, the more alien it seemed. I'd need a lot of help with Middle English, and anything older would require the sort of major effort/rewriting discussed here. William the Conqueror set a huge linguistic change in motion with his little dust-up.

Really, even early Modern English (e.g. Shakespeare or the King James Bible) is pretty thick for today's English speakers.

As a native German speaker, I can at least say that knowing both German and English doesn't really help in understanding the text. Not even the most "dumbed down" version - ok, he's apparently saying something about his wife, but no idea what exactly. And when I read "shyne (Modern English "sheen" but German cognate is closer)", I was even more confused. "Sheen" is the property of an object that is shiny, which in German would be "Schein", but because it is applied to a woman, I assume that the "cognate" he refers to is "schön" (beautiful)?

Old english using "ne" as a negative concord is definitely borrowed from the french right?

Should be “1000 AD”, not “Ad”

Related? "How far back in time can you understand English?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061614 18-feb-2026 399 comments

Highly dependent on passage and writer imo, for anything before 1500

Some people I've had say middle english is easy enough to read now, and that's sometimes true, but if you drop some passages of Gawain or Pearl in front of people they'll be convinced it's an extra 2-300 years older. Anything non-London dialect is harder

I would rather like to see a fully modern rendition of this text. Even as English-first-language, I still find this hard to understand.

Fascinating