[dddgghhbbfblk]

Should be "how far back in time can you read English?" The language itself is what is spoken and the writing, while obviously related, is its own issue. Spelling is conventional and spelling and alphabet changes don't necessarily correspond to anything meaningful in the spoken language; meanwhile there can be large changes in pronunciation and comprehensibility that are masked by an orthography that doesn't reflect them.

[dhosek]

Indeed, I remember being in Oxford in the 90s and an older man approached me and spoke to me in English and I couldn’t understand a word he said. My ex-wife, who’s an ESL speaker who speaks fluently and without an accent has trouble with English accents in general. Similarly, in Spanish, I find it’s generally easier for me to understand Spanish speakers than Mexican speakers even though I learned Mexican Spanish in school and it’s been my primary exposure to the language. Likewise, I generally have an easier time understanding South American speakers than Caribbean speakers and both sound little like Mexican Spanish. (The Spanish I understand most easily is the heavily accented Spanish of non-native Spanish speakers.)

Accents have diverged a lot over time and as I recall, American English (particularly the mid-Atlantic seaboard variety) is closer to what Shakespeare and his cohort spoke than the standard BBC accent employed in most contemporary Shakespeare productions).

[JasonADrury]

I live in London, I can drive a little over an hour from where I live and hardly understand the people working at the petrol station. A few more hours and they start to speak French.

[nimbleal]

Hmmmm. Which direction are you driving in where you can hardly understand them? I don’t think there’s a regional accent in the whole of the UK that’s “hardly understandable” spoken by anyone under 80 years old, let alone an hour from London. Especially where the conversation isn’t “in group”

[pjc50]

I have had to interpret between an Ulsterman and a South African, who were both speaking English. I think those accents have vowel shifted in opposite directions.

I was also taught a bit of Chaucer (died 1400) in English at school. Although not any of the naughty bits.

[noosphr]

My funniest moment working in Singapore was translating between an Indian and a Chinese co-worker. The translation was repeating what each said in English in English.

[aardvark179]

Having interpreted for a guy speaking with a broad Glaswegian accent on the east coast main line, I can totally believe this.

[halapro]

This sounds like a Hot Fuzz scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cun-LZvOTdw

[clw8]

I imagine a current generation high school English class would be giggling right from the first line about gooning while on pilgrimages.

[lqstuart]

I think I read it's more "hillbilly" English that sounds like Shakespeare? Like coal mining towns where words like "deer" and "bear" are two syllables. Probably a combination of that and eastern seaboard.

I only learned recently that the vowel shift and non-rhotic R's in Britain happened after the colonization of America. Americans still talk "normally" whereas the English got weird. Also why Irish accents sound closer to American than British I think. Linguistics is cool

[clw8]

Also why the non-rhotic American accents are all by the East Coast, they were influenced by the non-rhotic British visitors while the inland areas were spared.

[NooneAtAll3]

> older man approached me and spoke to me in English and I couldn’t understand a word he said

like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc ?

[mh-]

I was expecting the hooligans from Eurotrip.

[Oreb]

> The Spanish I understand most easily is the heavily accented Spanish of non-native Spanish speakers.

Are you sure this is because of their accent? I have the same experience with French (the non-native speakers are easier to understand), but I always thought that was because they use fewer and simpler words.

[lefra]

As an ESL I'd say it depends on the native language of who's speaking. I'll have no trouble with a thick spanish, italian or romanian language (I'm french), but indians speaking english are completely incomprehensible to me.

[VorpalWay]

It took months of being exposed to Indian English on a regular basis for me to start to understand it (and I still find it requires significant mental effort). Context: I'm a Swede who regularly thinks and dreams in English (and when I did an English language test for exchange student purposes I got top marks in all categories).

[pavel_lishin]

My college had a lot of Indian & Pakistani students & instructors, and the first few semesters were rough, but by junior year, their accents were totally understandable to me. It was a very useful experience to have, as someone who became a software developer.

I wonder what they thought of my Russian accent.

[quadrifoliate]

If you want to be able to understand them, you should probably stop thinking of them as a monolithic groupd of "Indians". Individual states in India are comparable in size and greater in population than Spain or Italy; and some cities and their suburbs are comparable to Romania. Overall, India's population is more than 3x that of Europe.

A lot of Indians have English that's influenced by the specific region they come from and the native language. A couple examples:

- Specific regions of Northwestern India have the "e-" prefixing (e.g. "stop" turns into "estop") while speaking English

- Southern Indians tend to y-prefix due to their native languages having more of that sound (e.g. "LLM" can turn into "yell-ell-em").

[mistrial9]

as a native English speaker in California, this is funny to read. I was standing in a crowd of undergraduates at UC Berkeley, shoulder to shoulder, during a break in a movie. Two guys were talking Very Fast right next to me, I mean 0.5 meter in a crowd. I decided to run an experiment because I could not pick out any of what they said. So I turned and spoke slowly in an ever so slight British formal version of California English "excuse me, do you know what time it is?' . One stopped and answered -- almost exactly as I spoke -- the current time (around 18:00). Then they went back to their talk! it was English!

[ranger_danger]

I didn't think it was possible to speak "without an accent."

[bityard]

It depends on who you ask.

There is a "dialect" called General American English, which is essentially how national news anchors and some actors are trained, so that they don't sound like they are too obviously from anywhere in particular to the public.

A large percentage of Midwesterners and Canadians speak _mostly_ General American, if you allow for the occasional drawl or shifted vowel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English

[nsvd2]

This is certainly at least an American accent, and would sound out of place in e.g. the UK.

[tayo42]

Who taught you Mexican Spanish in school? Im always hearing about how Spanish speakers not from Spain struggle with Spanish in school. You didn't learn vosostros?

[well_actulily]

Anecdata, but I took Spanish all four years in high school in Southern California—I knew of vosotros, but was never really taught it

[kstrauser]

Different person, but I learned Mexican Spanish in school. The teacher taught us vosotros “for the test, and it’s not any harder than the others once you learn it, so might as well, but you’ll never need this again unless you go to Europe”. She seems to have been right. To this day, I’ve never needed vosotros.

[syspec]

Did you mean it is easier for you to understand Spaniards speaking Spanish than Mexican speakers?

[gfto]

You can try this video to see how far back you can understand spoken English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=842OX2_vCic

[frogpelt]

I came here to post the same video. I couldn't understand it until 1600-ish. My wife immediately recognized swinu as pigs early in the video.

[KPGv2]

> Spelling is conventional and spelling and alphabet changes don't necessarily correspond to anything meaningful in the spoken language

On the contrary, spelling is highly idiosyncratic until the 18th century, and until then it was tightly correlated to the sounds of spoken language. Shakespeare didn't even HIMSELF have one way of spelling his own last name. That's how non-conventional spelling was until pretty recently.

You can even see it in these examples, words like "maiſter" in IIRC the 1300s example. Which becomes "master" later in English, but remains Mäster in Frisian (the closest Germanic language to English) and is also mäster in Swedish.

[chuckadams]

Screw these modern sensibilities, I am totally renaming my default git branch to "maiſter".

[dddgghhbbfblk]

I think you are missing my point. Just because spelling can be inconsistent doesn't mean it's not conventional. We agree that certain letters and combinations of letters correspond to certain sounds--that's a convention. We could just as easily remap the letters in our alphabet to entirely different sounds from the ones they represent today and the resulting written text would be, on the surface, entirely incomprehensible, because we no longer understand the conventions being used.

In this particular case, there are several glyphs used in the older texts which we don't use any more today, which makes the older text both appear more "different" and, for most people, harder to read. But this is an artificial source of difficulty in this case. I acknowledge your point that some other spelling differences track pronunciation differences but this isn't always true.

As far as pronunciation changes that aren't captured in spelling changes, this is true most obviously for a lot of words whose spelling standardized during or before the Great Vowel Shift, like "day".

[noosphr]

I use a screen reader and in managed quite well until 1200.

That said: phonetic spelling now. We have spent 500 years turning English into something closer to Egyptian hieroglyphs than a language with an alphabet.

[Oreb]

Phonetic spelling would perhaps make the language easier to learn for native speakers, but it would make it harder to learn for foreigners, at least those of us who come from Europe. Most words in written English resemble words in Germanic or Romance languages. If English was spelled phonetically, the resemblance would be significantly smaller.

People often say that the English spelling is weird or illogical. As a non-native speaker, I disagree. The English spelling makes perfect sense. It’s the English pronunciation which is really strange and inconsistent.

[dontlaugh]

The other big problem would be the lack of intelligibility of English written by native speakers from different places.

[cyberax]

> Phonetic spelling would perhaps make the language easier to learn for native speakers, but it would make it harder to learn for foreigners, at least those of us who come from Europe.

BS. Phonetic alphabets are _much_ easier to learn for everyone. In Russia and Ukraine pretty much every child can read by the time they enter the first grade. It's _that_ easy because both alphabets are phonetic (although it's only one-way in case of Russian).

Meanwhile, when I was learning English there basically was one spelling rule: memorize. It was not at all helpful. I also ended up learning English as a mostly written language, so after moving to the US, I kept getting surprised by how familiar written words are actually pronounced.

E.g. it took me a while to explain to a nurse over the phone that I may have pneumonia and need an appointment. Why the heck that leading "p" is completely silent?!?

[Izkata]

> In Russia and Ukraine pretty much every child can read by the time they enter the first grade.

In the US too, reading is generally handled in Kindergarten, the year before first grade. If your parents didn't teach you before that, like mine did.

> Meanwhile, when I was learning English there basically was one spelling rule: memorize.

There are rules though, that we're ad-hoc taught as kids, or just absorb through exposure. Just because there's a lot of exceptions doesn't mean they don't exist. Here's an attempt at listing them out: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html

[cyberax]

> In the US too, reading is generally handled in Kindergarten, the year before first grade.

I keep hearing that students in the US struggle with reading. With something like 60% of students not being able to read proficiently.

Inlcuding a truly stunning case of a valedictorian high school graduate who couldn't read: https://www.kktv.com/2025/02/28/former-high-school-honors-st... Or the "whole language" approach to reading, which sounds completely bonkers to me.

[Izkata]

The "whole word" teaching method only got popular in the past few decades and is probably the main cause of stuff like that.

[mcswell]

To be technical: the term is phonemic, not phonetic. If we spelled phonetically, we'd have different symbols for the p in 'spin' and the p+h in 'pin'. Similarly for 'tick' and 'stick', and 'scale' and 'kale'. Native English speakers generally don't notice the differences, just like speakers of many oriental languages don't easily recognize the difference between English /l/ and /r/.

[kstrauser]

OTOH, I’ve seen what y’all call cursive, and want no part of it.

[cyberax]

It depends on a writer, but it can be very legible.

I used to be able to jot down notes during lectures almost as fast as the normal spoken speed. We often traded notebooks when preparing for the exams, and I rarely had problems reading other people's notes.

It's also really nice to write, once you learn it. I was surprised after moving to the US that almost nobody here knows how to write in cursive anymore.

A part of this is a really terrible cursive variant that schools in the US used to teach ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method ). Modern Russian (and Ukrainian) cursives are closer to the older Spencerian script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencerian_script

[mananaysiempre]

The usual pictures of и / п / т / ш ambiguity that you see are exaggerated in that they show forms that are nominally “standard” but basically impossible to reproduce without a fountain (or, even better, dip) pen (think round hand or, as 'cyberax mentions, Spencerian script), yet use a constant stroke width that such an implement wouldn’t produce. For the latter two, people who actually write m and not т will often resolve the ambiguity with ш with an over- resp. underbar (the same ones that Serbian uses even in print[1]). It’s also pretty normal to exaggerate letter joins when they come out looking too similar to parts of other letters, etc. Overall, modern Russian cursive is about as legible as the modern French one, and I don’t think people complain much about the latter.

I also find the hand-wringing about English accents somewhat surprising. Yes, different accents exist, and yes, English has a much wider variation than (urban) Russian (there are things in the countryside that urban dwellers haven’t heard for a century), but phonemic orthographies are a thing, and though children in e.g. Moscow may perpetually struggle with orthographic distinctions that no longer correspond to anything in their accent, the idea of a spelling competition remains about as laughable as that of a shoelace-tying one. Nobody makes you represent the many mergers of English with a single letter in your new orthography (though it would be funny).

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cyrillic_alternates...., rightmost column

[CRConrad]

> BS. Phonetic alphabets are _much_ easier to learn for everyone.

BS yourself: The English -- e.e. Latin -- alphabet is just as phonetic as any other.

As long as you don't fuck up your pronounciation as thoroughly as English has done.

[sheept]

phonetic spelling based on whose dialect? should "merry" "marry" and "Mary" be spelled the same?

besides, pronunciation continues to evolve, so any phonetic spelling would continue to gradually diverge from the spoken language

[noosphr]

You suffer from the typical brain damage caused by using a language without an alphabet.

There is no such thing as spelling in phonetic writing systems because they render what is said, not some random collection of glyphs that approximated how a word was pronounced 500 years ago, in the best case.

If two people with different accents can speak to each other, they can also write to each other under a phonetic writing system.

[DiogenesKynikos]

That's kind of a mean and not very relevant response.

The point is that if anyone wanted to reform English spelling, they would have to choose a particular dialect to standardize around.

There is no standard English dialect. There is a relatively standard version of American English ("Walter Cronkite English"), and there is Received Pronunciation in England, but then there are all sorts of other dialects that are dominant elsewhere (Scotland, Ireland, India, etc.).

Which one should we choose to base our orthography on? Or should we allow English spelling to splinter into several completely different systems? Yes, there are already slight differences in British vs. American spelling, but they're extremely minor compared to the differences in pronunciation.

And after this spelling reform, will people still be able to read anything written before the reform, or will that become a specialized ability that most people don't learn?

[noosphr]

You don't standardise. That's the point. If you can understand how people speak you will understand how they write.

[DiogenesKynikos]

So you want a thousand different writing systems, or everyone just winging it as they go along?

That would make reading anything extremely slow and difficult.

[sheept]

Then under your definition there must not be any widely used written language with an alphabet. Most of the world's alphabetic writing systems aren't phonetic transcriptions, they're standardized. They're usually based on the prestige dialect, at the cost of diminutizing other dialects.

For example, Spanish has a fairly consistent spelling system standardized by RAE, based in Madrid. But, for instance, even though much of Latin America doesn't have a distinction between s and soft c (seseo), they still keep the distinction in its spelling.

[noosphr]

One I can say for sure is Serbian. Italian looks like it does. Finnish, Hungarian, Georgian, Armenian, Albanian, Turkish and Korean are all ones I've heard are to a lesser or greater degree, but I don't know enough to say either way.

[kortex]

Standard Italian speakers in Rome struggle to understand Ciociaro dialect, which is from the region on the outskirts of Rome. Take "n'coppa" - spelled with a "c" but very much pronounced /ŋgopa/ with a voiced [g]. I dont even have a reference point for Sicilian but that really pushes the bounds of the dialect/language distinction.

That's one example, from a language with ~70M native speakers, in a geographically tight region.

Likewise, all your other languages (sans Turkiye) are very compact geographically with small speaker bases. And Turkish undoubtedly has large aspects of forced standardization and dialect extinction.

English is spoken by 1.5 billion, by ESL speakers from basically every language tree, across the world. Try to get folks from Boston, Brooklyn, Philly, and Albany in a room and get them to agree on a phonetic spelling.

[accidentallfact]

People always overestimate how 'phonetic' their language is, because nobody actually uses phonemes in regular speech. In Korean in particular, there doesn't even seem to be any obvious correspondence between what is written, and what is actually said.

Foreign accents don't come from any inherent inability to learn language after X years of age. They come from people pronouncing languages as they are written, and virtually no language is like that in reality.

[eesmith]

The best case is a syllabary with how the word was pronounced a few years previous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

> Around 1809, ... Sequoyah began work to create a writing system for the Cherokee language. ... He worked on the syllabary for twelve years before completion and dropped or modified most of the characters he originally created.

> After the syllabary was completed in the early 1820s, it achieved almost instantaneous popularity and spread rapidly throughout Cherokee society.[4] By 1825, the majority of Cherokees could read and write in their newly developed orthography. ...

> Albert Gallatin ... believed [the syllabary] was superior to the English alphabet in that literacy could be easily achieved for Cherokee at a time when only one-third of English-speaking people achieved the same goal.[6] He recognized that even though the Cherokee student must learn 85 characters instead of 26 for English, the Cherokee could read immediately after learning all the symbols. The Cherokee student could accomplish in a few weeks what students of English writing might require two years to achieve.

[williadc]

I've been thinking about this problem for quite awhile, and recently coded up something that allows for easy conversion between today's written English, and a phonetic spelling convention.

https://git.sr.ht/~dcw/iNgliS

I've created a Firefox Add-on for it as well.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/inglis/

[abustamam]

I'm a bit confused by what you mean by that, unless you're talking about emoji, but those weren't around 500 years ago.

Do you mean that since English isn't phonetically spelled, that which we call the alphabet is rather arbitrary?

[ETH_start]

I think he means the latter. This makes learning the spelling harder because you have to learn each word individually, as you would have with hieroglyphs, as opposed spelling it out based on phonemes (that you would have learned from learning how words sound when spoken) and a limited alphabet.

[SoftTalker]

That's not how I learned to read or spell in the 1970s. "Sounding it out" was the main strategy. You learned a few rules for how different combinations of letters sounded, and the exceptions to those, as you went along. But most words are spelled as they sound.

[noosphr]

>But most words are spelled as they sound.

English has 45 sounds and 26 letter. There are basically no words over three letter long that are written as they are spoken.

[SoftTalker]

That's why kids start with "Run Spot Run" and other simple 3 and 4 letter words. They then learn the more complicated rules and exceptions as they go. It's really not a problem.

[scubbo]

Spelling can still be phonetic even if groups of letters have differing sounds from those letters' sounds serially in isolation. The key criterion is that the rules must be universal, applying to every instance of those groupings, rather than having exceptions for their appearances in certain words.

...ok, it occurs to me now that a smart-alec might declare each individual word to be a "grouping of letters with its own phonetic pronounciation", whereupon phoneticism as-defined is achieved trivially because pronounciation is universal over the singleton universe of words spelt exactly like that word. You know what I _mean_ - "sufficiently small groups of letters", hand-wave.

[naniwaduni]

The Latin alphabet variant modern English uses has uses only ~11 kinds of strokes, where is this 26 coming from?

[Terretta]

> Should be "how far back in time can you read English?"

Made a version with modern glyphs to help separate language familiarity from writing familiarity:

https://gist.github.com/terretta/5be1e14b42cf62ec9c235c7cd88...

All credit to original, just agreed with your point this munged two things as presented and preferred to focus on the language.

[mock-possum]

Yeah it’s really just the glyphs that are changing here, and occasionally the spelling, otherwise the words themselves are still fairly recognizable if you’re well-read.

[ksenzee]

This is true through 1300 or so. If you transliterate the 1200, 1100, and 1000 sections to modern glyphs, it's still a foreign language with the occasional recognizable word (such as "the"). Learning Old English in college was a lot like learning Latin: lots of recognizable vocabulary, totally unfamiliar case endings, mostly unfamiliar pronouns, arbitrary word order.

[Terretta]

Agree, I've linked (above) a transliteration to help make this more apparent:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47112220

[ogogmad]

The 1200 one is perfectly comprehensible to me, and I don't think it's that foreign at all.

[jjtheblunt]

there'd be a discontinuity around 1066 since Normans brought over Latin-derived vocabulary aplenty, and overlayed germanic vocabulary. it's super evident if you learn Swedish (for example...very related to pre-1066 English) and have learned Latin (or French), while speaking English.

[depressedpanda]

Yeah. Try comparing texts written in Old English and Old Norse. It's basically the same language. (I'm not surprised at all that Beowulf takes place in Scandinavia.)

But I think they would both be easier to decipher for someone speaking Swedish than English.

[thaumasiotes]

Languages can change in many different ways. Pronunciation changes impede you a lot more the first time you meet someone with a different pronunciation than they do as you interact over time. Grammatical changes are trickier.

[carlosjobim]

We have the written word from centuries ago available today.

Where are you going to find the spoken word from centuries ago?

[CRConrad]

In a crashed flying saucer, in the recordings of an old alien ethnographer?

[zadikian]

I honestly didn't know English had so many non-Latin characters in those centuries. Like a modern English reader can more easily read (but not understand) a Roman inscription than some of these examples.