[biofox]

The Middle English spelling and phonetic shifts are what make it so painful to read. The words themselves though are mostly comprehensible with a bit of effort.

Go back another four hundred years to Old English and Beowulf and it becomes complete gobbledygook (to me at least).

[eszed]

Yep. If you hear Chaucer read aloud by someone who knows the phonetics and the meaning it's instantly like 75% comprehensible. If they give you a bit (like, half a class-period) more help, you'll get to ~90% without any more effort than that. Chaucer is more or less as incomprehensible as Glaswegian - that is to say, it's a bit tricky, and you won't know all the slang, but you can get used to it pretty quickly.

What's really fun is that if you keep the dialect in your head, and try reading it out loud with your best "Chaucer accent" it feels like slipping on a pair of glasses: you immediately "get" stuff that you'd have thought was impenetrable just looking at the page.

Source: my medieval lit classes, with a teacher who was really good.

[eszed]

Replying to myself to add that that last ~10% is an enormous time-sink. You'll have to look up every unfamiliar word, which isn't a big deal for a short text, but becomes one for something longer. Worse, though, is that you'll constantly be led astray by words whose meanings have drifted over time: your interpretation (often) won't align exactly with that of Chaucer or his audience. What I said above is good enough for casual / undergraduate use - the stories are still funny, and / or have enough depth for a good discussion - but there's a reason "medievalist" is an actual speciality: you'll spend a whole career trying to get to 100%.

[SoftTalker]

Since spelling was not standardized at the time, I suppose there would be no real loss of meaning if someone were to rewrite these works using modern/standard English spelling? Why are high schoolers forced to read these archaic texts as written? It was just so tiring to try to read them; I could never get through any of them and resorted to Cliffs Notes.

[eszed]

English nerd (and former English teacher) here, and I think for high school students that's a good idea. It's not actually an impossible text, and an introduction to the real thing is useful and interesting, but forcing teenagers to go through everything in the original is too much of an obstacle for most students.

Also: only reading the "boring" bits. When I was in high school I was excused English classes (took English 101 at the local college instead - told you I was a nerd), but overheard my classmates hating their way through "The Wife of Bath's Tale", or "The Knight's Tale" - one of those - and introduced them (nerd!) to "The Miller's Tale" - broad scatalogical comedy - which they loved. Later I did something similar for them with Gulliver's Travels, by showing them the bit where he has fairly graphic sex with the giantess. (I think that's an actual kink, but I certainly didn't know that at the time!)

[usrnm]

I wonder what modern English would look like if the battle of Hastings went differently

[Bayart]

Take a look at Frisian for the beginning of an answer.

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