Language history

How far back can you understand written texts in your language with relative ease?

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I can kind of understand Old Castillian.

When was Hochdeutsch invented again

16th century

Earlier than that is where it starts to get difficult.

I can read the oldest text written in French in the 7-8th century.

up to 5 century before the language is totally the same. And basically from there each increasingly different and harder to understand.
But to be honest it doesn't matter so much because there aren't so many text written in French before the Renaissance, most were in classical latin.

dunno 16th century I guess

there were hardly any texts in Polish before that

t. republican propagandist

What are the Matters of Rome, Britanny, and France, also, what are the countless romans, poems, and chronicles written in Old French.

depends on whether it was Ottoman Turkish or actual Turkish. Ottoman Turkish is equally hard to understand no matter the time, actual (common) Turkish can be understood as far back as 12th/13th century with ease, and earlier works can be understood with some lexical help.

By 'lexical help' do you mean transliterating Orkhon runes? If that's the case, shouldn't transliterating the Ottoman Perso-Arabic script provide just as much ease?

13-14th century without much issue anyone can read it
Before it's hard as fuck and it's translated when studied in school.

Anything before 1150 (Old English, Common Germanic, and Indo-European) is competently impossible, about 1150 to 1500 (Middle English) you're in the realm of intelligibility, and after that you're in the clear.

For example

Forrþrihht anan se time comm
þatt ure Drihhtin wollde
ben borenn i þiss middellærd
forr all mannkinne nede
he chæs himm sone kinnessmenn
all swillke summ he wollde
and whær he wollde borenn ben
he chæs all att hiss wille.

As soon as the time came
that our Lord wanted
be born in this middle-earth
for all mankind sake,
at once He chose kinsmen for Himself,
all just as he wanted,
and He decided that He would be born
exactly where He wished.

We have one of the oldest preserved languages in the world but it wasnt written down until 1600s (because everything was governed in swedish all the way to 1800s). For some reason written finnish has changed so much that it takes time to figure out what old texts say, even the words are pronounced exactly like they have been pronounced for last 5000 years
for example: Oppe nyt wanha / ia noori /
joilla ombi Sydhen toori.
Jumalan keskyt / ia mielen /
iotca taidhat Somen kielen.
Laki / se Sielun hirmutta /
mutt Cristus sen tas lodhutta.
Lue sijs hyue Lapsi teste /
Alcu oppi ilman este.
Nijte muista Elemes aina /
nin Jesus sinun Armons laina

modern version:
Opi nyt vanha ja nuori / joilla ompi sydän tuore
Jumalan käskyt ja mielen / jotta taidat suomen kielen.
Laki se sielun hirmuttaa / mut Kristus sen taas lohduttaa.
Lue siis, hyvä lapsi, tästä / alkuoppi ilman estettä.
Niitä muista elämässä aina / niin Jeesus sinulle armonsa lainaa.»

Les serments de Strasbourg was written in the 9th century you dip

You're telling me that Finnish didn't have any significant vowel shifts for 5000 years? I want to call bullshit, especially since there isn't any written record to help verify that.

13th century.

Probably not because all finnic languages sound almost same to this day

i have no idea, but the oldest books that i have in my possession are from 19th century and i can understand them 100%

Our language doesn't go very far back. Norwegian has been written since the 1850s, and it can be a bit difficult to read when you go that far back. I'm far better than average, so I think I should be able to understand most of it, but the average Norwegian is completely clueless and would struggle greatly to understand even something from 1900.

We've also written Danish for a long time, and while I haven't read much old Danish texts, I can at least read some stuff from the 1600s with very little difficulty.

If we go back to the old writing tradition that mostly died with the black death, that's very difficult, and I can by no means say I can read easily, although I believe I may get some of it if I think carefully, at least if it's modernized to modern standards. But actually they used a lot of shorts and a different standard than what's used for texts from that time today, so it's even more difficult than I'd think.

is that text saying there are 500 years old birds

What about sagas?

it poses a hypothetical maximum age for swans at 500 years. i think it's because swans were like very very holy birds for us so they kind of exaggerated. (it's a children's book btw)

just gonna go ahead and bump with pic

Swans were holy here too. To be honest I can understand a lot of words from that book page you posted, for some reason I understood that better than some modern day estonian newspapers. Are those oldschool words in it?

Ancient greek is for gayropian faggots.
Modern greek is for alphas

yeah. oldschool estonian and modern finnish are a lot more similar than modern age both. don't take this the wrong way, but finnish has not evolved a lot comparing to estonian. at least the northern dialect. if you take a look at some southern dialects and even livonian you'll find they are more easy to understand if you have some finnish experience vs. pure northern estonian only.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Codax#A_cantiga_by_Martin_Codax

I can understand eveything in this galician poem from the 13th-14th poem. The problem is that some words have a different meaning than the commonly used nowadays.

I had that in mind for the last paragraph. Most of them are actually Icelandic, not much Norwegian literature survived due to reformation and because the language changed too much for people to understand, so they didn't see the value in keeping it. But it's pretty similar to the language of the sagas.
Assuming they are written in modern Old Norse, no, we can't understand them easily. We may get some of it if we look carefully at a sentence and think for a bit, but even then we'll encounted words we don't understand.
If they are written in the original language, it's even more difficult, because of single letters representing words to save space, that you are supposed to know, and overall less unified. Sometimes c, sometimes k etc.

And that's a broken written tradition. Most people who knew how to write died in the mid 1300s, and with that the written tradition mostly disappeared. It also happened at a time that Norway was very weakened, lost a lot of its population, so Denmark got the opportunity to steal us. Our language still persisted for a while, I think it had some use in church, in a very different form into the 1400s and maybe the 1500s, I don't remember exactly. But then it was gone, and Danish replaced it completely.

It's actually also a little bit inaccurate that it wasn't written until 1850s. That was when it got a written standards, but there was some limited writing in Norwegian before then too, and some of the decisions when making the written standard were actually based on older tradition.
This is new tradition, though, we have no unbroken, Norwegian tradition back to the sagas. It broke after the 1300s. And later, there was a new tradition created.

It's only one tiny century, and i bet i could read a text from the 7th century if such a text existed.

Absolute bullshit, French from a thousand years ago is quasi Latin and extremely difficult to understand. You're just making assumptions and don't know what you're talking about.

t. Took a class in French lit that covered all periods and various regional styles/dialects

>quasi Latin
>just two cases

You're exagerating user

And as i said i can read the oldest text.

9th century the oldest
but there is very little left from that period so the oldest works we read in practice are form the 12th century

the sagas were written at a time when Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian were almost identical dialects of Old Norse though
it's your ancestral language as well, but the continental languages are so germanized they're almost unrecognizable

16th century for full comprehensibly. 15th century texts already feature obsolete vocabulary

so you can read the prose edda and understand it? that's pretty fuckin neato if you can

prose edda definitely
the poetic edda can be very tough to understand though, especially Völuspá while Hávamál is a lot easier

a glossary is a must though since there is a lot of obscure or archaic vocabulary being used or references to mythology you don't understand

I haven't tried reading shakespeare myself but I assume it's similar

You know he's right, you're a dumb middle age nostalgist and you delude yourself into thinking you're hot shit

>leftist sucking arab cock

J'ai hâte que la guerre civile arrive pour s'occuper des salopes dans ton genre

Merdique et Fraisse ne sont que le début.

actually tenth

No Shakespeare is early modern english, any native speaker should be able to read it with at most a light gloss.

meant the prose edda my post was confusing
maybe the glossary is more extensive than for shakespeare but it's generally fairly easy to read with only looking up the occasional word here and there
it's the poetry where the glossary is absolutely needed

Late Middle English best English

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