You can easily imagine the countless difficulties you would face if you suddenly traveled back in time a thousand years. But if you’re a native (or fluent) English speaker from an English-speaking part of the world, at least the language won’t be a problem. Or so you thought, until you first encountered an utterance like this:þat troe is daed on gaerde” or “þa rokes forleten urne tun”” Both of these sentences New video above by Simon RoperIn it, he delivers a monologue that begins in fifth-century English and ends in late-millennium English.
Roper, a Brit who specializes in linguistics and anthropology videos, has accomplished this kind of feat before. We previously featured him on Open Culture about his performance of the London accent, which has evolved over 660 years.
But writing and communicating a monologue that travels through a millennium and a half of changes in the English language is clearly a difficult endeavor, especially since it involves literal barbs. þ That is, it is a character used in the Latin script of Old English. they are pronounced as thYou can hear Roper speak the sentence quoted earlier. This translates as “The trees in the garden are dying” and “The rooks have abandoned our town.”
words translate I’m only talking about English, so wait a minute. But since then, English has evolved so dramatically that if you get far enough away from it, we might as well be talking about another language. Roper emphasizes that change did not come suddenly. Non-Scandinavian listeners may not have the slightest idea that 450 Farmer of the Year is talking about sheep and pigs with these words. Skep and SuineBut his last line, about having “all the hot coffee you could ever need” and “the friends you never had in New York” back in 2000, poses no hardship to English-speaking people around the world. Even a list of his agricultural wealth around the beginning of the 13th century—”We haben God, we haben Mani Feld” – You might be led to believe that traveling 600 years ago is how it was said in Middle English. No problem.
Related content:
Tracing English to its earliest known ancestors: An introduction to Proto-Indo-European languages
Hear the evolution of the London accent over 660 years: 1346 to 2006
What Shakespeare’s English sounded like and how do we know it?
Where did English come from?: An animated introduction
A quick tour of British and Irish accents: 14 ways to speak English in 84 seconds
The entire history of English in 22 minutes
Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages and cultures. His projects include the Substack newsletter books about cities and a book Stateless City: A Stroll Through Los Angeles in the 21st Century. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
