How far back in time is your native language comprehensible?

[AdrienIer]

My mother is specialized in 16th century France and the texts she works on are mostly understandable. Not sure how much further back you can go beyond that though

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Oldest "Castillian" text dates back from the 9th century and it is 90% incomprehensible. Most words are pure latin and it is gramatically chaotic:

..in loco que uocitant Elzeto cum fueros de totas nostras absque aliquis uis causa, id est, de illa costegera de Valle Conposita usque ad illa uinea de Ual Sorazanes et deinde ad illo plano de Elzeto et ad Sancta Maria de Uallelio usque ad illa senra de Pobalias, absque mea portione, ubi potuerimus inuenire, et de illas custodias, de illas uineas de alios omnes que sunt de alios locos, et omnes que sunt nominatos de Elzeto, senites et iubines, uiriis atque feminis, posuimus inter nos fuero que nos fratres poniamus custodiero de Sancta Maria de Valle Conpossita...

Translation to moden Spanish:

...en el lugar que llaman Elicedo con fueros de todas las nuestras excepto alguna causa de fuerza, esto es, de la costera de Valpuesta hasta la viña de Val Sorazanes y de allí al llano de Elicedo y a Santa María de Vallejo hasta la sierra de Pobalias, excepto mi parte, donde habremos podido encontrar, y de los puestos de guardia, de las viñas de otros hombres que son de otros lugares y hombres que llaman de Elicedo, viejos y jóvenes, varones y hembras, hemos puesto entre nosotros fuero que nosotros hermanos pongamos guardián de Santa María de Valpuesta...

I would call that a very mutated latin more than Castillian.

We must go to the 12th century to find readable texts. With some effort i can understand most of the original Cantar de el mio Cid. I would say 14th century texts are already pretty readable thought. I can read the Libro del Buen Amor for instance almost at full speed. From that point in advance it gets easier and easier until the 18th century when it becomes standarized and current rules are finally fixed.

 

[luiz]

That's odd. I never found printed works in portuguese hard to read, Camões did use a few words that fell into disuse, but being a poet aiming for a particular metric probably made him use words that were unusual in his own time. Works in prose, such as the 16th century Décadas da Ásia or the Peregrinação are surprisingly easy to read in the original. And fun too!
Manuscripts tend to take a lot more work to figure out because they had not been revised to follow a standard at the time they were written. Whomever did the 20th century printed version of the 17th century História de Ethiópia, written by a spaniard living deep in Africa who mixed portuguese with some castilian, deserved some kind of prize for the work!

But you're right that there has been indeed an unfortunate fervor for making small changes to the grammar too often and for no good reason.

Hum, might be that Brazilian Portuguese deviated further from early Portuguese than the European version. I do have a hard time reading Camões - I can read it, of course, it's just that it takes an effort as if I was reading something in a language that I don't truly master.

But you are quite right that probably a big part of the difficulty comes from the lack of standards - so the same problem Owen alluded to about early modern German.

But yeah, I do dislike all the grammar changes. I still can't bring myself to write ideia or europeia without an accent (unless when I type with my phone, such as now, and autocorrect helps out )

 

[luiz]

My mother is specialized in 16th century France and the texts she works on are mostly understandable. Not sure how much further back you can go beyond that though

French is the opposite of Portuguese - it hasn't been reformed enough! It's full of archaisms and almost seems deliberately difficult in some cases. The upside is that reading old texts in French is extremely easy - once you learn French...

 

[Hehehe]

Umm... what? How would you even know how it was spoken back then?
First book in Finnish was printed when? 16th century?
I'd bet neither of us would recognize no more than a couple words from whatever common proto-language our ancestors spoke "a couple thousand years ago".

This is based on reconstructions made by researchers. How did they reach those conclusions? I don't know. My claim is based on this news article (it's in Finnish, sorry, I don't have an English link). There's no link to the original research, so I guess I'll just have to take their word for it.

 

[Verbose]

Swedish, um... About the 13th c. provincial legal codes. And they are tricky. But that's after the Medieval language shift that dropped a lot of the old Norse, "Viking" in layman's terms I guess, features. Things stabilize properly with the Bible in Swedish in the 16th c., even if orthography, spelling, was more or less a matter of personal choice until the 18th c.

Old Norse is a much tougher proposition, on par with Old English. Otoh I have found that some modern English commentary on certain details of Old English are totally superfluous to a modern native Swedish speaker; it can be the same word even.

 

[Yeekim]

This is based on reconstructions made by researchers. How did they reach those conclusions? I don't know. My claim is based on this news article (it's in Finnish, sorry, I don't have an English link). There's no link to the original research, so I guess I'll just have to take their word for it.

Thanks for the article...yeah, even I understood roughly 2/3 of that, and my Finnish is VERY sketchy.
Still... this "reconstruction" can be nothing but semi-educated guesswork, much like dinosaur pictures, as in... we don't really know whether they had feathers or scales and what color.

 

[Hehehe]

Thanks for the article...yeah, even I understood roughly 2/3 of that, and my Finnish is VERY sketchy.
Still... this "reconstruction" can be nothing but semi-educated guesswork, much like dinosaur pictures, as in... we don't really know whether they had feathers or scales and what color.

Yeah, well I can't find the original source, but I'm guessing there are ways to make reconstructions. You could get an idea of how fast the language changes by comparing different Finno-Ugrig languages and how similar they are based on how long ago they were separated. Or by comparing modern Finnish with known sources and extrapolating from that. Sources such as written texts from the 16th century onwards, or national epic like Kalevala. There have also been some Finnish poems recorded by the Russians written in cyrillic before that. You could also try to plot out common words by comparing these languages. If there's something that's common to all of them, then it's likely that that's been there from the start. If there's a word that only Finns use, for example, then it's likely that it's either a loan word or a natural evolution of the language.

I mean for how long have Finnish and Estonian been separated? I've never studied Estonian, but I can pull up a random news article and understand 50%

 

[Yeekim]

I mean for how long have Finnish and Estonian been separated? I've never studied Estonian, but I can pull up a random news article and understand 50%

Border between "two languages" and "two dialects of a single language" is notoriously murky, but I believe they were still essentially the same at the time of the Northern Crusades.

 

[CKS]

Sure an average Modern English speaker can make out written Shakespeare, but stick them in 16th century Bristol, York, or Canterbury and they probably wouldn't be able to make heads-or-tails of much of anything.

I'm not sure you need to go back in time for this to be true for American speakers of English. When I was a kid, we were waiting to take the ferry over to England, and my dad and brother were making a game of guessing what language groups of people were speaking. The group that gave them the most trouble turned out to be speaking English; it took them a _long_ time to figure it out.

 

[Hehehe]

Border between "two languages" and "two dialects of a single language" is notoriously murky, but I believe they were still essentially the same at the time of the Northern Crusades.

I checked, and it seems that you are indeed right. I would have thought Finnish and Estonian separated earlier, but maybe that's just because of all the loan words Estonians have picked up

 

[AdrienIer]

French is the opposite of Portuguese - it hasn't been reformed enough! It's full of archaisms and almost seems deliberately difficult in some cases. The upside is that reading old texts in French is extremely easy - once you learn French...

The last reform was in 93 but it was never put into effect. When the previous government tried to implement it in school the right said it was going to lower the level of the children. I feel like we're the only country where the language itself is politicized.

 

[Broken_Erika]

......... I feel like we're the only country where the language itself is politicized.

Ahem, Freedom Fries anyone?

 

[Lexicus]

I feel like we're the only country where the language itself is politicized.

Language is a terrain of political struggle, everywhere and at all times

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The last reform was in 93 but it was never put into effect. When the previous government tried to implement it in school the right said it was going to lower the level of the children. I feel like we're the only country where the language itself is politicized.

Canada, where there are language police in the province of Quebec, making sure that every business's sign contains French that is larger and more prominent than English, even if it's a family-owned business. There was a huge row over whether or not Eaton's (large department store chain that used to be ubiquitous across Canada) could keep its English sign because French possessives don't have apostrophes.

Businesses with no French signs or signs where French was not more prominent than English face the wrath of the language police and can be fined.

The latest round of nonsense over shopping in that province: Whether shopkeepers and clerks are allowed to greet customers with "Bonjour/Hi" or just "Bonjour". A politician actually tried to make it mandatory for them to drop the "Hi" part of the greeting. A lot of the francophone shopkeepers said they didn't mind - and even preferred" to keep the "Hi" part of the greeting because it gave the customer the impression that English-speakers are welcome and that they can be served in English if they prefer.

And a few months ago our Prime Minister offended a lot of people at a town hall by his reply to a woman who had asked him a question in English about access to mental health services for anglophones... and he answered her in French, using the excuse that "We're in Quebec, so I'm going to speak French." The fact that the people who need this service are people who don't speak French and are trying to access health care in the language they do speak - one of the country's official languages even in Quebec - just whooshed right over his head. It wouldn't have taken more than a minute for him to give his reply in both languages, but he opted to be inconsiderate and dismissive toward the people on whose behalf the question had been asked in the first place.

If I hadn't already decided not to vote for his party in next year's federal election, this incident alone would have been sufficient to make that decision.

So yeah... language is very political in Canada.

 

[inthesomeday]

And a few months ago our Prime Minister offended a lot of people at a town hall by his reply to a woman who had asked him a question in English about access to mental health services for anglophones... and he answered her in French, using the excuse that "We're in Quebec, so I'm going to speak French." The fact that the people who need this service are people who don't speak French and are trying to access health care in the language they do speak - one of the country's official languages even in Quebec - just whooshed right over his head. It wouldn't have taken more than a minute for him to give his reply in both languages, but he opted to be inconsiderate and dismissive toward the people on whose behalf the question had been asked in the first place.

This is... farcical

 

[Hrothbern]

Language is a terrain of political struggle, everywhere and at all times

Macron would agree with you:

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, is to spend hundreds of millions of euros boosting the French language worldwide, in a push to overtake English in Africa, increase the use of French online and teach French to more European officials to loosen the grip of the English language on Brussels.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...s-drive-to-boost-french-language-around-world

 

[Valka D'Ur]

This is... farcical

But true. I heard it with my own ears (these town halls are televised).

Trudeau's own mother is an anglophone who has been suffering from bipolar disorder for decades, so he should have foregone his political posturing and just included English in his answer.

 

[AdrienIer]

I didn't mean that it wasn't discussed in politics elsewhere, but that it had somehow become a left vs right battle like so many others. Sorry for the bad wording.

 

[Perfection]

However, now that I think about it my dad came from a part of Poland where people talk funny. They don't pronounce some of the letters the same way, and it all sounds sort of half drunk half Russian.

Are they half drunk and half Russian?