How far back in time is your native language comprehensible?

[luiz]

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.

I think it's more complex than left VS right. While it's true that virtually everyone on the right is opposed to French reform, so is a lot of people on the left. I'd say even that the people who are most radically against it are academics fairly to the left. Perhaps a way to phrase it is that reform is only popular among some leftists circles.

 

[Oerdin]

Middle English is pretty easy though old English might as well be German with a few exceptions.

 

[warpus]

Are they half drunk and half Russian?

We assume our ancestors from that side of the family were Russian until they ran into a Polish priest saying "wolololololo"

 

[Azem.Ocram]

I’m fluent in English and Spanish and I’m trying to learn the language of poets (Italian). I realized that medieval Tuscan is comprehinsible to those fluent in modern Italian and no more difficult (for me) to understand than modern Italian. Dante’s Divine Comedy had a huge impact on the shaping of modern Italian. Medieval Venician is much harder.

 

[W|M]

I can roughly understand some ~13th Century poems, but going much further back involves reading Latin