How Far Back in History Can You Start to Understand English?

It’s easy to imag­ine the myr­i­ad dif­fi­cul­ties with which you’d be faced if you were sud­den­ly trans­port­ed a mil­len­ni­um back in time. But if you’re a native (or even pro­fi­cient) Eng­lish speak­er in an Eng­lish-speak­ing part of the world, the lan­guage, at least, sure­ly would­n’t be a prob­lem. Or so you’d think, until your first encounter with utter­ances like “þat troe is daed on gaerde” or “þa rokes for­leten urne tun.” Both of those sen­tences appear in the new video above from Simon Rop­er, in which he deliv­ers a mono­logue begin­ning in the Eng­lish of the fifth cen­tu­ry and end­ing in the Eng­lish of the end of the last mil­len­ni­um.

An Eng­lish­man spe­cial­iz­ing in videos about lin­guis­tics and anthro­pol­o­gy, Rop­er has pulled off this sort of feat before: we pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured him here on Open Cul­ture for his per­for­mance of a Lon­don accent as it evolved through 660 years.

But writ­ing and deliv­er­ing a mono­logue that works its way through a mil­len­ni­um and a half of change in the Eng­lish lan­guage is obvi­ous­ly a thornier endeav­or, not least because it involves lit­er­al thorns — the þ char­ac­ters, that is, used in the Old Eng­lish Latin alpha­bet. They’re pro­nounced like th, which you can hear when Rop­er speaks the sen­tences quot­ed ear­li­er, which trans­late to “The tree is dead in the yard” and “The rooks aban­doned our town.”

The word trans­late should give us pause, since we’re only talk­ing about Eng­lish. But then, Eng­lish has under­gone such a dra­mat­ic evo­lu­tion that, at far enough of a remove, we might as well be talk­ing about dif­fer­ent lan­guages. What Rop­er empha­sizes is that the changes did­n’t hap­pen sud­den­ly. Non-Scan­di­na­vian lis­ten­ers may lack even an inkling that his farmer of the year 450 is talk­ing about sheep and pigs with the words skēpu and swīnu, but his final lines, in which he speaks of pos­sess­ing “all the hot cof­fee I need” and “friends I did­n’t have in New York” in the year 2000, will pose no dif­fi­cul­ty to Anglo­phones any­where in the world. Even his list of agri­cul­tur­al wealth around the ear­ly thir­teenth cen­tu­ry — “We habben an god hus, we habben mani felds” — could make you believe that a trip 600 years in the past would be, as they said in Mid­dle Eng­lish, no trou­ble.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Trac­ing Eng­lish Back to Its Old­est Known Ances­tor: An Intro­duc­tion to Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean

Hear the Evo­lu­tion of the Lon­don Accent Over 660 Years: From 1346 to 2006

What Shakespeare’s Eng­lish Sound­ed Like, and How We Know It

Where Did the Eng­lish Lan­guage Come From?: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

A Brief Tour of British & Irish Accents: 14 Ways to Speak Eng­lish in 84 Sec­onds

The Entire His­to­ry of Eng­lish in 22 Min­utes

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.