Old English is insane. I got none of these.
Conversation
Weird to think that around 1500 it would be fair to say English didn’t really exist and the world-mind thought in an entirely different set of languages (and Middle English wasn’t one of them) with no global standard.
1
10
Middle English isn’t much better. It all sounds like extra complex German to me (I have a very slight smattering of German)
1
7
I basically think in English now so it’s weird to think my thoughts would basically be unintelligible to anyone outside of a ±500 year window. It’s a different kind of mortality.
1
1
16
You’re truly dead outside that window. If there was tech such that anyone could attach your recorded stream of consciousness to their brain and experience it as memories, it would be format incompatibility outside that window.
3
14
Replying to
a friend once showed me a book he had—it was a Bible with Old English on one side and Latin on the other. We agreed that the Latin looked more like modern English than the Old English did 😂
1
You’re unable to view this Tweet because this account owner limits who can view their Tweets. Learn more
Replying to
Modern English is only about 350 years old, and that’s using “modern” loosely. I think we’d have troubling parsing 1670s speech.
1
1
Show replies
Replying to
They should have had a Dutch speaker as the non-native speaker. I think a Dutch speaker would understand it.


