A man takes a train from London to the coast. He’s visiting a town called Wulfleet. It’s small and old, the kind of place with a pub that’s been pouring pints since the Battle of Bosworth Field. He’s going to write about it for his blog. He’s excited.
He arrives, he checks in. He walks to the cute B&B he’d picked out online. And he writes it all up like any good travel blogger would: in that breezy LiveJournal style from 25 years ago, perhaps, in his case, trying a little too hard.
But as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger’s voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler.
By the middle of his post, he’s writing in what might as well be a foreign language.
But it’s not a foreign language. It’s all English.
None of the story is real: not the blogger, not the town. But the language is real, or at least realistic. I constructed the passages myself, working from what we know about how English was written in each period.
…
It’s possible you caught this excellent blog post last month, but if you didn’t, you’re in for a treat. A long rambling “travel blog” story, except that every three or four paragraphs the author’s transported back a hundred years in time, which adapts not only the story but – more-importantly – the language the author uses.
For the last couple of hundred years the English language has been moderately stable and well-defined, although the stylistic mannerisms of authors have changed. But as you read beyond that, the language feels like it’s slowly mutating into something that, by the time you get to a thousand years ago, is nearly indecipherable!
Don’t just read the demonstration until you find you can’t understand it any more, though! After all of that, keep scrolling, and you’ll find that Colin Gorrie’s put together an explanation of what you just read. It describes the linguistic shifts you’ve now just experienced first-hand, the reasons for them, and how they were reconstructed in order to make this amusing distraction.
The footnotes are great too.
Also; it’s well worth watching/listening to the video that inspired it, in which you can hear (twice, the second time with explanatory slides) a linguist read a monologue that starts in the English of around 1,500 years ago and progress, jumping every few sentences, through to modern English. Absolutely fascinating.
With thanks to Ash for sharing.
