How far back can you go before English stops feeling like… English?
The Dead Language Society created a fascinating experiment: a fictional travel blog that rewinds the English language by 100 years at a time. It begins in modern, early-2000s blog style, then gradually shifts into the language used in the 1900s, 1800s, 1700s, and beyond, moving through Early Modern English, Middle English, and finally into Old English around the year 1000.
The story itself stays consistent: a traveler arrives in a coastal town called Wulfleet and encounters increasingly ominous events. What changes is the language. Spelling becomes inconsistent. Letters like þ (thorn, meaning “th”), ȝ (yogh), and ƿ (wynn, meaning “w”) reappear. “U” and “v” swap roles. Pronouns like thou signal social hierarchy rather than simple familiarity. Vocabulary shifts as French and Latin loanwords gradually disappear the further back you go, revealing English’s Germanic core.
By the tyme that reders comen vnto the partyes of the yere twelue hundred and enleuen hundred, the gramere waxeth more charged with endynges, and the ordre of wordes more free and chaungeable, lyke rather vnto the speche of Duche men than to the Englyssh that is now vsed. To many reders the vnderstondyng fayleth sodeynly somtyme bitwene the yere fourtene hundred and twelue hundred, for there is the poynt where Middel Englyssh passeth and draweth toward the olde Englyssh tonge.
If þou hast euer wondred whi Beowulf semeth vnredable, whilom þe speche of Shakespeare semeth but litel olde and straunge, þis assay maketh þe answere ful cler.
The question is simple: at what century does your comprehension break? Read the text here!
[Via Neatorama]