How far back in time can you understand English?
How far back in time can you understand English?
A travel blog of a trip to the English village of Wulfleet becomes a linguistic time machine, illustrating changes in the alphabet, spelling, and vocabulary from AD 2000 back to AD 1000, before the Norman Conquest.
"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."
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