[We’ve all been around long enough to have witnessed the evolution of language in our lifetimes. Nothing new about that, Bro. But, but do you realize how long this has been going on and at what rate? The video below is like a freeze-frame photo that condenses some thousand years or so of linguistic evolution into a short video, enabling you to find your roots in the process. This is lifted from Recomendo, the newsletter put out by the folks at Cool Tools. “KK” is their fearless leader, Kevin Kelly. Oo-oo! SB SM]
Understanding Old English
What we now call the English language has been rapidly changing for over a thousand years. The best way to experience this evolution is to watch this video by Simon Roper where the same passage is recited in proto-English, and then repeated in newer versions of Old English every hundred years, until you reach modern English. The game is to see when you begin to understand it. For me it was around 1600 in part. This gimmick, more than any other, gave me an appreciation of what ancestral versions of English were like. — KK