Discussion
Security Verification
nephihaha: That was interesting, notwithstanding the editorialising comments by Tomasz Barański.
Oras: The writing style (in Arabic) feels like a message in a chat. It's a mix between dialect and official Arabic.
interstice: Like, modern and understandable? I ask because English from more than a few hundred years ago is basically gibberish so I’m curious about languages where that didn’t happen.
dghf: Is six hundred years ago more than a few? Chaucer is still more or less comprehensible. (Though Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, from roughly the same time, not so much.)
biofox: The Middle English spelling and phonetic shifts are what make it so painful to read. The words themselves though are mostly comprehensible with a bit of effort.Go back another four hundred years to Old English and Beowulf and it becomes complete gobbledygook (to me at least).
asabil: Yes Arabic from 1000 years ago is very much understandable today[1].[1] https://fluentarabic.net/arabic-unchanged-1000-years/
usrnm: I wonder what modern English would look like if the battle of Hastings went differently
Tade0: I would expect no less from a graduate of the University of Warsaw.This writing (and speaking) style permeates this institution.
xrd: I just love the sounds in sentence "...Arabization of Dongola in the Funj period."Dongola in the Funj period sounds like the place to be!
marginalia_nu: A lot of that is just that English along with much of western vernacular wasn't given standardized spelling until fairly recently, as most of the important writing was done in Latin.If you get past the weird spelling it's still fairly understandable.Exception being maybe stuff like Shakespeare, but a huge part of what makes that inaccessible is that his writing is full of references to current events, double entendres, and various 17th century memes. It's a bit like showing South Park's world of warcraft episode to someone from the 2400s.
graemep: Shakespeare is sufficiently close to contemporary English that audiences will watch and enjoy his plays. I have seen plenty of kids and audiences in different countries enjoy them.
romanhn: I did not expect the recovered order that confirmed the existence of a (semi-)legendary Nubian king to basically be "Dear X, when you get here, please take some sheep from Y in exchange for some cotton cloths. Kthxbye!".
ameminator: Uh, probably it would have been a place to be avoided for a non-Arab
nwhnwh: Why?
nwhnwh: Dots?
sach1: because then your dongola would be all Arabized!
coin: Please don’t edit the title
Bayart: The article doesn't expound on it, but it very much depends on what Arabic means to you. Depending on the answer, it's really a dozen different languages. I know people who only speak their own darija and classical literature is utterly obscure to them.
asabil: Sorry to disagree, but no, they are not dozens of different languages. The challenge with Arabic is that it has a rather large vocabulary, and different regions use slightly different vocabularies.That being said, Darija, or rather North African Arabic is a messy mix of Arabic and Tamazight. Which can be difficult for Middle East Arabic speakers to understand.For reference, I speak Darija and understand both classical and modern Arabic. It would take me a few days to adapt my speech to other regional variations of arabic.
syncsys87: Great find. This is the kind of content that makes HN worthwhile.
Broken_Hippo: It isn't that it isn't enjoyable, but it just isn't enjoyable in the same way. How often do you view the jokes in shakepear's work as raunchy or sexual? Do you think younger teens get the jokes? Do you think anyone explains it to them?It is more akin to watching television from a different culture. I am American, live in Norway, with my Norwegian spouse. We wind up watching British television from time to time. We find the jokes funny, but we both realize that we are missing references to people and places - but understand the gist of the jokes.The difference between shakespear and modern times is even larger - you don't always know they are jokes because you don't realize they are referencing anything. Still enjoyable, but a different story without as much comedy.
shagie: > It isn't that it isn't enjoyable, but it just isn't enjoyable in the same way. How often do you view the jokes in shakepear's work as raunchy or sexual? Do you think younger teens get the jokes? Do you think anyone explains it to them?Yes... my own recounting of freshman high school English (it was the late 80s) https://everything2.com/node/1207826
hnfong: You had a great teacher. I learned something today :PBut I think that affirms the GP's point. The jokes needed explanation, which is what you'd expect when the audience is from a different culture and don't understand them natively.
coldtea: Funj times!
eszed: Yep. If you hear Chaucer read aloud by someone who knows the phonetics and the meaning it's instantly like 75% comprehensible. If they give you a bit (like, half a class-period) more help, you'll get to ~90% without any more effort than that. Chaucer is more or less as incomprehensible as Glaswegian - that is to say, it's a bit tricky, and you won't know all the slang, but you can get used to it pretty quickly.What's really fun is that if you keep the dialect in your head, and try reading it out loud with your best "Chaucer accent" it feels like slipping on a pair of glasses: you immediately "get" stuff that you'd have thought was impenetrable just looking at the page.Source: my medieval lit classes, with a teacher who was really good.
eszed: Replying to myself to add that that last ~10% is an enormous time-sink. You'll have to look up every unfamiliar word, which isn't a big deal for a short text, but becomes one for something longer. Worse, though, is that you'll constantly be led astray by words whose meanings have drifted over time: your interpretation (often) won't align exactly with that of Chaucer or his audience. What I said above is good enough for casual / undergraduate use - the stories are still funny, and / or have enough depth for a good discussion - but there's a reason "medievalist" is an actual speciality: you'll spend a whole career trying to get to 100%.
