Explanation: Arabic has maintained a great literary continuity through the centuries, in part due to the importance of the Quran as the literal written word of the Divine. A translation of the Quran is only a commentary - nothing more - meaning that written Arabic has had a sort of ‘hard standard’ that has bound together diverse locales with a common written form of the tongue. Spoken dialects are somewhat more diverse.
As an English speaker, I can confirm that reading the 14th century AD poet Chaucer without additional notes or translation is a struggle, and not necessarily a victorious one.
As an English speaker, I can confirm that reading the 14th century AD poet Chaucer without additional notes or translation is a struggle, and not necessarily a victorious one.
fucking shakespere is a bitch to understand, and he’s more recent
Yeah, but thats all a drift in slang and culture.
Chaucer uses castly different spelling and grammar than we do now.
It’s the one thing they always get wrong in time travel stories. They go back in time to the mediaeval era and everyone just speaks modern English.
If you have time travel you probably have a babel fish as well
Icelandic and old Norse is pretty similar as well. Couple of vowels missing here and there, but you can see it’s the same stuff.
Nevermind the language itself, the scripts they used 700 years ago (even just 100 years ago, but that’s somewhat specific to my country. Fucking blackletter.) were atrocious. I assume this isn’t really a thing to this extent in arabic, either?
I struggle to read handwriting from 100 years ago. Very beautiful but very formal in a way I’m not used to.
100 years ago? I struggle with contemporary handwriting. You know how in many European countries, writing cursive is still the norm? Most people’s cursive fucking sucks, even those that have never written any other way. Print is far and away the best handwriting style if other people need to be able to read it.
This is Sütterlin, a form of handwriting taught between 1915 and 1941 in German schools, until it was banned by the Nazis because of their weird obsession with typefaces
