How far back in time can you understand English?
Summary
An exploration of how far back in English one can understand, presented as a creative experiment by Dead Language Society. Colin Gorrie reconstructs a single blog post across centuries (1000–2000) imitating various historical styles, highlighting shifts in spelling, grammar, and orthography. It discusses the readability wall around 1250–1300 due to lexical and grammatical changes, and explains how pronouns and letters such as thorn, wynn, and yogh evolved. The piece ends with reflections on how language changes shape reading and comprehension, and invites readers to subscribe for deeper guides to historical texts.