Language Is A Time Machine.
- Todd Christensen
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
Some of you may have been assigned to read Shakespeare in high school English. While the Bard's brilliant prose is filled with vast vocabulary challenges, it's still gripping, readable and fully parsible to the modern mind and written in what we consider Modern English (obligatory).
But if your teachers were particularly sadistic, you were tasked with the older more impenetrable literature of Beowulf, Chaucer or, (god forbid) Milton. The editions you read of the later were translated into mostly modern english from MIddle English or the more Saxon and Germanic Old English. As Old English is coded in idiomatic spellings, lost ligatures, and a pre-printing press alphabet.
“For this was on seynt Volantynys day Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make Of euery kynde that men thinke may And that so heuge a noyse gan they make That erthe & eyr & tre & euery lake So ful was that onethe was there space For me to stonde, so ful was al the place.” — Chaucer's Parlement of Foules (1382)
As designers in the English language we should know the history of how and why our typography evolved as it has. And appreciate the labyrinthian path of our language's etymology. Because it's always a work in progress.
I challenge you therefore to test yourself with the Dead Language Society's experimental and delightful short folk story, written by Colin Gorrie, told by a traveler in a haunted inn as the tale passes backwards in time, and each chapter is written in the vernacular of the period.
See how far back you can go. I made it through the 13th century.
