How Weird Would Modern English Sound To A Medieval English Person?

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Published 2023-07-20
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period (also spelled mediæval or mediaeval) lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. This period began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD and ended with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD, this era would transition into the Renaissance and then the Age of Discovery. The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period. The medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages.

Population decline, counterurbanisation, the collapse of centralized authority, invasions, and mass migrations of tribes, which had begun in late antiquity, continued into the Early Middle Ages. The large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the 7th century, North Africa and the Middle East—most recently part of the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire—came under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate, an Islamic empire, after conquest by Muhammad's successors. Although there were substantial changes in society and political structures, the break with classical antiquity was not complete. The still-sizeable Byzantine Empire, Rome's direct continuation, survived in the Eastern Mediterranean and remained a major power. Secular law was advanced greatly by the Code of Justinian. In the West, most kingdoms incorporated extant Roman institutions, while new bishoprics and monasteries were founded as Christianity expanded in Europe. The Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty, briefly established the Carolingian Empire during the later 8th and early 9th centuries. It covered much of Western Europe but later succumbed to the pressures of internal civil wars combined with external invasions: Vikings from the north, Magyars from the east, and Saracens from the south.

During the High Middle Ages, which began after 1000, the population of Europe increased greatly as technological and agricultural innovations allowed trade to flourish and the Medieval Warm Period climate change allowed crop yields to increase. Manorialism, the organisation of peasants into villages that owed rent and labour services to the nobles, and feudalism, the political structure whereby knights and lower-status nobles owed military service to their overlords in return for the right to rent from lands and manors, were two of the ways society was organised in the High Middle Ages. This period also saw the formal division of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, with the East–West Schism of 1054. The Crusades, which began in 1095, were military attempts by Western European Christians to regain control of the Holy Land from Muslims, and also contributed to the expansion of Latin Christendom in the Baltic region and the Iberian Peninsula. Kings became the heads of centralised nation states, reducing crime and violence but making the ideal of a unified Christendom more distant. In the West, intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasised joining faith to reason, and by the founding of universities. The theology of Thomas Aquinas, the paintings of Giotto, the poetry of Dante and Chaucer, the travels of Marco Polo, and the Gothic architecture of cathedrals such as Chartres mark the end of this period.

The Late Middle Ages was marked by difficulties and calamities including famine, plague, and war, which significantly diminished the population of Europe; between 1347 and 1350, the Black Death killed about a third of Europeans. Controversy, heresy, and the Western Schism within the Catholic Church paralleled the interstate conflict, civil strife, and peasant revolts that occurred in the kingdoms. Cultural and technological developments transformed European society, concluding the Late Middle Ages and beginning the early modern period.

Terminology and periodisation

Palais des Papes, Avignon
The Middle Ages is one of the three major periods in the most enduring scheme for analysing European history: Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Modern Period.[1] A similar term first appears in Latin in 1469 as media tempestas or "middle season".[2] The adjective "medieval",[A][4] meaning pertaining to the Middle Ages, derives from medium aevum or "middle age",[3] a Latin term first recorded in 1604.[5] Leonardo Bruni was the first historian to use tripartite periodisation in his History of the Florentine People (1442), with a middle period "between the fall of the Roman Empire and the revival of city life sometime in late eleventh and twelfth centuries".[6] Tripartite periodisation became standard after the 17th-century German historian Christoph Cellarius divided history into three periods: ancient, medieval, and modern.[7]

#medieval #english #language
All Comments (21)
  • @sceema333
    It's always so funny to me as an Austrian to see how close English used to be to german (Ik English is a Germanic language) and its fascinating to learn about the development of English as someone who speaks German as first language, English as 2nd and also knows a bit of French/latin
  • @Reziac
    Would be fun to hear modern written English read aloud by someone who speaks Old English, and pronounces to suit.
  • @gaius_aerister
    This is such a cool video. I'd be awesome to see the same concept applied to romance languages and Latin.
  • @timelston4260
    I'm 61, and I can already hear differences in how the younger generations, especially in power centers of the U.S., like New York and Washington DC, pronounce words. Words like mountain and button, for example, are sometimes pronounced "mowden" and "budden". It drives me crazy, but I do know, since my undergraduate degree was in linguistics, that this is how language changes over time. Since I can tell that in my own lifetime American English has started to change intergenerationally, I have no doubt that it will be a lot different a thousand years from now.
  • @ashenen2278
    There is a video on youtube where the English/British queens Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II speak with their accent from their respective times and make fun of each others accent. Also, interestingly, German had a similar vowel shift like English, but Germans still decided to write everything phonetically (at least much more than the English). And I would love to see more of those videos to get an impression how it would feel if our languages changed
  • @holygooff
    Knecht means servant in Dutch and I think German as well. It's weird that it means something very different in English.
  • @tomhalla426
    I wonder how much recorded sound has flattened the difference between different accents, and stabilized pronunciation. It has been a bit over 130 years.
  • @danadnauseam
    This scenario reminds me of a French film from 1993 called The Visitors. A medieval knight and his servant are transported to modern France. They are described as speaking a mixture of Latin and medieval French. I don't think the /k/ would drop from kitchen. The initial cluster in knight was probably a substantial factor in that change.
  • @asdfghjkl123asd
    So English sounded exactly how it was written. And when I learned it my "wrong" slavic pronunciation of the words was actually right for medieval times. That's funny.
  • @Unpainted_Huffhines
    Yes, this topic has always been one I've found fascinating. As an English speaker, I speak a little Spanish and German. I've always wondered what it must be like to speak a language with a very close sibling language. Spanish-Portuguese obviously cones to mind, but really all the Romance languages that aren't French or Romanian sound similar to my ear. I feel the same with Dutch and German, but apparently, German speakers think the same but in reverse, that Dutch sounds more like English than German. And what a Latin speaker would think of Romance languages is very interesting to. I will eagerly look forward to your breakdowns on the subjects.
  • @gazlator
    Absolutely brilliant, Raff - fascinating stuff. I just can't help but imagine that if someone from Chaucer's time did appear in a pub in 2023, there'd be a lot of hilarity as they tried to make sense of a guy's dialect that probably sounds like he came from somewhere in the deepest darkest west Midlands or Norfolk!!
  • @stevenschilizzi4104
    This is a really great idea and so original! Brilliant! Yes, please do more of these.
  • @Bagginsess
    Yes definitely would like a deep dive video on the vowel shifts. Thanks for this one :)
  • @ElmerEscoto
    Fascinating stuff, Raffaello! Thank you for teaching us so much!
  • @fatalisticbunny
    I really like your content. I also appreciate the balanced and reasonable approach you bring to the topics you cover.
  • @marcofaustinelli7010
    Darn interesting, and explained very well. Subscribed on the spot. Looking forward to the GVS video.