If I was to time travel, how far back could I go and still have a conversation with someone in my high street?

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I am sorry if I have asked this before, it is one of those things that I think about every now and then, but have no idea what the answer is.

My home town is now a West London suburb and has a quite long history.

I'm fairly sure that if I travelled back 100 years, I would still be able to understand the language of people around me, maybe even 200 years, though I imagine the accent would be a heck of a lot different to nowadays.

300 years ago? I doubt if I could understand much of what was being said.

I have no evidence to base my thoughts upon, so I was wondering if anyone out there could give a rough estimate as to how far back I could travel, and still understand people.

Oh how I adore this thread! Really I should have done a degree in linguistics or something. I love the way it's all tied up with anthropology and literature too.

LRD I'd heard that about the Duchess of Devonshire too, can't remember where though.

HelpTheSnails are you referring to the story in Ecce Romani when the wheel of Gaius Cornelius's cart comes off in a ditch and he exclaims 'Sceleste!' ('Wicked!')

That amused us very much at school in the early 90s.

Can't remember the Latin for cart though.

This is a really interesting thread. I would love to read more about dialect and the evolution of language. A lecturer of mine on my English degree used to read us from the Icelandic and I was fascinated by how it sounded and how the North East accent is so close to Scandinavian. I told my 5 year old the first few lines of the Canterbury Tales recently as an eg of how people used to speak and how language changes. Don't think he was all that impressed!

I once heard Anna Friel I think do a really good impression of how the Australian accent evolved from Cockney. A bit hard to try and recreate here but it was all to do with the effect of all the light and space.

Could be all rubbish I suppose but it sounded good!

Maybe it was on here, hearts .... wouldn't surprise me, as a group we know everything.

Oh, and I also wish I'd done linguistics. Darn.

Zizzo, I would be second in line (behind you) for some Google History Glasses.

One of my favourite things is looking at old photographs or paintings or etchings of streets / buildings / villages I am familiar with and comparing them to present day - I just love it, don't know why. I have all these "Olde London" books full of interesting text that I have never read because I'm too busy poring over the photos

OP I have often wondered something similar to you. But also, how different would people be, the way they communicate with each other - would you be cut off by the way society operated back in time?

In other words, regardless of whether you could understand the individual words and sentences, would you be able to converse on the same level? Would people two or three hundred years ago be so extremely different from now that having even the most basic conversational relationship might be impossible?

I was thinking about it this morning, thinking about how eg sense of humour changes over time, but that people have always laughed with/at each other - what would our friends of a few hundred years ago laughed at together? What would their general chit chat have been? What did they say when they were lying in bed together at night, when they were making breakfast in the morning? The daily stuff.

It fascinates me.

And in relation to BalCOny, I lived in a village with a road called Balcony and it was pronounced in that 'eat my sarndwiches at the grarnd piarno' (see Monty Python, IIRC) way.

HelpTheSnails I always read the title (in my head) in a slightly Yorkshire accent as I lived there when younger and my teacher used to say 'ecky thump'.

Ee bah gum there's trouble in't atrium. And so on.

You can tell I enjoyed Latin!

Those photos are brilliant. I'd love to do that - I'm another one that loves looking at photos of places as they used to be. The reality of actually being there is so close when you look at them - but so far away at the same time.

I'd be screwed. My town is ancient. Was listed in the Domesday Book. If I went to the street market when it first started it would be the year 1233. I doubt I'd be able to buy myself a cheap handbag and freshly ground coffee that's fo'sho.

I dunno .... cheap handbag, maybe. It'd probably have looked like a codpiece, but there we go.

help, those are fascinating. I've seen similar of the village where I grew up and the thing that amazed me (after, erm, noticing that you can so tell whose families have been there intermarried for generations) was how much more hedges were overgrown, right into the road. Odd how a little thing makes a difference, it was hard to tell which bit of the street was which sometimes.

I think you have a point op. My grandad would be 105 if he were alive today. He grew up in the same village I live in but his accent was very rural compared to the accent now. I think it's because it's a more urban place now and people travel more. Whereas when he was growing up he would never really mix outside the parish. Even 30 yr ago some of my friends found
His accent difficult.

I've just bought this book which involves a 21st century corporation time travelling to the 16th c to plunder its resources. Haven't read it yet because I'm still on Game of Thrones but it has scenes with 16th c people being impressed by modern technology and thinking the time travellers are elves

I don't know much about the history of English language, but somewhere in my brain is stuff about the history of French language.

The French used to roll their R's, like Italians (some still do - in SE France my pen friend's grandparents still did). Accents and affections went in and out of fashion, as they do, and some stick. The gutteral R was fashionable amongst the working class in Paris at the time of the revolution - suddenly everyone wanted to be working class and so that form of R 'stuck'.

Or something like that....

I used to like to read old French, the word order was more like english.

Given how quickly accents evolve I would think even 100 years ago people spoke quite differently. My grandad was from quite a poor part of Liverpool but his accent was nothing like as scouse accent is now. I struggle to understand some young scouse accents.

Which Americans are supposed to speak most like traditional English? Is it the words or the accent?

I still understand most of Burns when I read it - think that's about 1780 ish.

Understand much more when it's read out loud though.

I struggle to understand my own father some times. He has a west country accent and his family have always lived there.

I was listening to a 60s radio program yesterday and thinking how people just don't speak like that any more.

Also, we can read a Shakespeare play, but are they the original language? We can read the King James Bible too. www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/1611_Genesis-Chapter-1/

There was a woman on the radio a while ago who read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I couldn't understand a word. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Gawain_and_the_Green_Knight

Very interesting thread. I'd love to know.

Very interesting thread. I have nothing helpful to add other than I doubt I would have been able to get close enough to understand them because I have poor hearing and an amazing sense of smell that would be crippling in the face of what, by modern standards, would be quite a stench.

With no deodorant and minimal washing facilities for clothes and no such thing as a daily hot shower for washing the stench must have been incredible. Regular hair washing and daily laundering of clothes and use of antiperspirant are relatively very recent.

It's really not that bad, K8Middleton. As long as you can stand the smell of manure, because a lot of agricultural workers would be around animals all day too!

Use of antiperspirants, daily showers etc. are seen as a necessity nowadays partly because we have to live and work so close to complete strangers.

I read somewhere that if we were able to go back in time the most obvious thing would be the smell!
I remember my grandparents had a distinctive smell,not sweaty and horrible but they did smell,which sounds awful written down!
They probably bathed once a week at most,in the 1970s.
Having said that I definitely didn't bathe or shower daily as a child.
Seems unthinkeable now,with daily showers and washing machine on constantly!