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

[complexnumber]

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.

bumfit

IpanemaMeisje you have one of the best nicknames I have ever come across on MN

Is it true that Doric is a direct descendant of Pictish?

I would always have placed Pam Ayres around Gloucestershire myself...

pipbin. We have something similar. Media seem to do a generic South Yorkshire for anyone in Yorkshire. But the accents of the north, west and east are totally different.

South Yorkshire is really distinctive, with that kneu sound. I remember maybe 20 yrs ago in s. Yorks people still saying thee and tha, but it was considered common.
In my part of Yorkshire people would say Brokken for broken, but saying "brawken" was considered posher!
If you watch Kes, that is real South Yorkshire, with all the crazy vowel sounds "Am not gooin dahnt peeitt!"

Trills - when you said eyren meant eggs, I thought it must be related to eyrie (nest) but looking in online dictionaries, it doesn't seem to be.

Lefty lucky- it's so sad, something so colourful as Doric could be lost so quickly.

I heard somewhere that 'eeny meeny miny moe' came from counting in old Celtic languages, however the only reference I can find to this is from Wiki which states that the Cornish for "One, two three four" is "Eena, mea, mona, mite".

I really want this to be true. Just like I also heard that Hickory, dickory, dock was how some shepherds used to count, but I can find nothing to back this up.

I had no idea this was a topic. MN is the Tardis, so much bigger on the inside.

V interesting thread.

It's a brand new baby topic doctrine. Tech gave birth to it yesterday.

I heard a linguist from Leeds University highlighting the mish mash of northern accents that is Emmerdale! I have developed a sort of generic Northern accent as I've moved round a bit but yes I can pick out those people who come from a couple of miles around my childhood home.

I googled about the US fisher folk with an English accent and came upon video of Tangier, Virginia. Worth a listen. (Still can't do links..)

The mish mash of accents in Emmerdale is more likely to be because of the wide geographical origin of the actors :P I think a small village in the Dales would still retain quite a characteristic accent of its own. Hopefully. I don't think there would be many who have re-located from the bright lights of Leeds and Huddersfield _

Daffodil who was the Leeds linguist?

Really enjoying this thread!
I recently read a couple of books by Deborah Harkness in which an 21st century American woman ends up in Elizabethan England and can't understand a word anyone is saying! She has to learn it day by day and finds it really hard. There are vampires and witches too, but I found the languages side of the story equally fascinating! :)

Loved the Eddie Izzard clip. I used to live near Friesland and whiled away several rainy afternoons (of which there were many...) in bookshops looking for fairy tales in Friesisch. I really wanted to find Mr Men books in different dialects, but no luck, sadly. It's amazing how much written Friesisch is comprehensible even if you don't speak German.

German? They'd lynch you!

Yes it's the actors from all over. The main subject under discussion was Anne Hathaway's northern English accent in a film out at the time.

Sadly I do not know the name of the linguist , an older Yorkshireman is my only recollection!

What an interesting thread - and what a great new topic!

to all those who got it going.

Sorry complex as a proud Cornish woman I have to correct you... Those words you types are not 1,2,3,4 in Cornish.

Onan, dew, tri, peder. (Hope I'm spelling them right?!)

From a bit of google-ing there appears to be a consensu tht eena mea mona mite is the Cornish version of eena meeny miny moe but it certainly isn't 1-4 in Cornish.

Is it true that Cornish Welsh and Breton are all mutually intelligible?

What a fascinating question

My Welsh-speaking grandmother claimed that Welsh speakers could understand the Breton onion-sellers of her childhood, but she never encountered Cornish. I'm not Welsh-speaking, so cannot judge myself. French Wikipedia has an article on "les Johnnies" (Johnny Onions), a term which has apparently passed into Breton as "ar Johnniged".

My Welsh-speaking father also claimed to understand (and be understood by) Breton speakers. Like LongWayRound's grandmother, he never met any Cornish speakers, though. (Didn't the last 'true' Cornish speaker - Dolly someone - die late 18th century? 'true' speaker in the sense that she was the last native speaker to learn from her family. Cornish speakers since then are revivalists, I believe?)

Sorry - off topic!