Tfw if you traveled back past the 1500s...

Not really. The language was much more flowery, but still in understandable English words. You'd get your ear in and pick it up fairly quickly, just like hanging around a new city with different accents and dialects for a while.

Here's William Caxton's egg story in its original form, from about 1490.

And specyally he axyed after eggys. And the good wyf answerde that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry for he also coude speke no frenshe but wold haue hadde egges and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she understood hym wel.

Even 150 years ago people would think you were a retard because of your accent.

>And specyally he axyed after eggys. And the good wyf answerde that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry for he also coude speke no frenshe but wold haue hadde egges and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she understood hym wel.
The people were right about the muh language is degenerating meme. How beautiful and sophisticated the English language truelly was.

A longer version with a bit more context.

And that comyn Englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a-nother, in so moche that in my dayes happened that certayn marchauntes were in a ship in Tamyse for to have sayled over the see into Zelande, and, for lacke of wynde, thei taryed atte Forlond, and wente to lande for to refreshe them. And one of theym named Sheffelde, a mercer, cam in to an hows and axed for mete and specyally he axyd after eggys, and the goode wyf answerde that she could speke no Frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coude speke no Frenshe, but wolde have hadde egges; and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste a-nother sayd that he wolde have eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she understod hym wel. Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges, or eyren? Certaynly it is hard to playse every man, by-cause of dyversite and chaunge of langage.

>eggys
kek

I would probable by able to hold a basic conversation in Middle Dutch, Middle Low German and possible Middle English though.

You could also die from some plague that went extinct centuries ago. Not only are the immunities selected by a pandemic lost over the generations, but most people in the West aren't being exposed to plaguebearing rats or drinking water contaminated by corpses and pigshit on a regular basis. Hell, some argue that just the widespread use of soap significantly weakened our immune system.

He also spells "asked" differently, twice in the same sentence.

Not to mention the written language was clunky as fuck as it didn't matching sounds to spoken finnish. As long as I don't get too close to Savo or Karelia I should be fine.

It reads easily, but in the spoken language practically every vowel would sound different than what you expect.

How so? How can anyone possibly know that given there are no sound recordings of the time?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
linguists don't always agree how vowels were pronounced, but they pretty much all agree they changed

I grew up with the King James Bible and some classic, pretentious literature. I talk like a grandiose douche anyway. I'd fill in the gaps within a week at most.

>know frisian
>all who know it are from some isolated little farming shithole in north netherlands
>travel back in time to england
>mfw my language is finally important

youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34

Its really not

if you have syphilis and travelled back more than 500 years, yeah, you definitely would

What about "Shoppe"?

hey mang I'm visiting Amsterdam for a few days. how's the weather? what should I expect?

>a nother
So from this I can say it went from an other -> a nother -> another

And here I thought English would have taken the simple route and just merged the two words outright.

Watch out for Frisian terrorists such as these:

youtube.com/watch?v=FzI82f3AAkQ

English doesn't actually seem to have changed that much, especially in the past 500 years.

It's not like being Italian and going back in time 2000 years to Rome.

Remember they wrote phonetically, so they may have said the word another, but with emphasis on the a, it then being recorded as a nother.

If I suddenly found myself in my country Bulgaria in medieval times, I would understand people to a large degree since slavic languages developed a lot more conservatively, and because old bulgarian had a lot of words and grammar common with russian which i can speak to a large degree. I dont know about the medieval bulgatians understanding me tho.

I would not have any problems. Not with my mother tongue, at least.

The Old Portuguese was more like the Galician and the Mirandese. And more like the Brazilian Portuguese. Without the dire gibberish that today abound.

Pigeons, it's easier for me to understand the Galician than the Portuguese spoken in Portugal.

The language itself has not changed much. Sure, the spelling suffered terrible disfigurements in the last 100 years (the idiot who suggested the Speller Agreement deserved to be hanged), but nothing incorrigible.

Romanian here. I would be fucked if I had to write/read anyrhing because people were using the cyrillic alphabet. Other than that, the languahe is not that different.

i swear it looks like it was written by a dank meme page admin using broken english on purpose

>tfw it's only as much as a dialectal difference

Spanish in the 1500s was pretty much the same, luckily. There wouldn't be more """language""" barrier than when I talk with south americans.

Not the user that answered you but I remember this video about a Shakespeare play and how you could notice the shift of pronounciation because a piece in the play was supposed to rhyme but with modern pronounciation it does not.

>marchaunt
Just like colour became color, but I wish every "a" like this would have become an "e" like it did here.

>he doesn't learn Ancient Greek for fun in his spare time

I think it would have been great if the whole lot of eastern europe had that and russian, fucking commie could have done something right for once.

> the vowels are all different

Like this would be a challenge.
Go to Australia, they replace every vowel with an 'i'
Go to New Zealand, they replace every vowel with a 'u'
Then go to South Africa and they replace every vowel with an 'e'

Maybe a challenge for an American but if you've ever watched the Commonwealth Games you should be fine.

EME sounded a lot like Scots, so that really wouldn't be an issue. I imagine it might for most Americans, since they're probably not used to some of the more rural British accents.

Shit if I could pronounce it at first, though, but that's mostly my own accent.

>learn dutch
>can now speak to English speakers in England beyond your timeline

Frisian you mean

Both really. Fact of the matter is that even today if you are fluent in at least two of the following languages, Dutch English and German you can pretty easily decipher the third.

It really is you pleb

I know 0 middle english and I can understand it alright

Of course a lot of it is guess work and I get some things wrong but in general I can read it

The Y is just a stand in for Þ(th like in "thistle") and Ð(th like in "this")

Rome...Would kinda be intelligible, You chose a fucking dumb place, Lombard definitely not

take that eyren fags

Some languages are pretty understandable I think.

Nah, not everywhere, I believe most empires had a standartized language as a mean for communication with strangers from 10km abroad.

Except of course, if you were travveling through the holy roman empire where the hundreds of clusters of little dutchees and kingdoms had crass differences in their dialects and no high german for help until luther came along and made it up.