BBC's Old and Middle English language samples

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

I just noticed today that BBC has a nice page here about the evolution of the English language, with two samples for each era (out of ten) that can be read as well as heard - one sample can be heard by clicking on the jester, the other through the microphone icon in the centre. By about stage 5 the language already mostly resembles the modern tongue so it becomes much less interesting, but the samples in the beginning are fun. English really comes across as a language with a short history here, and when it turns from a heavily inflected language into a more synthetic language it suddenly becomes really easy to understand.

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