Words. For all of us at OggaDoon, words are our bread and butter: we love them, craft them, and depend on them to get our message across. We (privately) pride ourselves on being pretty up to date when it comes to grammar, spelling, and other literary rules.
But the English language as we know it has only existed for a very short amount of time, comparatively, and this awesome video proves just how little any of us would be understand if we decided to travel back in time.
Shakespeare suddenly doesn’t seem such a difficult challenge when you start to hear some of the Middle English words, and Old English – spoken before the Latinised Normans ever reached our shores – sounds like a completely foreign language.
And in a way, it is. With its Germanic roots and few other influences, you may find that someone from Berlin could understand it better than someone from Brighton.
It goes both ways of course: give it another fifty years, and the English language that we speak now may seem partially incomprehensible to a person born in 2045, and by the time you start thinking about heading into the next millennium, our ‘modern’ English may sound just as incomprehensible as Chaucer does to our ears. It just goes to show that language is an ever-fluid, ever-changing thing.
But until it does change, we’ll champion the Oxford comma to the bitter end.


