I did not expect the recovered order that confirmed the existence of a (semi-)legendary Nubian king to basically be "Dear X, when you get here, please take some sheep from Y in exchange for some cotton cloths. Kthxbye! -King Qashqash".
Reminds me of this quote from Tonya Riley's _The Staff Engineer's Path_:
> In The Art of Travel (Vintage), Alain de Botton talks about the frustration of learning new information that doesn’t connect to anything you already know—like the sorts of facts you might pick up while visiting a historic building in a foreign land. He writes about visiting Madrid’s Iglesia de San Francisco el Grande and learning that “the sixteenth-century stalls in the sacristy and chapter house come from the Cartuja de El Paular, the Carthusian monastery near Segovia.” Without a connection back to something he was already familiar with, the description couldn’t spark his excitement or curiosity. The new facts, he wrote, were “as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.”
Like, presumably you'd know something of monastaries, materials, manufacturing...
"“the sixteenth-century stalls in the sacristy and chapter house come from the Cartuja de El Paular, the Carthusian monastery near Segovia.” "
tells me that 500 years ago, the church reused either entire stalls or perhaps materials from another presumably older church that's near Segovia. I'd infer that there must have been some importance to both the intitial act and the preservation of the fact. Probably due to religious orders preferring lineage and continuity.
Without knowing anything at all about either facility, the countries involved, or really just anything at all, I can still tell that we're observing the heritage of traditions and know enough to ask after details of how this facility relates to the one near Segovia.
Like, modern and understandable? I ask because English from more than a few hundred years ago is basically gibberish so I’m curious about languages where that didn’t happen.
A lot of that is just that English along with much of western vernacular wasn't given standardized spelling until fairly recently, as most of the important writing was done in Latin.
If you get past the weird spelling it's still fairly understandable.
Exception being maybe stuff like Shakespeare, but a huge part of what makes that inaccessible is that his writing is full of references to current events, double entendres, and various 17th century memes. It's a bit like showing South Park's world of warcraft episode to someone from the 2400s.
Shakespeare is sufficiently close to contemporary English that audiences will watch and enjoy his plays. I have seen plenty of kids and audiences in different countries enjoy them.
It isn't that it isn't enjoyable, but it just isn't enjoyable in the same way. How often do you view the jokes in shakepear's work as raunchy or sexual? Do you think younger teens get the jokes? Do you think anyone explains it to them?
It is more akin to watching television from a different culture. I am American, live in Norway, with my Norwegian spouse. We wind up watching British television from time to time. We find the jokes funny, but we both realize that we are missing references to people and places - but understand the gist of the jokes.
The difference between shakespear and modern times is even larger - you don't always know they are jokes because you don't realize they are referencing anything. Still enjoyable, but a different story without as much comedy.
Sexual and and current affairs references are the hardest to get - euphemisms change, for example In spite of this I do get a lot. Some are pretty obvious ("your tongue in my tail", for example) I am sure I miss many. Some productions try harder to make things obvious than others. Then there is all the stuff you do get so the comedies are still pretty funny overall.
I think Your TV analogy is probably pretty accurate. Kids also do not get a lot of sexual references in TV comedy too!
> It isn't that it isn't enjoyable, but it just isn't enjoyable in the same way. How often do you view the jokes in shakepear's work as raunchy or sexual? Do you think younger teens get the jokes? Do you think anyone explains it to them?
The article doesn't expound on it, but it very much depends on what Arabic means to you. Depending on the answer, it's really a dozen different languages.
I know people who only speak their own darija and classical literature is utterly obscure to them.
Sorry to disagree, but no, they are not dozens of different languages. The challenge with Arabic is that it has a rather large vocabulary, and different regions use slightly different vocabularies.
That being said, Darija, or rather North African Arabic is a messy mix of Arabic and Tamazight. Which can be difficult for Middle East Arabic speakers to understand.
For reference, I speak Darija and understand both classical and modern Arabic. It would take me a few days to adapt my speech to other regional variations of arabic.
What's your prior exposure to Classical and Standard Arabic ? The people I'm thinking about only have darija exposure without any formal education in Arabic and little exposure to pan-Arabic media.
Depending on the author 17th century English can also be very close to modern English. A couple phrases will be off and the spelling is different, but most of the difficulty is more the author using constructions that have fallen out of use or "showing off" with overly complicated sentences.
For example here's an excerpt from 1688's "Oroonoko"
I have often seen and convers'd with this great Man, and been a Witness to many of his mighty Actions; and do assure my Reader, the most Illustrious Courts cou'd not have produc'd a braver Man, both for Greatness of Courage and Mind, a Judgment more solid, a Wit more quick, and a Conversation more sweet and diverting. He knew almost as much as if he had read much: He had heard of, and admir'd the Romans; he had heard of the late Civil Wars in England, and the deplorable Death of our great Monarch; and wou'd discourse of it with all the Sense, and Abhorrence of the Injustice imaginable. He had an extream good and graceful Mien, and all the Civility of a well-bred great Man.
Is six hundred years ago more than a few? Chaucer is still more or less comprehensible. (Though Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, from roughly the same time, not so much.)
The Middle English spelling and phonetic shifts are what make it so painful to read. The words themselves though are mostly comprehensible with a bit of effort.
Go back another four hundred years to Old English and Beowulf and it becomes complete gobbledygook (to me at least).
Since spelling was not standardized at the time, I suppose there would be no real loss of meaning if someone were to rewrite these works using modern/standard English spelling? Why are high schoolers forced to read these archaic texts as written? It was just so tiring to try to read them; I could never get through any of them and resorted to Cliffs Notes.
Dongola in the Funj period sounds like the place to be!
> In The Art of Travel (Vintage), Alain de Botton talks about the frustration of learning new information that doesn’t connect to anything you already know—like the sorts of facts you might pick up while visiting a historic building in a foreign land. He writes about visiting Madrid’s Iglesia de San Francisco el Grande and learning that “the sixteenth-century stalls in the sacristy and chapter house come from the Cartuja de El Paular, the Carthusian monastery near Segovia.” Without a connection back to something he was already familiar with, the description couldn’t spark his excitement or curiosity. The new facts, he wrote, were “as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.”
Like, presumably you'd know something of monastaries, materials, manufacturing...
"“the sixteenth-century stalls in the sacristy and chapter house come from the Cartuja de El Paular, the Carthusian monastery near Segovia.” "
tells me that 500 years ago, the church reused either entire stalls or perhaps materials from another presumably older church that's near Segovia. I'd infer that there must have been some importance to both the intitial act and the preservation of the fact. Probably due to religious orders preferring lineage and continuity.
Without knowing anything at all about either facility, the countries involved, or really just anything at all, I can still tell that we're observing the heritage of traditions and know enough to ask after details of how this facility relates to the one near Segovia.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2025-04-28/debates/2E7...
If you get past the weird spelling it's still fairly understandable.
Exception being maybe stuff like Shakespeare, but a huge part of what makes that inaccessible is that his writing is full of references to current events, double entendres, and various 17th century memes. It's a bit like showing South Park's world of warcraft episode to someone from the 2400s.
As many of us learned recently from this great article: https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-u...
It is more akin to watching television from a different culture. I am American, live in Norway, with my Norwegian spouse. We wind up watching British television from time to time. We find the jokes funny, but we both realize that we are missing references to people and places - but understand the gist of the jokes.
The difference between shakespear and modern times is even larger - you don't always know they are jokes because you don't realize they are referencing anything. Still enjoyable, but a different story without as much comedy.
I think Your TV analogy is probably pretty accurate. Kids also do not get a lot of sexual references in TV comedy too!
Yes... my own recounting of freshman high school English (it was the late 80s) https://everything2.com/node/1207826
[1] https://fluentarabic.net/arabic-unchanged-1000-years/
That being said, Darija, or rather North African Arabic is a messy mix of Arabic and Tamazight. Which can be difficult for Middle East Arabic speakers to understand.
For reference, I speak Darija and understand both classical and modern Arabic. It would take me a few days to adapt my speech to other regional variations of arabic.
For example here's an excerpt from 1688's "Oroonoko"
Go back another four hundred years to Old English and Beowulf and it becomes complete gobbledygook (to me at least).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisian_languages
This writing (and speaking) style permeates this institution.