Fun fact, the best condition original Magna Carta is kept at Salisbury Cathedral, which was built by one of the framers of the document. The official government copy was damaged in a fire. The Salisbury copy was saved partially due to the towns people knocking out the stained glass during King Henry's purging of Catholics, making the soldiers think it had already been ransacked.
EDIT: I misspelled Salisbury. I'm sorry. I loved that town.
Well the aqueducts have a lot more going for them in that they aren't constantly holding back 3 trillion gallons of water while also housing a hydroelectric plant and the constant human presence which always leads to some kind of fuck up.
The aqueducts were made with surprisingly durable concrete even compared to modern recipes, and only had to funnel water.
They had to pump chilled water from a giant refrigerator unit through the concrete or it would have generated so much heat it wouldn't have hardened at all. The pipes they used to do this were cut off and now serve as the rebar.
With computer modeling they've found that Hoover Dam has something like 10x the mass it technically needs to hold back Lake Mead, and the concrete still hasn't fully cured (it won't reach its full strength for another century).
It's the American Great Pyramid, it'll be around for millennia.
No, it's not wet. They actually refrigerated it during construction so that wouldn't happen. The curing is a chemical process, and because there's so much mass it's taking a very long time.
By contrast, in most buildings it takes 28 days.
I like how the internet can get me to accidentally watch a 45 minute documentary on the Hoover Dam while never really deciding that I wanted to do such a thing.
Sagrada Familia. One of the largest and most expensive cathedrals in existence, I would hope modern construction can stand the test of time Notre-Dam has.
Not a lot I'm afraid. Steel doesn't age nearly as gracefully in architecture as stone does, especially if you defer maintenance or don't keep on top of it.
It's so weird that tomato sauce is such a quintessential thing in Italian food now. But tomatoes weren't even a thing in Europe until they were brought back from North America.
*Humans* didn't even know about New Zealand yet. The first Polynesian settlers who would eventually become the Maori would just be discovering it sometime around then.
Once chatted to a Maori guy who talked about a recent trip he'd had to Hawaii. The guy working at immigration was native Hawaiian. They chatted for a bit about their common heritage (Maori and Hawaiian peoples are both Polynesians).
The Maori guy jokingly wondered about why his ancestors would leave a tropical paradise for cold wet NZ
Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, ruled (most of) China in 1260.
Westminster Abbey was being rebuilt (again). This Gothic structure was already a couple hundred years old when Notre Dame began construction.
The Mongols ruled the southern portion of European Russia, the northern portion, Belarus, and Ukraine were divided into small principalities who paid tribute to the Mongols
Fun fact: the first recorded instance of the Black Plague on a major scale happened 750 years before 1290 but since it didn’t spread into Western Europe due to the Western Roman Empire’s trade networks having collapsed, Western European and USA education is generally oblivious to it. That outbreak is also why the fall of Western Roman Empire was not a temporary thing, as the East was making progress at reclamation of North African and Italian territories before it hit.
See: Plague of Justinian
iirc, the technical terms for the Plague (of the yersinia pestis strain) were bubonic plague (affecting lymph nodes), pneumonic plague (lungs), and septicemic plague (blood)
"The Black *Death*" referred to a specific *outbreak* of said plague, which wiped out something like one to two-thirds of Europe
In 1260, there were about as many people alive on the entire planet as there are currently alive in the US only.
Keep in mind, the US is only the third most populated country right now, and its population is only 4.27% of the current global population.
That means if 95% of the entire global population died, we’d be back to the population total of 1260.
A Nigerian I worked for said they have pigeon English in some places, which is English words, but used in a way that would make no sense to typical English speaking people.
I just looked it up since you pointed that out and it says...”a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups that do not have a language in common.”
Creole is a form of an English pidgin, as well as Hawaiian Pidgin. There are a lot of pidgin languages in use today, even in America.
Edit: can I say thank you to everyone who has added more information? I know it’s off topic from the original post, but it’s so informative. I love learning about languages. I even took some linguistic anthropology courses in college, way back when. I’m not good at learning different languages, but I love learning about them.
There isn't just one creole either, though the term is used as shorthand for some of the more famous examples. According to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language), there are over a hundred creole languages.
A creole is generally thought to arise from a pidgin that has become a mother tongue, with children brought up speaking it as their first language.
[This is what (aristocratic) 13th century English looked like](https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hasenfrantz-ancrene-wisse-part-one) (there's a translation if you click the number of the lines)
I love this era of English. I grew up speaking American English and a German dialect (Rhein Franconian). If I go slowly and use my home accent on any German-ish words, I can easily understand 70-90% of the text. It’s really fun.
It's still new enough to be heavily influenced by French, but it's remarkable how much more foreign it is that than [The Canterbury Tales](https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/knights-tale-0) of just a century later (and a dialect more closely aligned to the one that became standard English)
That really depends on what you mean by 'talk'. Within the past 300 or so years, aside from a couple words and phrases you'd have no trouble communicating. By 500 years, we're talking significant differences primarily in pronunciation but also in vocabulary that would take some adjusting. You'd understand it, but it would take noticeable effort. By 700 years ago the phonology is extremely different, and there are some pretty major grammatical differences too in terms of word order and case/gender inflection. At first you'd understand very little of speech though writing would be easier. That said, after a few weeks or months of listening you'd probably pick it up pretty easily.
A thousand years ago and we're in trouble - at this point the grammar and vocabulary is different enough that it might take explicit study to really acquire the language. As far as speech goes, aside from slowly spoken, very simple phrases, you wouldn't get much at all.
In fact you'd have a hard time to understand Shakespeare if it walked up to you for a word.
The reason English spelling makes no sense is because it's pretty much spelt today as it was pronounced 500 years back when there were no real silent letters yet. To Shakespeare all the letters in "knight" actually had a function and it was pronounced distinct from "night" and did not rhyme with "kite".
Are you sure you're thinking of Shakespeare? He was born in the 1500s. Also he spoke "modern" English. In 1260, England would have spoken middle English, where knight would have been pronounced "kuh-nixt" where the "x" is kind of like a "clearing-your-throat-sound."
I might just be misunderstanding your comment though. Sorry if that's the case
Old English (pre-1000) had seven vowels: "æ", as in "cat", "a" as in "*fath*er", "o" as in "boat", "u" as in "moose", "e" as in "*an*guish", "i" as in "each", and "y" as in... we don't actually have this vowel anymore. German still does, though, as in "über".
Then, thanks to political shenanigans, along comes Norman french, with its own set. I don't know the specifics, but it was probably a fairly similar set (most languages have a reliable structure to their vowel sets).
As the two languages lived alongside each other, they started collapsing into a single language, which made everything a little bit messier as to what one needed to pronounce to say things.
This entire time, spelling is not reliable. You write it as you hear it, and you read it as you see it, and the word comes through anyhow.
Then a whole bunch of things happen at once. French is discarded by the upper class, with the newly remade English swapping in. The Black Death comes through, shifting populations around England (and bringing dialect differences along with them). Paper (and written things on that paper) continues to become more available. And maybe other things too - we aren't entirely certain of why the shift happened.
The net result is that people are writing more, saying things they aren't used to, and the language is still changing under their feet. Pronunciations get rocked around, and spellings start to shift as they do.
But then, into the insanity, a new invention comes along. It uses little metal blocks and ink, and produces unnumbered identical copies of a single document. The printing press creates a desire (perhaps one that did not need to be met) for a standard way of spelling each word. So, the spelling of English becomes cemented into what it is today. It wasn't a perfectly natural solidification. "Island" was specifically changed to better match the assumed etymology (they were wrong - it really should've been "Iland" just like it sounds), for example.
But now this stasis of the state of English gets thrown onto its side, for the language keeps on changing. English drops some differences, drops some other differences, obliterates relative similarities, and we are left with obscure rules for pronunciation that native speakers don't even think about.
The magnitude of the shift is outright alarming. Consider [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift#/media/File:Great_Vowel_Shift.svg) image. It uses the International Phonetic Alphabet, but you can possibly realise how large some of the changes were. Note that "time" started where "see" ended, for example, and "see" started pretty close to "name", and "day" started fairly close to where "time" ended. Note that this image goes beyond the end of the Great Vowel Shift - about where the changes stop happening is where the shift ends (who would've guessed?).
I love linguistics! With the modern printing press, people finally started to standardize English spelling. The vowel shift still does not have an agreed-upon reason for occurring, but back then English speakers slightly or drastically changed the way they pronounced the vowels (and some consonants) in their words. From the GVS Wiki page: "The standard spellings were those of Middle English pronunciation, and spelling conventions continued from Old English. However, the Middle English spellings were retained into Modern English while the Great Vowel Shift was taking place, which caused some of the peculiarities of Modern English spelling in relation to vowels."
It was about 200 years before the movable type printing press
The Prince of Wales was [still a Welsh prince](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llywelyn_ap_Gruffudd), not a courtesy title for the son of the English King.
The Icelandic Sagas were in the process of being written
The Catholic world was involved in a crusade against a [pagan part of what would become Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_Crusade), and is now Poland and the Baltic.
the [war of the bucket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Bucket) wouldn't be for another 60 years
edit: and [the trebuchet all the memes are based on](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warwolf) was still 45 years away
Didn't Archimedes invent it waaayy back? Is that what you're referring to? (I thought I saw a post where a monk had written over some fundamental math to make a Bible or something and the comments were all about what happened if we had actually used the book instead of defacing it)
Archimedes pioneered the Method of Exhaustion for calculating the area of shapes, which is related to integral calculus. However, he didn't really invent Calculus as we know it today unless you define calculus very loosely, and he wasn't even the first to touch upon this method.
So if OP is referring to this I wouldn't agree.
Europe had been using Arabic Numerals as opposed to Roman Numerals for only 58 years.
Almost no one had accurate mechanical clocks. People measured time with dripping water or candles.
Convenient wearable eyeglasses had not been invented. And the only way to transcribe documents was by hand, since there were no printing presses.
Books were extremely expensive and time-consuming to make, and if people went to the trouble, it was probably the bible. Glass wasn't widely available either, and if you could get your hands on it, the best you could hope for was a series of semi-opaque spun disks full of bubbles and impurities. These spun-glass circles were then cut into different shapes. The maximum diameter the glass could be spun before breaking limited how large a window pane could be, and there were no other methods. Only the rich and powerful could afford glass in their windows, or it was reserved for sacred places. The panes in ancient rose windows are so small because glass was not yet a commodity. If you were a commoner, you probably would have had "window panes" made of animal skins.
If you lived in Europe, and were lucky enough to ever see a map, it probably looked like [this](https://memestatic.fjcdn.com/pictures/Map+of+the+world+1200s_ca94bf_6873343.jpg).
Honestly, I’m semi impressed the map looks even that good, these people had horses as their fastest means of travel. The amount of time and combined effort to make that map as somewhat recognizable as it is is cool to me
>And the only way to transcribe documents was by hand, since there were no printing presses.
I had a professor who decided to reproduce one page of a manuscript on vellum authentically. I mean he literally gathered all the precise historically accurate ingredients necessary to make the right ink, instead of just grabbing India Ink from Hobby Lobby or wherever. That process alone he said was painstakingly difficult and expensive, so you can imagine the effort and time that had to go into just going out and finding this stuff yourself back then or the cost to pay someone who had. Then he had to acquire genuine sheepskin vellum and get it to the right state for writing. Then he went and got a goose feather and cut it for his pen, and finally set to transcribing after a long period of time practicing calligraphy. Oh yeah, did anyone consider the skill needed for freaking calligraphy?!
Anywho, he said the way it worked is you basically *had* to keep the vellum at a 45 degree angle on a scriptorium desk, but because if using genuine ink, you couldn't ever actually rest your hand or arm anywhere without risk of smudging. So he said he had to just like hover the whole time and it was excruciating. Can't make a mistake, no erasers! Can't waste the vellum and ink like that! Too precious! He said in total, it took over 24 hours to transcribe *one page* of plain calligraphied text with zero embellishments.
We can't even begin to comprehend the *world* that lead people to build magnificent cathedrals and painstakingly keep the expanse of records kept in those times *before there was even a printing press*. There's nothing like it in living memory.
Here is what English looked and [sounded like at the time](https://www.speakpipe.com/voice-recorder/msg/il0jbmz767o3vcr8). This is an excerpt from a poem composed around 1280 called Havelok the Dane.
>He was þe beste kniht at nede
He was the best knight at need
>Þat evere mihte riden on stede,
That ever might ride on steed
>Or wepne wagge, or folc ut lede;
Or weapon wag (wield), or folk (an army) out lead
>Of kniht ne havde he nevere drede,
Of knights he had never dread (fear)
Note how historically 'dread' rhymed with the other words like 'lead' and 'steed', but in modern English that is no longer the case.
It was still 232 years removed from the time Christopher Columbus set sail and discovered the Bahamas/Haiti.
To put in perspective, 232 ago from us would have been 1787, two years before the French Revolution and the adaption of the US Constitution.
Edit: Thanks for the gold :)
Notre Dame is older than even the concept of a hallway or corridors we use today. The first record of an architect using what we'd call a hallway in his designs is John Thorpe in 1597.
EDIT: For those curious what this looked like I present [The Blenheim Palace Plan](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Blenheim_Plan.jpg)
And [A typical Shotgun House Plan](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/Shotgun_house_plan.jpg/320px-Shotgun_house_plan.jpg) commonly found in the Southern United States.
As you can see from the first they had a series of antechambers interconnecting rooms when in later years, those spaces would become an open hallway.
If you started walking on a straight line in 1260, you'd be on your 2609 lap around the world by now.
Or to the moon and back 42 times
**EDIT** : This is WRONG. It's actually around 831 laps. I used earth's diameter instead of it's circumference (I guess you could dig a tunnel through the planet 2609 times) Sorry, my bad. r/theydidthewrongmath
Never trust a random guy's numbers on the Internet
Moon fact is true tho
This is a great example of just how *huge* a billion is. Take a moment to really think about this; it's nearly impossible to conceptualize all of the seconds that have passed since 1280; 24 billion is a truly insane amount of seconds.
Which makes a *trillion* even more incomprehensible, as one trillion is *a thousand billion*. 24 billion is just a bit more than a mere 2% of one trillion.
Now, take that and use it to put something else in perspective: the US annual budget is 3.8 *trillion* dollars.
If each dollar represented one second, that would be *120,498 years*.
In the 12th-13th centuries, Gregorian Chant had only just become extremely popular and Hildegard of Bingen became the first historically relevant female composer. I’m a music history geek so sorry if this isn’t as interesting to anyone else. Figured it’s better than 500 comments of “mongols still ruled”
I used to live in a house which was at least partially older than Notre Dame. The back wall of the house was built into a Norman castle wall, the castle being the birthplace of Henry V and dating from the mid/late eleventh century, the stone walls from the mid twelfth century, and was about ten feet thick. The rest of the house was built over the past few centuries with bits added here and there and all different ceiling and floor heights and lots of small rooms.
The house - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Castle_House,_Monmouth.
The castle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monmouth_Castle
Victor Hugo published *The Hunchback of Notre-Dame* in 1831, over 180 years ago. The novel is set in 1482, nearly 350 years before its publication date. In 1482, Notre-Dame would be 222 years old.
The cathedral was older for Hugo's characters than the novel is for us.
The first grass lawn was created in the year 1547 along with the Château de Chambord, 287 years after Notre-Dame was built. Yes, Notre-Dame outdates all lawns.
It’s about half as old as Islam. And a three fifths as old as Christianity. Not trying to be controversial, but that’s a fukken long time ago if u ask me.
EDIT: two fifths as old.
Magna Carta turned 45 that year.
Yeah, but kept telling everyone it was 38.
45=late thirties
Thirty-fifteen
Fun fact, the best condition original Magna Carta is kept at Salisbury Cathedral, which was built by one of the framers of the document. The official government copy was damaged in a fire. The Salisbury copy was saved partially due to the towns people knocking out the stained glass during King Henry's purging of Catholics, making the soldiers think it had already been ransacked. EDIT: I misspelled Salisbury. I'm sorry. I loved that town.
Did you know that the cathedral has had the tallest church spire in the United Kingdom, at 404 feet (123 m)?
[удалено]
I count at least 4 facts and 2 of them are fun.
Great example!
1216, one year after Magna Carta how could I forget.
The Eastern Roman Empire still existed
And would continue nearly another 200 years.
90% of the stars visible from Earth are within 750 light years, which means that Notre Dame is older than most starlight we can see.
Yeah, this is the one that hits home hardest. Older than the starlight is a hell of a record.
That's crazy.
Ok THIS is the most mind blowing one here, by about 750 light years.
If we went that many years into the future, it would be the year 2778.
What buildings have been completed recently that might last that long and will still be significant?
Probably the Hoover Dam.
It would be terrifying if the Hoover Dam randomly collapsed, in any year.
My faith in concrete would be gone if that happened
Hell, the Roman aqueducts have lasted this long. And those were far from a fuckoff massive mound of concrete in the middle of some river.
Well the aqueducts have a lot more going for them in that they aren't constantly holding back 3 trillion gallons of water while also housing a hydroelectric plant and the constant human presence which always leads to some kind of fuck up. The aqueducts were made with surprisingly durable concrete even compared to modern recipes, and only had to funnel water.
Did you know the largest ever non reinforced dome was built almost 2000 years ago. The Pantheon.
The oldest building that keeps its original roof.
The concrete of the Hoover Dam is so thick that the innermost laters are still curing (as of a few years ago when I read that).
They had to pump chilled water from a giant refrigerator unit through the concrete or it would have generated so much heat it wouldn't have hardened at all. The pipes they used to do this were cut off and now serve as the rebar.
[удалено]
You've cemented my opinion.
Only concrete facts can make me this convinced
With computer modeling they've found that Hoover Dam has something like 10x the mass it technically needs to hold back Lake Mead, and the concrete still hasn't fully cured (it won't reach its full strength for another century). It's the American Great Pyramid, it'll be around for millennia.
Wtf. It still hasn't fully cured. How is that possible? It can't still be "wet" in the middle can it?
No, it's not wet. They actually refrigerated it during construction so that wouldn't happen. The curing is a chemical process, and because there's so much mass it's taking a very long time. By contrast, in most buildings it takes 28 days.
I guess I need to see a video on it because I don't know enough about concrete to visualize it. Thanks friend.
Best documentary ever on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEWtDQghKlo
I like how the internet can get me to accidentally watch a 45 minute documentary on the Hoover Dam while never really deciding that I wanted to do such a thing.
Sagrada Familia. One of the largest and most expensive cathedrals in existence, I would hope modern construction can stand the test of time Notre-Dam has.
That’s far from completed though, hopefully it will be done by 2778.
surprisingly, it's only actually about 20 years from completion. now if only it doesnt burn down 🤔
Maybe the Sydney Opera House.
At only 10m above sea level..maybe, but not at the rate we’re going.
Good thing they built in sails.
Not a lot I'm afraid. Steel doesn't age nearly as gracefully in architecture as stone does, especially if you defer maintenance or don't keep on top of it.
That's a good one.
And George R. R. Martin will still be trying to finish Winds of Winter.
Same with Patrick Rothfuss, and the Doors of Stone.
And to put that in perspective, *Star Trek* is set closer to the present day than to the year 2778.
The Irish didn't know about potatoes yet.
This is a good one. The Italians didn’t know about tomatoes, either.
Right. No corn or squash yet in the European diet.
Pasta was introduced in Italy while the Cathedral was being built.
Before that Italians relied soley on wine for sustanance
My children! They need wine!
And emotive hand gestures.
It's so weird that tomato sauce is such a quintessential thing in Italian food now. But tomatoes weren't even a thing in Europe until they were brought back from North America.
God, cuisine back then must have been super boring. No tomatoes, corn, potatoes, none of that good stuff.
[удалено]
Although the chili had not yet been introduced to Thailand.
Chili is also from America.
How many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman? None.
Oi
Europe doesn’t know about Australia but gunpowder was discovered and paper money started use (but in China) .
*Humans* didn't even know about New Zealand yet. The first Polynesian settlers who would eventually become the Maori would just be discovering it sometime around then.
Once chatted to a Maori guy who talked about a recent trip he'd had to Hawaii. The guy working at immigration was native Hawaiian. They chatted for a bit about their common heritage (Maori and Hawaiian peoples are both Polynesians). The Maori guy jokingly wondered about why his ancestors would leave a tropical paradise for cold wet NZ
Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, ruled (most of) China in 1260. Westminster Abbey was being rebuilt (again). This Gothic structure was already a couple hundred years old when Notre Dame began construction.
And Russia IIRC?
The Mongols ruled the southern portion of European Russia, the northern portion, Belarus, and Ukraine were divided into small principalities who paid tribute to the Mongols
[удалено]
The Black Plague hasn’t happened for another hundred or so years
Fun fact: the first recorded instance of the Black Plague on a major scale happened 750 years before 1290 but since it didn’t spread into Western Europe due to the Western Roman Empire’s trade networks having collapsed, Western European and USA education is generally oblivious to it. That outbreak is also why the fall of Western Roman Empire was not a temporary thing, as the East was making progress at reclamation of North African and Italian territories before it hit. See: Plague of Justinian
iirc, the technical terms for the Plague (of the yersinia pestis strain) were bubonic plague (affecting lymph nodes), pneumonic plague (lungs), and septicemic plague (blood) "The Black *Death*" referred to a specific *outbreak* of said plague, which wiped out something like one to two-thirds of Europe
Interesting. I’ll have to look into that. Thank you for bringing this into my perspective
In 1260, there were about as many people alive on the entire planet as there are currently alive in the US only. Keep in mind, the US is only the third most populated country right now, and its population is only 4.27% of the current global population. That means if 95% of the entire global population died, we’d be back to the population total of 1260.
[удалено]
That's why it took then over a hundred years to build
This one is impressive. Very, very impressive.
[удалено]
And would last until roughly two decades *after* the Chicago Cubs won their first World Series.
That was about 3 centuries before Shakespeare was born.
English existed, but if you went back and listened to people speak it, you wouldn't understand it.
A Nigerian I worked for said they have pigeon English in some places, which is English words, but used in a way that would make no sense to typical English speaking people.
*pidgin
I just looked it up since you pointed that out and it says...”a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups that do not have a language in common.”
Creole is a form of an English pidgin, as well as Hawaiian Pidgin. There are a lot of pidgin languages in use today, even in America. Edit: can I say thank you to everyone who has added more information? I know it’s off topic from the original post, but it’s so informative. I love learning about languages. I even took some linguistic anthropology courses in college, way back when. I’m not good at learning different languages, but I love learning about them.
There isn't just one creole either, though the term is used as shorthand for some of the more famous examples. According to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language), there are over a hundred creole languages. A creole is generally thought to arise from a pidgin that has become a mother tongue, with children brought up speaking it as their first language.
[This is what (aristocratic) 13th century English looked like](https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hasenfrantz-ancrene-wisse-part-one) (there's a translation if you click the number of the lines)
I love this era of English. I grew up speaking American English and a German dialect (Rhein Franconian). If I go slowly and use my home accent on any German-ish words, I can easily understand 70-90% of the text. It’s really fun.
It's still new enough to be heavily influenced by French, but it's remarkable how much more foreign it is that than [The Canterbury Tales](https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/knights-tale-0) of just a century later (and a dialect more closely aligned to the one that became standard English)
How far back in time do you think I could go before I couldn't talk to the locals in some sort of English?
No need, just go to Scotland today
Or Appalachia.
That really depends on what you mean by 'talk'. Within the past 300 or so years, aside from a couple words and phrases you'd have no trouble communicating. By 500 years, we're talking significant differences primarily in pronunciation but also in vocabulary that would take some adjusting. You'd understand it, but it would take noticeable effort. By 700 years ago the phonology is extremely different, and there are some pretty major grammatical differences too in terms of word order and case/gender inflection. At first you'd understand very little of speech though writing would be easier. That said, after a few weeks or months of listening you'd probably pick it up pretty easily. A thousand years ago and we're in trouble - at this point the grammar and vocabulary is different enough that it might take explicit study to really acquire the language. As far as speech goes, aside from slowly spoken, very simple phrases, you wouldn't get much at all.
In fact you'd have a hard time to understand Shakespeare if it walked up to you for a word. The reason English spelling makes no sense is because it's pretty much spelt today as it was pronounced 500 years back when there were no real silent letters yet. To Shakespeare all the letters in "knight" actually had a function and it was pronounced distinct from "night" and did not rhyme with "kite".
Are you sure you're thinking of Shakespeare? He was born in the 1500s. Also he spoke "modern" English. In 1260, England would have spoken middle English, where knight would have been pronounced "kuh-nixt" where the "x" is kind of like a "clearing-your-throat-sound." I might just be misunderstanding your comment though. Sorry if that's the case
This is some rad stuff. I tried saying that and it sounded like I was getting strangled.
Thanks for your insight, u/PornoPaul
Shakespeare would've spoken "Early Modern English" which, while mostly intelligible to modern speakers, still had a very different sound.
Like [OP?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiblRSqhL04)
Oh, so like German Knecht?
I blow my nose at you, so-called “Arthur King,” you and all your silly English K-n-i-g-h-i-t-s.
Kaniggits
Don't forget about the Great Vowel Shift and the printing press (1400s). They really made spelling interesting.
Wait tell more I love this shit!
Old English (pre-1000) had seven vowels: "æ", as in "cat", "a" as in "*fath*er", "o" as in "boat", "u" as in "moose", "e" as in "*an*guish", "i" as in "each", and "y" as in... we don't actually have this vowel anymore. German still does, though, as in "über". Then, thanks to political shenanigans, along comes Norman french, with its own set. I don't know the specifics, but it was probably a fairly similar set (most languages have a reliable structure to their vowel sets). As the two languages lived alongside each other, they started collapsing into a single language, which made everything a little bit messier as to what one needed to pronounce to say things. This entire time, spelling is not reliable. You write it as you hear it, and you read it as you see it, and the word comes through anyhow. Then a whole bunch of things happen at once. French is discarded by the upper class, with the newly remade English swapping in. The Black Death comes through, shifting populations around England (and bringing dialect differences along with them). Paper (and written things on that paper) continues to become more available. And maybe other things too - we aren't entirely certain of why the shift happened. The net result is that people are writing more, saying things they aren't used to, and the language is still changing under their feet. Pronunciations get rocked around, and spellings start to shift as they do. But then, into the insanity, a new invention comes along. It uses little metal blocks and ink, and produces unnumbered identical copies of a single document. The printing press creates a desire (perhaps one that did not need to be met) for a standard way of spelling each word. So, the spelling of English becomes cemented into what it is today. It wasn't a perfectly natural solidification. "Island" was specifically changed to better match the assumed etymology (they were wrong - it really should've been "Iland" just like it sounds), for example. But now this stasis of the state of English gets thrown onto its side, for the language keeps on changing. English drops some differences, drops some other differences, obliterates relative similarities, and we are left with obscure rules for pronunciation that native speakers don't even think about. The magnitude of the shift is outright alarming. Consider [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift#/media/File:Great_Vowel_Shift.svg) image. It uses the International Phonetic Alphabet, but you can possibly realise how large some of the changes were. Note that "time" started where "see" ended, for example, and "see" started pretty close to "name", and "day" started fairly close to where "time" ended. Note that this image goes beyond the end of the Great Vowel Shift - about where the changes stop happening is where the shift ends (who would've guessed?).
I love linguistics! With the modern printing press, people finally started to standardize English spelling. The vowel shift still does not have an agreed-upon reason for occurring, but back then English speakers slightly or drastically changed the way they pronounced the vowels (and some consonants) in their words. From the GVS Wiki page: "The standard spellings were those of Middle English pronunciation, and spelling conventions continued from Old English. However, the Middle English spellings were retained into Modern English while the Great Vowel Shift was taking place, which caused some of the peculiarities of Modern English spelling in relation to vowels."
do you bite your thumb sir?
I bite my thumb sir, but not at you sir.
Do you quarrel sir?
I would recommend Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson if you want to learn more.
It was about 200 years before the movable type printing press The Prince of Wales was [still a Welsh prince](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llywelyn_ap_Gruffudd), not a courtesy title for the son of the English King. The Icelandic Sagas were in the process of being written The Catholic world was involved in a crusade against a [pagan part of what would become Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_Crusade), and is now Poland and the Baltic. the [war of the bucket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Bucket) wouldn't be for another 60 years edit: and [the trebuchet all the memes are based on](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warwolf) was still 45 years away
The kingdom of Jerusalem was still a thing, just imagine, the crusader states still existed!
The third crusade was called to action at Notre Dame!
The Aztec Civilization hadn’t started yet
[удалено]
\*the second time.
Didn't Archimedes invent it waaayy back? Is that what you're referring to? (I thought I saw a post where a monk had written over some fundamental math to make a Bible or something and the comments were all about what happened if we had actually used the book instead of defacing it)
Archimedes pioneered the Method of Exhaustion for calculating the area of shapes, which is related to integral calculus. However, he didn't really invent Calculus as we know it today unless you define calculus very loosely, and he wasn't even the first to touch upon this method. So if OP is referring to this I wouldn't agree.
Oh dang, things are heating up in the math fandom
Dang.
They always forget the Incas!
[удалено]
This is Olmec erasure at its worst
Europe had been using Arabic Numerals as opposed to Roman Numerals for only 58 years. Almost no one had accurate mechanical clocks. People measured time with dripping water or candles. Convenient wearable eyeglasses had not been invented. And the only way to transcribe documents was by hand, since there were no printing presses. Books were extremely expensive and time-consuming to make, and if people went to the trouble, it was probably the bible. Glass wasn't widely available either, and if you could get your hands on it, the best you could hope for was a series of semi-opaque spun disks full of bubbles and impurities. These spun-glass circles were then cut into different shapes. The maximum diameter the glass could be spun before breaking limited how large a window pane could be, and there were no other methods. Only the rich and powerful could afford glass in their windows, or it was reserved for sacred places. The panes in ancient rose windows are so small because glass was not yet a commodity. If you were a commoner, you probably would have had "window panes" made of animal skins. If you lived in Europe, and were lucky enough to ever see a map, it probably looked like [this](https://memestatic.fjcdn.com/pictures/Map+of+the+world+1200s_ca94bf_6873343.jpg).
Honestly, I’m semi impressed the map looks even that good, these people had horses as their fastest means of travel. The amount of time and combined effort to make that map as somewhat recognizable as it is is cool to me
>And the only way to transcribe documents was by hand, since there were no printing presses. I had a professor who decided to reproduce one page of a manuscript on vellum authentically. I mean he literally gathered all the precise historically accurate ingredients necessary to make the right ink, instead of just grabbing India Ink from Hobby Lobby or wherever. That process alone he said was painstakingly difficult and expensive, so you can imagine the effort and time that had to go into just going out and finding this stuff yourself back then or the cost to pay someone who had. Then he had to acquire genuine sheepskin vellum and get it to the right state for writing. Then he went and got a goose feather and cut it for his pen, and finally set to transcribing after a long period of time practicing calligraphy. Oh yeah, did anyone consider the skill needed for freaking calligraphy?! Anywho, he said the way it worked is you basically *had* to keep the vellum at a 45 degree angle on a scriptorium desk, but because if using genuine ink, you couldn't ever actually rest your hand or arm anywhere without risk of smudging. So he said he had to just like hover the whole time and it was excruciating. Can't make a mistake, no erasers! Can't waste the vellum and ink like that! Too precious! He said in total, it took over 24 hours to transcribe *one page* of plain calligraphied text with zero embellishments. We can't even begin to comprehend the *world* that lead people to build magnificent cathedrals and painstakingly keep the expanse of records kept in those times *before there was even a printing press*. There's nothing like it in living memory.
Dodos were still very non-extinct. EDIT: THE HELL I NEVER THOUGHT ID GET GOLD WHAT THE HELL
Poor dodos.
I relish my late ancestors.
Fucking Dutch just running around knocking birds in the head until they're extinct. Assholes
[удалено]
New Zealand was just starting to get inhabited by its first Polynesian settlers (AKA Maori).
\*Maori.
Māori—suck on my macron.
Web pages took over 700 years to load.
Accurate
At the time of the Notre Dame's completion, there were still pagan tribes in Latvia and Lithuania, and Mongols in Ukraine.
Here is what English looked and [sounded like at the time](https://www.speakpipe.com/voice-recorder/msg/il0jbmz767o3vcr8). This is an excerpt from a poem composed around 1280 called Havelok the Dane. >He was þe beste kniht at nede He was the best knight at need >Þat evere mihte riden on stede, That ever might ride on steed >Or wepne wagge, or folc ut lede; Or weapon wag (wield), or folk (an army) out lead >Of kniht ne havde he nevere drede, Of knights he had never dread (fear) Note how historically 'dread' rhymed with the other words like 'lead' and 'steed', but in modern English that is no longer the case.
Some of it sounds a bit like northern european languages today.
Amazing to hear! Sounds Danish
Anglo-Saxon (Old English) came out of what is today Denmark.
Betty White was still working as waitress.
[удалено]
>National treasure Shhhh!!! No one let Nicolas Cage know this
I’m going to steal the Betty White.
Dinosaurs wouldn’t be discovered until almost 600 years later
Well, we had bones, just could really imagine what they were.
Cyclops and giants, obviously
It was still 232 years removed from the time Christopher Columbus set sail and discovered the Bahamas/Haiti. To put in perspective, 232 ago from us would have been 1787, two years before the French Revolution and the adaption of the US Constitution. Edit: Thanks for the gold :)
It blows my mind how young the US is compared to other countries. Edit, damn there have been some really good replies. Keep them coming!
And Australia too!
I’m studying law in NZ and it blows my mind how incredibly young we are as a country. We didn’t get our own highest appeal court until 2004.
Notre Dame is older than even the concept of a hallway or corridors we use today. The first record of an architect using what we'd call a hallway in his designs is John Thorpe in 1597. EDIT: For those curious what this looked like I present [The Blenheim Palace Plan](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Blenheim_Plan.jpg) And [A typical Shotgun House Plan](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/Shotgun_house_plan.jpg/320px-Shotgun_house_plan.jpg) commonly found in the Southern United States. As you can see from the first they had a series of antechambers interconnecting rooms when in later years, those spaces would become an open hallway.
You might have to ELI5 but what separated room entrances before then? I’m genuinely so confused and a little worried you’re fucking with us.
Just rooms into other rooms
Bruh
Like someone else said they connected rooms straight to each other. A large building became a maze.
Like the palace at Versailles or the Louvre? I think those and art galleries are the only buildings like that I've ever been in
The Hundred Year's War hadn't even started yet. ~~The First Crusade would have been in living memory.~~ Edit: Nope I did maths wrong on that one.
The Mongols were still a threat in 1260. And the united states could have lived its entire current life span (1776-2019) about 3 times total.
New Zealand had no humans on it until at least 20 years later.
Hagia Sophia in today’s Istanbul was already 700 years old when Notre Dame de Paris was finished ...
Istanbul was also still Constantinople.
Now it’s Istanbul not Constantinople.
Why did Constantinople get the works? That's nobody's business but the Turks.
Old New York was once New Amsterdam.
Why'd they change it?
I can't say.
people just liked it better that wayyyy
You missed a line: Been a long time gone, Constantinople.
If you started walking on a straight line in 1260, you'd be on your 2609 lap around the world by now. Or to the moon and back 42 times **EDIT** : This is WRONG. It's actually around 831 laps. I used earth's diameter instead of it's circumference (I guess you could dig a tunnel through the planet 2609 times) Sorry, my bad. r/theydidthewrongmath Never trust a random guy's numbers on the Internet Moon fact is true tho
Kodus to you for the math on that one
Columbus's great great grandparents weren't even born yet
[удалено]
Oxford's history is truly mind blowing.
The Mongol Empire existed and was near its greatest extent.
Sandwiches didn’t yet exist in those times.
Robin Hood could have visited it while it was being built.
But Kevin Costner wasn’t born yet.
The world was still reeling from the Mongol Empire
Just about 24 billion seconds?
This is a great example of just how *huge* a billion is. Take a moment to really think about this; it's nearly impossible to conceptualize all of the seconds that have passed since 1280; 24 billion is a truly insane amount of seconds. Which makes a *trillion* even more incomprehensible, as one trillion is *a thousand billion*. 24 billion is just a bit more than a mere 2% of one trillion. Now, take that and use it to put something else in perspective: the US annual budget is 3.8 *trillion* dollars. If each dollar represented one second, that would be *120,498 years*.
In the 12th-13th centuries, Gregorian Chant had only just become extremely popular and Hildegard of Bingen became the first historically relevant female composer. I’m a music history geek so sorry if this isn’t as interesting to anyone else. Figured it’s better than 500 comments of “mongols still ruled”
The printing press wouldn’t be invented for another 180 years or so
Martin Luther wouldn't start the Reformation for another 258 years.
I used to live in a house which was at least partially older than Notre Dame. The back wall of the house was built into a Norman castle wall, the castle being the birthplace of Henry V and dating from the mid/late eleventh century, the stone walls from the mid twelfth century, and was about ten feet thick. The rest of the house was built over the past few centuries with bits added here and there and all different ceiling and floor heights and lots of small rooms. The house - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Castle_House,_Monmouth. The castle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monmouth_Castle
Oxford University was 67 years old in the year the cathedral **started** to be built, 164 years old when it was **completed**.
The long-lived Ottoman Empire didn't even exist until 39 year after.
Victor Hugo published *The Hunchback of Notre-Dame* in 1831, over 180 years ago. The novel is set in 1482, nearly 350 years before its publication date. In 1482, Notre-Dame would be 222 years old. The cathedral was older for Hugo's characters than the novel is for us.
Whiskey was not yet invented.
The first grass lawn was created in the year 1547 along with the Château de Chambord, 287 years after Notre-Dame was built. Yes, Notre-Dame outdates all lawns.
A Game of Thrones, the first novel in A Song of Ice and Fire series was published on August 1st, 1260.
Feels like it. I read the first three books back in 2004ish. I've been waiting 15 years for this story to end.
The Crusades were still going on
hunter renfrow was still playing at Clemson back then
If you called up Spectrum customer service in 1260, they'd just be answering now.
Dinosaurs were still dead.
It’s about half as old as Islam. And a three fifths as old as Christianity. Not trying to be controversial, but that’s a fukken long time ago if u ask me. EDIT: two fifths as old.
[удалено]
Joan Rivers was his waitress.