I am French, interested in middle age history. There is simply no way I can read something which is 600 years old. I could maybe decipher one word out of 50.

I heard old French read aloud. I understood 10% (optimistically) and not even the overall meaning.

I would say that starting from the 1700's the language slowly makes sense.

> Is this unusual, though? Fairly certain most romance language speakers can understand at least some latin if they put their minds to it.

Yes it works for basic texts, you can understand some words here and there.

> Yes it works for basic texts, you can understand some words here and there.

Even as an English speaker, which is not a romance language, I can understand quite a few Latin words here and there, due to the fact that something like 50% of English vocabulary was borrowed from Latin or other romance languages.

And so, for that matter, can we from the cold, benighted, Germanic north.

It pivots on what we mean by "understand fragments".

The average English speaker cannot make sense of Latin prose. Picking out a few words here and there, isn't the same thing.

"Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur."

All but 'Latine', and perhaps 'dictum', is gibberish to the average English speaker.

English is not a Romance language. It is Germanic.

Even Old English is pretty much unreadable by most speakers of Modern English. They still used runes rather than Latin letters 1500 years ago, but even transliterated you'd have a hell of a time.

First stanza of Beowulf in Old English, transliterated into Latin characters:

> Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah, oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra ofer hronrade hyran scolde, gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning. ðæm eafera wæs æfter cenned, geong in geardum, þone god sende folce to frofre; fyrenðearfe ongeat þe hie ær drugon aldorlease lange hwile.

It seems painful. I feel that in Romance languages is easier to identify the roots.

Now that I think about it, I have never read Romance text written before the XIII century: Cantigas, Dante, etc.

It has multiple roots, thanks mainly to the Normans. It also has a habit of plundering vocabulary from other languages, to the point where a single thesaurus entry might list synonyms with etymological origins from a dozen different languages. It can also smash affixes from disparate languages together without shame, particularly prevalent as mixes of Greek and Latin.

There is a decent chance that an English speaker with a broad vocabulary would be able to recognize individual words in any foreign language that can be expressed with the ASCII character set.

Oops, I missed that.

I think it is amazing you can read and understand 1,500-year-old writings on museum pieces. That is awesome!