Survival tips if you find yourself in the Middle Ages?

Re:Survival tips if you find yourself in the Middle Ages? by vaksel on Saturday January 03, 2009 @03:33PM (#418656)

there are a few series that cover that area.(not exact mind you, but close enough)

First you have the Assati Shards series(1632, 1633, 1634)...basically a town in Virginia get transferred to Germany in 1632.

And then you have the Conrad the Engineer series, where you have a guy transported to 13th century Poland, just before the Mongol invasion.

But chances are, no matter where you wind up...you'll be dead within a week. Why? Simple...language barrier. You won't be able to understand a thing....even if you wind up in the most civilized English speaking country. So you'll probably wind up getting burned as a demon who is speaking in tongues

For example...this is what Beowulf's first few lines look like in original english.

  Hwæt! We Gardena         in geardagum,
  þeodcyninga,         þrym gefrunon,
  hu ða æþelingas         ellen fremedon.
  Oft Scyld Scefing         sceaþena þreatum,

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Re:Survival tips if you find yourself in the Middle Ages? by lionheart on Saturday January 03, 2009 @04:17PM (#418681)

The language barrier is an interesting point.

I wonder if there are any places with languages that haven't changed that much?

Do you think I might be able to get along in the Middle East in 1000 AD if I knew modern Hebrew?

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Re:Survival tips if you find yourself in the Middle Ages? by quantumhobbit on Saturday January 03, 2009 @04:55PM (#418713)

Latin would be your best bet in Europe. The general populace wouldn't understand you but you could endear yourself to the clergy with it.

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Re:Survival tips if you find yourself in the Middle Ages? by ars on Saturday January 03, 2009 @08:31PM (#418856)

Modern hebrew is somewhat different, but understandable to those that speak biblical hebrew. But I think in those days they did not speak it, but rather spoke aramaic.

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Re:Survival tips if you find yourself in the Middle Ages? by joeyo on Saturday January 03, 2009 @04:29PM (#418691)

I don't know about Hebrew but I bet Arabic would be the language to know in 1000 AD if you were in Spain or Persia or many points in between.

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Re:Survival tips if you find yourself in the Middle Ages? by gaius on Saturday January 03, 2009 @04:43PM (#418706)

Arabic's a good bet because the Qu'ran is still written in the original Mediaeval Arabic and people learn it in order to read it in its original form. The accent might have changed over time but Arabic's going to be good for any time in the last 1300 years.

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Re:Survival tips if you find yourself in the Middle Ages? by showerst on Sunday January 04, 2009 @12:26AM (#419029)

Modern Standard Arabic (The generalized approximation of what college-educated people speak nowadays) is fairly different from Koranic Arabic, but it'd still probably be at least somewhat mutually intelligible, so you could pass as being from some other part of the Arab world I suppose.

Spain would've probably been the best possible place to land during the Ummayad/Abbasid Caliphates (before about 1085 or so), but it was a very rough place afterward (the Almoravid/Almohad Caliphates were not known for tolerance, and the reconquest was even worse)

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Re:Survival tips if you find yourself in the Middle Ages? by ctkrohn on Sunday January 04, 2009 @01:29PM (#419358)

Modern Icelandic is very close to medieval Icelandic as spoken by the Vikings. Apparently, manuscripts of the sagas can be read and interpreted by an Icelandic speaker with no special training, just as you or I could read an original printing of one of Shakespeare's plays.

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Re:Survival tips if you find yourself in the Middle Ages? by rsheridan6 on Sunday January 04, 2009 @12:04AM (#419013)

Strangely, it appears that, on the basis of one year of college Spanish combined with lots of practice from being the closest thing to a bilingual person at a job I had, I would be better off in Spain than England.

There's a comparison of El Cid in Old Spanish and modern Spanish at wikipedia (see link below), and they don't appear to be very different. Spain was not conquered by non-Spanish speaking foreigners between 1000 and now, so it's not surprising that the language has changed less than English.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Spanish_language

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Re:Survival tips if you find yourself in the Middle Ages? by pageman on Sunday January 04, 2009 @05:42PM (#419649)

plus they have Real Academia Española to regulate the intake of new words while English doesn't :)

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