3/3/2026 at 2:49:22 AM
by wglb
3/5/2026 at 1:27:25 PM
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".by romanhn
3/5/2026 at 12:23:24 PM
I just love the sounds in sentence "...Arabization of Dongola in the Funj period."Dongola in the Funj period sounds like the place to be!
by xrd
3/5/2026 at 2:58:56 PM
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.”
by philomath_mn
3/5/2026 at 5:01:18 PM
That's kind of weird, isn't it?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.
by goodmythical
3/5/2026 at 7:59:28 PM
And yet still, while you remain mildly puzzled as you surmise the above, someone more familiar with the area and history standing right beside you will perceive the same sentence with a completely different emotional reaction.That gap - knowing this is probably fundamentally deeper when perceived by someone else - is what the author is getting at. He can feel that's missing for him. Even if he's not completely left devoid of all comprehension of the passage.
by atomicnumber3
3/5/2026 at 9:05:43 PM
Funj times!by coldtea
3/5/2026 at 2:14:58 PM
Uh, probably it would have been a place to be avoided for a non-Arabby ameminator
3/5/2026 at 2:26:36 PM
Why?by nwhnwh
3/5/2026 at 2:47:31 PM
because then your dongola would be all Arabized!by sach1
3/5/2026 at 5:09:51 PM
Sounds Funj!by canadiantim
3/5/2026 at 3:42:55 PM
[flagged]by blargthorwars
3/5/2026 at 5:11:35 PM
[flagged]by bigyabai
3/5/2026 at 5:19:40 PM
[flagged]by jazz9k
3/3/2026 at 2:50:27 AM
Paper at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0067270X.2026.2... from Azania: Archaeological Research in Africaby wglb
3/5/2026 at 10:16:55 AM
The writing style (in Arabic) feels like a message in a chat. It's a mix between dialect and official Arabic.by Oras
3/5/2026 at 10:42:08 AM
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.by interstice
3/5/2026 at 12:48:36 PM
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.
by marginalia_nu
3/5/2026 at 12:55:43 PM
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.by graemep
3/5/2026 at 6:30:47 PM
Also, they're plays, not books. I think much of their reputation for difficulty comes from generations of English teachers making students study them like books when they're meant to be acted on a stage. While it's still poetry, it's much easier for laypeople to understand when conveyed through acting.by mitthrowaway2
3/5/2026 at 1:18:41 PM
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.
by Broken_Hippo
3/5/2026 at 2:22:44 PM
> 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?Yes... my own recounting of freshman high school English (it was the late 80s) https://everything2.com/node/1207826
by shagie
3/5/2026 at 6:56:59 PM
You had a great teacher. I learned something today :PBut I think that affirms the GP's point. The jokes needed explanation, which is what you'd expect when the audience is from a different culture and don't understand them natively.
by hnfong
3/5/2026 at 9:19:26 PM
My apologies if I didn't make that clear - my "yes" was to the question "Do you think anyone explains it to them?"And yep, she was a very good English teacher. It was a more fun class than the other English classes I had through the years. Composition was a pain, but that the teacher was a stickler for everything it helped with my writing and communication skills today. English lit from Beowulf to Pope was a slog. Ancient was ok (mostly Ancient Greek which got into more philosophy rather than word choice because it was a translation). Modern literature was only enjoyable because of Thoreau - I think that was also where I read Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead ... the other plays weren't as memorable.
Aside on that - read The Necklace (in English) in one of those classes... I'm fairly sure that was senior year. In college I took French to finish out my foreign language requirement and the final exam was reading comprehension for La Parure in French. I knew the story and so was able to quickly skim for vocabulary rather than needing to read every page.
All in all, looking back it was good, but as with most school classes, they weren't classes that I enjoyed going to at the time.
by shagie
3/5/2026 at 2:32:11 PM
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!
by graemep
3/5/2026 at 2:53:41 PM
> A lot of that is just that English along with much of western vernacular wasn't given standardized spelling until fairly recentlyAs many of us learned recently from this great article: https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-u...
by jkestner
3/5/2026 at 1:50:30 PM
Nah, you’ve got to go to Chaucer to get the really hard to parse but still understandable stuff.by simonklitj
3/5/2026 at 2:01:00 PM
Or reading Hitchhiker's Guide or Discworld as a non-Brit or non-English speaker.by Cthulhu_
3/5/2026 at 11:20:09 AM
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.by wongarsu
3/5/2026 at 11:49:43 AM
Yes Arabic from 1000 years ago is very much understandable today[1].by asabil
3/5/2026 at 12:39:12 PM
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.by Bayart
3/5/2026 at 3:56:18 PM
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.
by asabil
3/5/2026 at 4:04:47 PM
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.by Bayart
3/5/2026 at 4:08:22 PM
[dead]by catlover76
3/5/2026 at 11:23:05 AM
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.)by dghf
3/5/2026 at 11:51:50 AM
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).
by biofox
3/5/2026 at 9:18:54 PM
Yep. If you hear Chaucer read aloud by someone who knows the phonetics and the meaning it's instantly like 75% comprehensible. If they give you a bit (like, half a class-period) more help, you'll get to ~90% without any more effort than that. Chaucer is more or less as incomprehensible as Glaswegian - that is to say, it's a bit tricky, and you won't know all the slang, but you can get used to it pretty quickly.What's really fun is that if you keep the dialect in your head, and try reading it out loud with your best "Chaucer accent" it feels like slipping on a pair of glasses: you immediately "get" stuff that you'd have thought was impenetrable just looking at the page.
Source: my medieval lit classes, with a teacher who was really good.
by eszed
3/5/2026 at 4:50:20 PM
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.by SoftTalker
3/5/2026 at 9:33:20 PM
English nerd (and former English teacher) here, and I think for high school students that's a good idea. It's not actually an impossible text, and an introduction to the real thing is useful and interesting, but forcing teenagers to go through everything in the original is too much of an obstacle for most students.Also: only reading the "boring" bits. When I was in high school I was excused English classes (took English 101 at the local college instead - told you I was a nerd), but overheard my classmates hating their way through "The Wife of Bath's Tale", or "The Knight's Tale" - one of those - and introduced them (nerd!) to "The Miller's Tale" - broad scatalogical comedy - which they loved. Later I did something similar for them with Gulliver's Travels, by showing them the bit where he has fairly graphic sex with the giantess. (I think that's an actual kink, but I certainly didn't know that at the time!)
by eszed
3/5/2026 at 12:08:18 PM
I wonder what modern English would look like if the battle of Hastings went differentlyby usrnm
3/5/2026 at 12:40:17 PM
Take a look at Frisian for the beginning of an answer.by Bayart
3/5/2026 at 4:23:52 PM
Great find. This is the kind of content that makes HN worthwhile.by syncsys87
3/5/2026 at 3:13:59 PM
Please don’t edit the titleby coin
3/5/2026 at 2:25:04 PM
Dots?by nwhnwh
3/5/2026 at 9:35:24 AM
That was interesting, notwithstanding the editorialising comments by Tomasz Barański.by nephihaha
3/5/2026 at 12:18:27 PM
I would expect no less from a graduate of the University of Warsaw.This writing (and speaking) style permeates this institution.
by Tade0
3/5/2026 at 5:21:42 PM
>That was interesting, notwithstanding the editorialising comments by Tomasz Barański.you are upset by these comments which this article's author chose to quote?:
As lead author Tomasz Barański explains, however, this transformation was far from sudden. "Nubia was not a marginal or isolated region of the Nile Valley, but a pivotal corridor connecting the Mediterranean world to sub-Saharan Africa. Rather than a civilizational dead end, Nubia functioned for millennia as a dynamic zone of movement for people, goods, and ideas. Through Nubia passed commodities such as gold, ivory, and enslaved people, but it also enabled the exchange of less tangible elements: technologies, religious beliefs, and political models.
"Moreover, Nubian communities were not passive recipients of outside influence; they actively shaped and adapted the flows passing through this corridor. This long history of exchange helps us understand later cultural transformations in the region, including Arabization and Islamization. These were not sudden ruptures, but part of a much older pattern of interaction, negotiation, and adaptation that has characterized Sudan throughout history."
Barański notes that further discoveries may yet follow: "Preliminary analysis of the letters from Building A.1 suggests distinct patterns in the circulation of correspondence, hinting at a coherent communication network. This network encompassed not only the city's religious and administrative elites, but possibly also the leaders of nomadic groups herding flocks in the surrounding regions."
Additionally, he adds, "the discovery of this seemingly inconspicuous scrap of paper, when situated within the larger context of gift-giving culture and traditional royal patronage navigating local micropolitics, provides a vivid example of how archaeological fieldwork continues to produce material that bridges the gap between material culture and written history."
by fsckboy
3/5/2026 at 10:56:24 AM
[dead]by draw_down