Lizardsquid, maker of noises @lizardsquid@computerfairi.es

@Violet *gently pets* sleep well, cute raccoon 💖

good morning, lovely lovelies!

@BatElite *purrs and wriggles under the pile*

@woozle *snuggles tight* ♥♥♥

avery ⇒ sleepzone

do you want to snuggle them to sleep

yes | very yes | I'll watch
--v----------v---------v

@synthgal LB → Last Boost

@Concerned_Catgirl @Elizafox every time I talk about English history with people who aren't linguists, I have to spend a few moments clarifying that "Old English" isn't shakespeare - shakespeare is Modern English and if we're talking about Old English, then we're talking about something much, much older

@synthgal If you favourite this post, I'll tell you
(ignore it if you don't want to know)

@BatElite I think the original version of "very" would have been close, but it's since changed meaning

it's interesting how fiction changed when literacy levels went up - it became much less flowery and much more dense

@Violet hi racoons I'm squibd

@BatElite that's partly the tales and partly the narrator - since most people were illiterate, tales like this were set up to be easy to be heard by several people at once, in perhaps a crowded room

something really cool is listening to the first few verses of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which was written in Middle English

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GihrWuysnrc

In English history, Old English is the language up to around ~1100 AD, Modern English is everything from Shakespeare onwards (1600s) and Middle English is the stuff in the middle

but when you first listen to it, it sounds so foreign and strange - you can still understand significant parts, so it's not a different *language*, but it is different

@Elizafox that's just how much languages change over time! language change is super interesting and has a lot of cool complexities - like English had the Great Vowel Shift, where (over the course of 200 years) every single long vowel changed to be a different sound