I hate to be so contrarian, and I'm beginning to question people's knowledge in this thread, but I was taught Middle English and they hammered home how it was very close to modern English.
Yes, a lot of students were first shocked and disagreed, but if you stuck with it, you would see a lot of similarities. One thing that I think threw off a lot of students was the spelling versus the pronunciation.
If you analyze Middle English on a purely visual or "literal" level, it looks almost nothing like English. Once you start learning the pronunciation and liaisons and connecting words, and with a few minor pronunciation differences, you really do begin to hear its strong correlations to modern English.
In an objective sense, Middle English is very close to modern English. Modern German is also very close to modern English. That means learning either language will be much easier for an English speaker than e.g. learning Japanese would be. But it doesn't mean that knowledge of modern English is sufficient to understand Middle English.
I think you missed my point, starting from scratch you might get say 50%+ percent of Middle English and it's fairly easy to learn the rest. But, this is only 650 years ago, 3,000 years is several cycles like this.
We teach students modern versions of really old stories like gilgamesh and enkidu, but not in their original format.
I hate to be so contrarian, and I'm beginning to question people's knowledge in this thread, but I was taught Middle English and they hammered home how it was very close to modern English.
Yes, a lot of students were first shocked and disagreed, but if you stuck with it, you would see a lot of similarities. One thing that I think threw off a lot of students was the spelling versus the pronunciation.
If you analyze Middle English on a purely visual or "literal" level, it looks almost nothing like English. Once you start learning the pronunciation and liaisons and connecting words, and with a few minor pronunciation differences, you really do begin to hear its strong correlations to modern English.