Top all-time · #5127
Colin Gorrie
Personal blog · deadlanguagesociety.comwritinghistory
Colin Gorrie writes Dead Language Society, a personal blog at deadlanguagesociety.com about writing and history. Since 2025, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “How far back in time can you understand English?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Colin Gorrie's Dead Language Society posts on the history of English, including lost letters, why English lacks accents, Old English riddles, colour words and how far back English is readable.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
English is weirder than you think. A weekly dive into the hidden history of everyday words.
Most-linked posts?
- How far back in time can you understand English?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-02-18
- Why English doesn't use accents2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-07-06
What Hacker News says?
Only þ (thorn) died with the printing of Caxton's Bible using y-, for cost reasons. The other letters -- ƿ (wynn), æ (ash), and ð (eth) -- went out of use long before movable type printing. https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/the-lost-letters-of-th...
Comment linking /p/the-lost-letters-of-the-english-alphabet
on “Why English doesn't use accents”Submitted Why English doesn't use accents as a story · 350 points
HN discussionOn the other hand, English is a Germanic language and got influenced by French. A nice recent article talked about why English doesn't use accents (because... of French) [1]. Just to say it's not uncommon at all to have languages influence each other. [1]: https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/why-english-doesnt-use...
Comment linking /p/why-english-doesnt-use-accents
on “Show HN: I built this to talk Danish to my girlfriend – works with any language”Submitted The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh as a story · 317 points
HN discussionI found the linked riddles page more interesting! https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/the-1000-year-old-ridd...
Comment linking /p/the-1000-year-old-riddles-we-still
on “How to get started with Old English poetry”Submitted “Weird” is a weird word as a story · 91 points
HN discussionI have a soft spot for such folklore. Strictly speaking, much doesn't hold up to scrutiny but I see no wrong with wild conjecture for the fun of it. For starters, some catastrophes do shine through more recent history: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer Then, Nuclear Evangelism is a fun idea,…
Comment linking /p/does-your-name-belong-in-the-odyssey-indo-european-names
on “What Happened to the Neanderthals?”Submitted How to get started with Old English poetry as a story · 50 points
HN discussionhttps://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/history-english-colour... > It’s not that people in the past couldn’t see blue. Indeed, there were several words which could refer to things we would call blue today, but these words could also describe things we’d assign to other colours too, especially grey and green.
Comment linking /p/history-english-colour-words
on “Olo (Color)”Submitted How far back in time can you understand English? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSee Colin Gorrie's "How far back in time can you understand English?".[0] [0]: https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-u...
Comment linking /p/how-far-back-in-time-understand-english
on “Reading English from 1000 Ad”Submitted Could Beowulf See Blue? as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> A lot of that is just that English along with much of western vernacular wasn't given standardized spelling until fairly recently As many of us learned recently from this great article: https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-u...
Comment linking /p/how-far-back-in-time-understand-english
on “Arabic document from 17th-cent. rubbish heap confirms semi-legendary Nubian king”Submitted Why the word "mead" shows up in Chinese as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted How far back in time can you understand English? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Classical Chinese poetry: a guide for the curious (2023) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why ChatGPT writes like that as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
