Knowing a bit of German or Dutch helps as well.

I posted my amateur translation of 1200 here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47102874

At first it stumped me, but I spent some time on it and it started to become intelligible. I didn't look up any words until after I was done, at which point I looked up "uuif" (woman/wife) since I wanted to know what manner of amazing creature had saved the protagonist :D

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dhosek 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Knowing that W is a late addition to the alphabet and would have been written UU or VV suddenly makes uuif obvious.

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antonvs 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I could intuit the pronunciation but I didn’t make the connection from “wif” to “woman” in general. In hindsight I should have, after all we have words like “midwife” which doesn’t refer to a person’s actual married partner.

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Symbiote an hour ago | parent | next [-]

"Wif" meant woman at the same time that "wer" meant man and "man" meant person.

Man changed to mean only a male person, and we lost wer except in the word "werewolf".

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remyp 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m a native English speaker and I think this is an easier jump if you know other Romance languages. In Spanish and Portuguese “woman” and “wife” are often the same word, “mujer” and “mulher” respectively.

	▲	DonaldFisk 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Also French femme. It isn't limited to Italic languages either. There's also German Frau, Dutch vrouw, Irish bean.