The person you're talking to is German, so the answer is presumably at least two. :-) I'm a native English speaker, and I've noticed that English writers got m

The person you're talking to is German, so the answer is presumably at least two. :-) I'm a native English speaker, and I've noticed that English writers got much better over time -- ineffable depth be damned. When I read people writing in early modern English, they tend to be... not pleasing to the reader, not near as much as recent authors. And it's not a matter of changing dialects, because I have no trouble fluently reading stuff from a few centuries ago. It just feels like progress has been made in writing techniques. How many other languages, I wonder, have had the chance to undergo this same evolution? (I have no other languages to compare this to, so take this with many grains of salt.)