Indeed, Newspapers - printing in general - were definitely driving the condensation of language. The most telling example I once started to read in German and

Indeed, Newspapers - printing in general - were definitely driving the condensation of language. The most telling example I once started to read in German and sooner or later gave up on was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplicius_Simplicissimus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplicius_Simplicissimus Written 1668, it's written in a style that put a lot of long words after each other in a way that makes it hard to decipher to day. I had to follow a few obscure rules to understand things, one being not to start to try make sense of a sentence before reading up to the period. Towards the end, the wording was often upended completely by whatever additional constructs with which the author closed sentences. It isn't really because the individual words have become much different, but our use of language really shifted.