Sorry for the late reply and thank you for spending quite a lot of time responding to me. > But your comment is intriguing; I'm mostly struck by the idea that

Sorry for the late reply and thank you for spending quite a lot of time responding to me. > But your comment is intriguing; I'm mostly struck by the idea that the style of 1950s is so much different from that of 2020s. I threw the 1950s into my comment because that is post WW2 and pre me - I'm 50 ie off of 1970 and onwards. I perhaps didn't think it through too much. I am a Brit wot went through the private school system in general apart from the six or seven schools in West Germany, London and Manchester before age eight. My upbringing was loosely observant Church of England. The CofE Book of Common Prayer, Hymnal etc was full of thee and thou and was modernised to you and you around those decades. You still hear "for Thine is the Kingdom" in the Lord's Prayer even today. Thine, thee and thou (your, you and you) are still in use. You also see what looks like Ye or ye but the letter that looks like Yy is really the letter thorn so ye is really thee. Shake the spear wrote during the time of the great vowel shift in English which seems to have taken about 300 years. Spelling in his time was pretty random and looks more like hints and indications, rather than "correct". My home town of Yeovil has over sixty documented spellings since around 400CE. A lot of them are seen in those 300 years. I would put Shakey into a different brand of English because I doubt that he and I could have conversed. My mum could make herself completely unintelligible by falling back to her girlhood Devonian dialect from the 40s/50s. Language is way more interesting and diverse than a WP page can possibly describe. I do love WP - its a cracking project and I've written quite a lot of WM (M not P - I'm a nerd not a clever bloke) pages. However it does fall short sometimes due to some small minded editors who squat on their pages and refuse to allow changes. Language scholarship used to need a bit of a kicking but I think that is quietly happening over the last 20-30 years. I'm not an expert in any way but I do see signs of broadmindedness and proper scholarship in some of the books I read that have a language component. That said, you then get threads like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27721748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27721748 . Search for the terms Chinese and Sanscrit for the exciting bits (or the bits where you quietly close the door and wander off.) There are some decent ideas and comments in there but they are really hard to find. Sadly, aggressive nationalism is rearing its ugly head in no small way. I'm a Brit and well aware of my nation's past. It seems like everyone wants to piss off the rest of the world a la the worst excesses of the British Empire. My forebears () invented the word jingoism and it is quite awful seeing others not learning the lessons of our past. Whoops, sorry. Back in the room ... 8) () I should point out that my documented ancestors include people who identified with all four UK nations and the male line runs back to Germany (Hanover) in around 1750 where the trail runs cold.