4 ms·

Five hundred years ago is Shakespeare, roughly. Still readily understandable for the most part. Now if we go back a thousand years…

• kevinmchugh 5y ago
  Shakespeare and the KJV are both closer to 400 years old. Shakespeare wanted to be accessible, though modern readers still need annotations to understand some of the words and most of the references. The KJV was intentionally somewhat archaic. There's a big difference in how accessible KJV is vs Shakespeare But otherwise yeah, the Norman Conquest did a number on the language
• paxys 5y ago
  Shakespeare wrote in what is referred to as "Early Modern English". It is no secret that his writings were a big influence in the evolution of the language itself. If you look at some of his contemporaries from the same period, however, their language will be very different and much harder to understand.
  • dhosek 5y ago
    My specialty in undergrad was 15th and 16th century poetry. His contemporaries' writing (and writings from the early 15th c.) was no harder to read than Shakespeare.¹ The biggest challenge would be the irregularities of spelling—before the printing press and for at least a century afterwards, English spelling was inconsistent and flexible (and frequently was left up to the compositor for printed materials which led to different spellings for a word in the same document to make line breaks work better). ⸻⸻⸻ 1. A notable exception would be Edmund Spenser who wrote in a style that was archaic even to his contemporaries.