Comment by npilk
2 days ago
This is cool, I love the concept.
I wonder how much our understanding of past language is affected by survivorship bias? Most text would have been written by a highly-educated elite, and most of what survives is what we have valued and prized over the centuries.
For instance, this line in the 1800s passage:
> Hunger, that great leveller, makes philosophers of us all, and renders even the meanest dish agreeable.
This definitely sounds like the 1800s to me, but part of that is the romance of the idea expressed. I wonder what Twitter would have been like back then, for instance, especially if the illiterate had speech-to-text.
There's also a lot of historical writing out there that's more or less the shorthand scribblings of shopkeepers, foremen, and low-level clerks, so it's not all flowery prose. There's even surviving Egyptian hieroglyphics that are more or less just work logs, and they're quite different than the painted ones in the tombs. Then there's the graffiti that's all over Pompeii.