Comment by dmurray
4 days ago
> Somewhere in this section — and if you’re like most readers, it happened around 1300 or 1200 — the language crossed a boundary. Up to this point, comprehension felt like it was dropping gradually, but now it’s fallen off a cliff.
This is generous to his readers. Most American college students majoring in English can't read Dickens, according to a study discussed here last year [0].
People reading a post on a blog about dead languages are self-selected to be better at this task. But so are people who've decided to spend four years of their life studying English literature.
In fairness , Dickens is quite dry. My mind would wonder off.
In some sense, it's better these days, competition has led to care for the reader that probably didn't exist as much then, since so few people can read.
Funny how I, as non native english speaker I lose it completely around 1200-1100's. But maybe that is because I know other languages like german, french, spanish and italian? I feel the biggest issue for me was keeping up with the letters changes rather than the new words.