English may not change very much in 500 years, because written...

English may not change very much in 500 years, because written language changes slowly in a society where spelling is to a degree standardised, albeit with minor variation (mainly between British English and North American English). The pace of change has slowed remarkably since about 1700. A percentage of the people who could write have always written badly – it's not a new phenomenon – there are just more of them. However, modern technology by democratising the printed word (let the hoi polloi in) may speed up change, so my first sentence may prove to be incorrect.

With the help of Google, I wrote the stuff below for my personal amusement. It's not a topic in which many HC readers would have much interest, but having written it, I'll include it in this post.

Until about 1150, English (Old English) was closer to modern German than it is to modern English. One would only understand it after years of study, and then still have arguments with other scholars as to the meaning of specific written fragments of the language. Spelling was chaotic, with writers spelling words as they personally pronounced them. What helped to develop a corpus of knowledge about Old English is that the few people who wrote Old English could also write Latin, and they often either added Latin annotations, or mirrored the entire work in Latin.

From 1150 until about 1470 the language, Middle English, can be understood by an educated person with the help of a glossary, and if one were to read the whole of Canterbury Tales, towards the end the need to use the glossary would be sparse. What adds to the complexity of reading Chaucer is that he adapts language to suit each of the pilgrims, so one gets variations across social classes and regional dialects, which is more varied than the London-based language that he normally used himself. For instance, his characters variously use “I” , “Ik” (similar to Dutch) and “Ich (similar to German).

Early Modern English is the language used between circa 1470 and 1650, which even high school students can understand with some reference to assisting notes. The choice of 1470 as the dividing line between Middle English and Early Modern English may be linked to the introduction of printing. William Caxton set up a printing press in Bruges, Belgium, in 1473 and at Westminister in 1476. Caxton focussed on printing in English as a niche market to avoid competing with European printers in Latin and French – both literary languages popular in England. Caxton, although not a literary guru, played a significant role in standardising English vocabulary and spelling. He selected a London dialect and aimed at a language midway between ‘a clerke and a noble gentylman’. He thus avoided using the spoken language of the working class and dialects peculiar to the provinces. 1500 may be a better dividing line than 1470.

From about 1650 until now the English has not changed much – a teenager would have little difficulty reading prose written since 1650. If one reads a poem like “Elegy written in a Country Churchyard”, written by Thomas Gray before 1751 (when it was published), it requires no more assistance to be understood than would a poem written today in affected poetic language (e.g., “o'er the lea”, for “over the field”).