Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
It's not really changed in the last 200+ years. You'll find that, if you read the novels of Jane Austen (one of my favourite authors), it's pretty much indistinguishable from today's English. There'll be words you don't understand relating to things like different types of horse-drawn carriage (of which there were a bewildering variety!), and there'll be a few spellings which have slightly changed (eg "shew" instead of "show", "stopt" instead of "stopped"), but overall you won't have the slightest difficulty in understanding the language.
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actually, I've got no problem reading Robinson Crusoe and that's from the early XVIII century.
Shakespeare and Milton do demand more cautious reading, though. However, you soon become acquainted with the arcaic idiom used.
The original text of Beowulf is a total no-no for me. and I guess for you too...
