|
That's the reason too why most historical fiction set before 18th C reads like a mix of 18th C and 19th C.
Actual 18th C authors are pretty readable. 17th & 16th progressively harder and 15th C authors in "English" very hard or impossible for modern readers.
The 17th C. King James and Douay Bibles currently in print are not the original versions. Shakespeare is more Jacobean (17th C.) than Elizabethan (16th C); Elizabeth had been ruling for about 25 years when Shakespeare started. Also neither KJV nor Shakespeare used language as anyone used it day-to-day in speech or writing.
You could write a readable Regency novel using the sort of English in Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, or Jane Austen (who makes fun of other 18th C authors in Nothanger Abbey, or Ann Radcliffe. But those writers included little local dialect. It's also the language of the educated.
I've more objection to 19th C and pre 1930s settings written today (or in last 30-40 years) that get it wrong.
P.G Wodehouse (1881 – 1975) seems trapped in the 1920s or even before WWI and practically in his schooldays. He wrote about 30 books from 1940.
It's not hard to get a wide variety of 18th C to early 19thC books for free and absorb the style and language. Recreating that doesn't need the excessive Macaroni Cant of Georgette Heyer (though not all he books use it excessively). The resultant readability would depend on the skill of the author and education of the reader as current dictionaries in ereaders are lacking many of the words that have become disused.
|