A Question about Antique Books

[rousseau]

I figure we'll have a few people who can speak to this question..

What I'm curious about is at what point books written in English tended to become more readable to the modern reader? Presumably throughout the last millennia old English moved toward the modernized form; would there be a rough time-period when older books started looking more familiar to us?

I ask because I've been interested in buying something pre-19th century for a while, but I actually like reading the texts I buy. Would it be possible to find something discernible from the 17th century, for example?

 

[bilby]

I figure we'll have a few people who can speak to this question..

What I'm curious about is at what point books written in English tended to become more readable to the modern reader? Presumably throughout the last millennia old English moved toward the modernized form; would there be a rough time-period when older books started looking more familiar to us?

I ask because I've been interested in buying something pre-19th century for a while, but I actually like reading the texts I buy. Would it be possible to find something discernible from the 17th century, for example?

C17th English is not too difficult to read, once you get used to it, but you do need to be aware of significant changes in some word meanings, and to be able to tolerate the subtle changes in how some letters are printed - an ‘s’, particularly as the first of a pair, often looks more like a modern ‘f’, and a ‘w’ is occasionally typeset using literally a double ‘u’, or a double ‘v’.

Usually context is sufficient for a modern reader to decode these minor changes, but they do reduce significantly your reading speed (or at least, they do mine).

There’s no particular ‘cut off’ point between the C17th and today where texts suddenly become more readable; It’s very much a continuous gradual change.

Prior to the C17th, things get a lot more difficult, as most text is handwritten, rather than printed, and even the printed stuff hasn’t yet settled into regular convention, so it’s much more variable.