I had trouble with the quotes (from previous centuries): I read the first 5 or so of them, and never became confident I knew what any of them meant. It is possible (but not likely) that my ability to read seventeenth-century english is no better than my ability to read French or German. (I’m a native English speaker. I would guess that I’ve spent at least as much time learning to read English from at least 300 years ago as I’ve spent learning to read French, i.e., not much time.) Because the quotes are a large fraction of the blog post, I felt I needed to give up on it even though I was very eager to learn about the topic.
That was approximately 24 hours ago (when I found the blog post on Hacker News). Just now as part of my preparation of this comment, I notice that the final 2 paragraphs of the post contain no quotes from previous centuries, and of course I had no trouble understanding them. My suggestion for improving the article is to move those 2 final paragraphs up to before the start of the quotes, so that people like me who give up on the article because of the old-English quotes see them.
It is unclear to me whether I’m just unusually bad at reading old English for a native English speaker or whether you are overestimating your audience’s ability to read old English.
I understand your point. Probably I’m overestimating. Which quotes were hard? I’m guessing that e.g. “the commandement, or example of our superiours” and “grant [sin] but her little, and this little will quickly come to a great deale” are relatively clear.
Reading C17 English isn’t hard to learn: it’s modern English (not Middle or Old) but just in an antiquated style and sometimes words have different shades of meaning. By “not hard” I mean you can teach yourself, simply by reading stuff and picking it up as you go along—I did Shakespeare at school, then Hobbes’ Leviathan and Locke’s Treatises on Liberty. (I wouldn’t start with Puritan self-help literature!) It’s worthwhile, because you get access to a bunch of people who thought in ways very different to your own time. That helps you surmount historical parochialism (https://wyclif.substack.com/p/parochialism-in-time-and-space).
I had trouble with the quotes (from previous centuries): I read the first 5 or so of them, and never became confident I knew what any of them meant. It is possible (but not likely) that my ability to read seventeenth-century english is no better than my ability to read French or German. (I’m a native English speaker. I would guess that I’ve spent at least as much time learning to read English from at least 300 years ago as I’ve spent learning to read French, i.e., not much time.) Because the quotes are a large fraction of the blog post, I felt I needed to give up on it even though I was very eager to learn about the topic.
That was approximately 24 hours ago (when I found the blog post on Hacker News). Just now as part of my preparation of this comment, I notice that the final 2 paragraphs of the post contain no quotes from previous centuries, and of course I had no trouble understanding them. My suggestion for improving the article is to move those 2 final paragraphs up to before the start of the quotes, so that people like me who give up on the article because of the old-English quotes see them.
It is unclear to me whether I’m just unusually bad at reading old English for a native English speaker or whether you are overestimating your audience’s ability to read old English.
I understand your point. Probably I’m overestimating. Which quotes were hard? I’m guessing that e.g. “the commandement, or example of our superiours” and “grant [sin] but her little, and this little will quickly come to a great deale” are relatively clear.
Reading C17 English isn’t hard to learn: it’s modern English (not Middle or Old) but just in an antiquated style and sometimes words have different shades of meaning. By “not hard” I mean you can teach yourself, simply by reading stuff and picking it up as you go along—I did Shakespeare at school, then Hobbes’ Leviathan and Locke’s Treatises on Liberty. (I wouldn’t start with Puritan self-help literature!) It’s worthwhile, because you get access to a bunch of people who thought in ways very different to your own time. That helps you surmount historical parochialism (https://wyclif.substack.com/p/parochialism-in-time-and-space).