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Re:Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is takin... by pjscott on Friday July 27, 2018 @10:31PM (#17631175)
The person you're talking to is German, so the answer is presumably at least two. :-)

I'm a native English speaker, and I've noticed that English writers got much better over time -- ineffable depth be damned. When I read people writing in early modern English, they tend to be... not pleasing to the reader, not near as much as recent authors. And it's not a matter of changing dialects, because I have no trouble fluently reading stuff from a few centuries ago. It just feels like progress has been made in writing techniques. How many other languages, I wonder, have had the chance to undergo this same evolution?

(I have no other languages to compare this to, so take this with many grains of salt.)

Re:Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is takin... by bunderbunder on Saturday July 28, 2018 @10:55AM (#17633412)
Could it instead be that the language that people find pleasing changes over time, so that, as a modern reader, your tastes are naturally more attuned to modern writing?