What follows is a hypothesis of mine. I'm wondering if there's
historical merit for my hypothesis. It seems the English
language has a much bigger change between the documents produced
in the early 1800s to those produced in the early 1900s, than
the early 1900s documents have until now. For example, in the
late 1700s/early 1800s, the letter u was still sometimes
represented as v (i.e. as in the US Constitution), but no such
changes in the glyphs used to represent the language, nor
"structure words" (words critical to language structure, i.e.
"is" or "the" or "a"), have occurred in the last hundred years.
There have been significant changes in typical vocabulary, but
not in language structure. I suspect that a large reason for
this is the spread of mass communication systems, such as office
typewriters, Xerox machines, rail transportation, telegraph, and
(most recently) computers. My guess is that the reason is that
when you have mass communication at the scale these technologies
span, standardized language b