sweetmotherofbuckets:

So while I was in the shower having general thoughts about yaoiz and shipping and singing one of my choir pieces, I had a thought.

So in today’s modern era, pretty much every highschool kid has had trouble with understand Shakespeare. In fact, they’ve had trouble with a lot of the classical novels because of the dialect back then.

Well perhaps, if we put it into perspective, here’s what I think:

A thousand years from now, the modern era from that age is going to look at all of our books and stories and dialect, and they’re going to have as much trouble with it as we do with Shakespeare and really old works.They’re going to over-analyze everything and make completely weird metaphors and shit.

Just think of the trouble they’re going to have with Homestuck

WELLLLLL in my opinion I don’t know how true that will be :T  Shakespeare is hard to understand chiefly because it is poetry not prose.  It is written in a lyrical format and the lines for the most part are written to adhere to the metrical rhythm of the iambic pentameter.  This wasn’t difficult to grasp for educated people, but even back then the unwashed masses didn’t get Shakespeare either.  It’s highly specialized language FORM that is not used anymore.  The diction and word choice are pretty easy to pick up and don’t vary TOO much from the words we use today, save for some antiquated terms and idioms and the like.  Trouble with vocabulary is a very easily fixed problem nowadays if you read with a computer or even a phone with internet next to you!  When people have a hard time understanding a book it’s usually not because it uses words that are hard for the reader to understand, but because the prose itself is constructed in a manner that is dense and difficult.  Like you said, you look at some of the older writers like Dickens or the Bronte sisters or Shaw and the like and their sentences are SO ponderous and complex it takes a lot to unravel!

However many modern works, including Homestuck, are written in a much more colloquial voice.  There used to be a MUCH stronger emphasis placed on speaking conventions versus writing conventions and that line has hence been pretty much ignored.  There were STANDARDS back then, just like there were standards for art!  People could only paint a certain way and people could only write a certain way, too.  And just like art with abstract movements and all those NAUGHTY rule breakers, people experiment with writing styles now instead of being held to an EXTREMELY rigid standard like writers were when Shakespeare was around.  Things have been fairly colloquial and freeform for a while now so unless we sort of devolve into some sort of REALLY whacked out version of street slang low English I doubt anyone will have much trouble with Homestuck even 1,000 years from now!