IS 1700 THE CUTOFF DATE FOR UNDERSTANDING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE?

IS 1700 THE CUTOFF DATE FOR UNDERSTANDING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE? As a linguist, John McWhorter points out that language change is “a gradual process with no discrete boundaries.” Yet, he says, Congreve writing in 1700 is readily understandable by a modern audience, but that the English of 1600, when Shakespeare was writing, “has changed not only in terms of a few exotic vocabulary items, but in the very meaning of thousands of basic words and in scores of fundamental sentence structures.” It seems to me an important question. When did the English language become the one we use? McWhorter is probably right. The answer is likely 1700; it is not 1600.