Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
IIRC old and Middle English had word order rules of their own that were different from modern English rules and in practice a lot of the cases were pronounced the same anyways.
My impression is that it’s actually the opposite case, and modern English actually has a meaningfully richer vocabulary- hence why the King James Bible and Shakespeare use a relatively smaller lexicon- with words generally having more specific meanings and far fewer awkward phrases and calques(eg orange used to be called ‘red-yellow’ until the word was borrowed from Dutch, ‘evil’ used to be a generic antonym of good whereas it now has a specificity towards the moral valence, ‘happy’ used to mean any of a half dozen related concepts).
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