The problem here is that national government has not choice but to nationalize a language of the realm. The King cannot let the most popular books be written in English or Latin. Each royal house has to create its own scribe industry, the etymologists and dictionary experts to prepare the local vernacular for movable type. Thus the permanent alignment of language and government. Schools teach the new grammar. Legal notices and contracts and news all paper printed in the king's grammar. Along with this, a reduction in local dialects. There is that span of 400 years with just paper and parchment from 1000. The missing part except what the Church its philosophers were writing. was writing.
The 400 years was mostly about commerce and financing and banking. Adapting the new math to the world. Once the etymologist can get a measure, of some sort, on the relative bandwidth of the new media, vs the old media, then a lot of possibilities can be ruled out in the silent periods. Like we can rule out that the Old High Germans were writing chronicles while the Romans were.
The movable type press froze the Latinization of language and literature. The long slow process starting with ancient Latin. Nations had to go with the local vernacular, and their philosophers went to work on that. much of Northern Europe and the original German based grammar stuck around, only to get mangles by England and America. But we also got some of the reverse, some nations artificially adding Latin phraseology where it is not derived. It all would have happened fast as the press technology spread.
200 hundred years later and we have newspapers another technology advance causing another consolidation in national grammar.
Bandwidth is how many, how often. What is the total production of messages. Newspapers greatly increase that number, by consolidating the dictionary. The steam powered rotary press fits this bill. It could print out catalogs, pictures, lists and she simple semantics of mechanical construction. This book skips national languages and open a markets across continents. Standardized mechanic construction would drive the industrial revolution. This is 800 years after gutenberg. But we are talking an order of magnitude increase in messages sent. t that point I call it Morse's Law, the regular doubling of media bandwidth about every 5-7 years.
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