Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Did Shakespeare invent as many words as people claim?" video.

  1. Well, when you account for the fact that quite a few of them are merely new Derivative Forms, rather than Entirely new words, nor new, contextually clear, usages for existing words, and then you realise that all of them are spread out over 40-ish works so the audience isn't running into them all at once... And then, yes, all the words where they're new in the sense that it's the first time they appear in texts that survived long enough for anyone to make record of them rather than the first time they were ever used at all mitigates the issue still further. Also, a large part of how incomprehensible so many people today find Shakespere (though certainly not the Entirity of it!) has more to do with their poor skills in Present Day English, even before getting into compensating for a couple of centuries of linguistic drift. ... That and the fact that it's all written in Script format, intended to be read aloud and Heard, not to mention written largely as poetry which further doubles down on that, so trying to understand it just from silently reading the text, rather than properly Performing it, is something of a struggle.
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