I'm posting this message on the Wall to ask you all a language-related non-Tatoeba question, which may seem a bit out of place for being unrelated to Tatoeba, but as it is language-related I think there's no harm done, particularly since I don't think one can find a satisfactory answer to it online and this is possibly the best place to ask, given the presence of many educated native speakers of various languages here. The question is:

What is the oldest text in your native language[s] that felt sufficiently modern that you were able to read it without particular difficulty? That is, you didn't need to look up old grammar or inflection forms to understand, and there were relatively few words that you had to look up because they've grown obsolete or changed their meanings since then, so overall you were able to read it with little more difficulty than you read modern texts. [Spelling is not considered, assume modernised spelling for old texts like we do in Russian where all modern reprints of pre-1918 texts use current orthography.]

For Russian, I can say that modern Russian ['modern' in a generic sense, not linguistically whereby '[modern] Russian' emerges as a development of Old Russian / Old East Slavic circa XV century, but XV century Russian is very much not easily understandable yet] is generally considered to have begun under Peter the Great [early XVIII century] who directed radical reforms and opened Russian society to Western influence, which naturally caused rapid and significant language change to match the changing times, but of course it didn't happen overnight and the texts of the time are quite variable in terms of style and register with plenty of archaic forms and excessive foreign borrowings that didn't survive, as the 'general modern language style' was slowly being developed. 'Modern-style' texts gradually emerge in the latter half of XVIII century, the first well-known 'modern' text being Denis Fonvizin's Недоросль [Minor/Ignoramus], a play satirizing human vices published in 1783; it's the earliest work of Russian literature studied fully in our schools [earlier XVIII century works are only skimmed over in excerpts]. Nikolay Karamzin's story Бедная Лиза [Poor Lisa], published in 1792 - a short sentimental story about failed love that leads to suicide, deliberately written in a then-vernacular style fitting its motif - is completely understandable to a modern speaker without consulting a dictionary once, I think; obviously, you can tell that it is not modern by usage of certain words and word forms, but none of them present any difficulty since they are easily inferred from currently used forms. So this completes the answer.

I am now quite interested to hear what other people's experiences in this respect are in their native languages, so any and all answers are more than welcome; I hope many of you shall also find this question interesting and will enjoy reading what others have to say about it.

✹✹ Stats & Graphs ✹✹

Tatoeba Stats, Graphs & Charts have been updated:
https://tatoeba.j-langtools.com/allstats/

What are the odds of finding something like this locally—and for just £1.5?

https://i.imgur.com/v4s03fz.png

At https://tatoeba.org/en/sentences/show/13175064
喂！is incorrectly converted as "餵！". 餵 is only used in other senses (e.g. to "feed")

我餵了貓。/ 我喂了猫。(Wǒ wèi le māo.) - I fed the cat. here 餵/喂 is correct.

But 喂 (wèi) "hello?" (on the phone) has only one form - traditional and simplified. Pls suppress the conversion or make 喂 for both simplified and traditional Chinese.

(In real life 喂 is pronounced with the second tone wéi but the nominal, dictionary pronunciation should be "wèi".)

I'm thrilled to have discovered such an amazing website. I would like to suggest adding the Teochew dialect (a branch of Southern Min/Hokkien language) to the language options list.

Can you do recordings of my sentences?

✹✹ Stats & Graphs ✹✹

Tatoeba Top 30 Languages Graphs since Tatoeba "epoch"
https://tatoeba.j-langtools.com/epoch/

Just for funsies, I ran a script to list the languages that are least well represented on Tatoeba, compared to the estimated speaker population sizes of those languages. (Specifically, the languages were restricted to those with >= 1mil speakers sorted by the quotient of the number of sentences on Tatoeba to the speaker population size.)

As you might expect, many of the worst-represented languages by this metric are various different variants of Chinese. Aside from those, the top 10 worst-represented languages are:

1. Sindhi (snd, 6 sentences vs. ~38.4mil speakers)
2. Sesotho (sot, 2 sentences vs. ~6.4mil speakers)
3. Maithili (mai, 8 sentences vs. ~19.3mil speakers)
4. Madurese (mad, 8 sentences vs. ~17.0mil speakers)
5. Libyan Arabic (ayl, 3 sentences vs. ~5.6mil speakers)
6. Western Punjabi (pnb, 72 sentences vs. ~113mil speakers)
7. Aymara (aym, 2 sentences vs. ~2.8mil speakers)
8. Pashto (pus, 47 sentences vs. ~53.0mil speakers)
9. Igbo (ibo, 35 sentences vs. ~28.0mil speakers)
10. Sundanese (sun, 40 sentences vs. ~32.0mil speakers)

If we restrict instead to languages with an estimated number of speakers >= 50mil, then here are the top 5 (excluding Chinese variants):

1. Western Punjabi (pnb, 72 sentences vs. ~113mil speakers)
2. Pashto (pus, 47 sentences vs. ~53mil speakers)
3. Punjabi (pan, 204 sentences vs. ~200mil speakers)
4. Gujarati (guj, 168 sentences vs. ~60mil speakers)
5. Telugu (tel, 271 sentences vs. ~95mil speakers)

On a more cheery note, here are the 5 *best* represented languages (that are not conlangs) with >= 1mil speakers, by the same metric:

1. Kabyle (kab, ~765k sentences vs. ~3.4mil speakers)
2. Macedonian (mkd, ~78k sentences vs. ~1.4mil speakers)
3. Lithuanian (lit, ~123k sentences vs. ~2.3mil speakers)
4. Hungarian (hun, ~420k sentences vs. ~11.8mil speakers)
5. Finnish (fin, ~151k sentences vs. ~5.2mil speakers)

And those with >= 50mil speakers:

1. Italian (ita, ~918k sentences vs. ~65mil speakers)
2. Turkish (tur, ~739k sentences vs. ~76mil speakers)
3. German (deu, ~721k sentences vs. ~92mil speakers)
4. Russian (rus, ~1.1mil sentences vs. ~170mil speakers)
5. French (fra, ~665k sentences vs. ~203mil speakers)