#Old German vs Modern German?

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fringe lark
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I'm wondering how old German language looks like from the past? Like I know that German used the circumflex diacritic in the past, but why; and what else did I miss?

quartz imp
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Each of those times have their own characteristics, and grammar and word usage gradually change the further back you go.

fringe lark
quartz imp
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(I'm not a linguist, so it's not going to be extremely detailed)

For background:
Luther was the first one who translated the bible into German. He wanted the translation to be universally intelligible, so he tried to pick words and metaphors from different groups. At the time, there was no "standard" German that was well understood by everyone as everyone was using some form of dialect basically, so his bible translation set something like the gold standard for quite a while, and influenced the German language to this day. The strongest influence in Luther's texts are from the area where he is from, in the modern day German states of Thuringia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt.
You can take at the text from the Luther bible here:
http://lutherdansk.dk/LutherBiblia1545/biblia2/default.htm
You can see that some common words were written differently, like "vnd", which is now "und" ("and").

Notably, the vocabulary shift of the 17th century had not yet taken place, so a lot of modern words that have their origin in French or Latin were not yet part of the language; for example, most of the verbs that end with "-ieren" would not have been understood at Luther's time. The language was a lot more "Germanic" in tone. I think putting the verbs in subclauses at the end also came later. And I think Perfekt, Plusquamperfekt and the Futur tenses weren't in usage yet, either.

Lutherbibel.net - Lutherbibel 1545 in Antiqua Letter

Text der unrevidierten Lutherbibel. Unrevised Luther Version of 1545

quartz imp
vital monolith