Which plaintext languages to try?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Dear Jorge, could you recommend a document in Venetian from the 15th century, for my study of letter and word frequencies?

There are very few written texts in Venetian from before the 1800s, or even the 1900s.  

The best ones I know are the plays/monologues by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. from ~1500, like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. As this example shows, Venetian was used in plays or tales only to mark a character as an ignorant rustic peasant.  Even Goldoni, the Venetian playwright who created the Harlequin character, wrote mostly in Tuscan (=Italian) and only used Venetian for that purpose (and it seems that he translated Venetian parts to Tuscan in the printed editions of his plays).

The dialect of Ruzante is from Padua, which is about 5'000'000 cm distant from my parents' home town.  I don't know if it is that enormous distance, or 400 years of language evolution, but I can understand only maybe 70% of those texts.

Hope it helps...

All the best, --jorge