I’ve heard plenty about the history of the English language, or at least enough to know that the language has changed a lot over time and in the past sounded quite different from today. How about other languages? If we went back, say, 500 years, what languages would sound very different from now? Would any be unintelligible? How about 1000 years, etc.? And what about spellings and such?
All languages change over time. They all change at roughly the same speed. If you go back 500 years, the earlier language will be difficult but still be intelligible to a modern speaker. If you go back 1000 years, the earlier language will be unintelligible, but you could pick up occasional words and with some practice could soon learn to understand the language. If you do back 2000 years, the language will be completely unintelligible and it would take as long to learn it as if it were completely unrelated.
Be careful about generalizations. Yes, all languages change over time, but they change at different rates. We did a thread a few weeks ago (can’t seem to find it) about which languages have changed the most/least. If you do a little searching, you’ll find some good info in that thread. Isolated languages, like Icelandic, tend to be very conservative and change much more slowly. Languages like English, which borrow heavily from other languages, change more quickly. Writing, with an alphabet, also tends to slow down change if the overall populations is literate.
Do languages of highly literate societies change at any appreciably different speed than those of non-literate societies? I might think that having a written record to refer to would keep some words and grammatical constructions current that would otherwise lapse from a language.
You probably have to assume that’s true, for alphabet writing systems. But if a language isn’t written down, it might not be possible to know how it was pronounced in the past. For well known language families like Indo-European, you can sometimes fill in the blanks based on what we know about related languages, reconstructing older, even dead languages to some extent. But this would be the exception rather than the rule.
Spanish certainly did - it had all sorts of fricatives that modern Spanish didn’t. The grammar has, however, changed a lot less in the intervening time. Most languages would sound quite different after the passage of 500 years, but of course, while language change on the whole is fairly consistent, over as short a span of time as that, it’s rather unpredictable how much the language would have changed. Changes can be gradual, or they can be precipitated by massive borrowing or influence from neighboring languages, and that pace is different depending on the number of speakers: languages with more speakers, paradoxically, appear to change faster, since there’s more people potentially coming up with new ways to speak.
John Mace writes:
> If you do a little searching, you’ll find some good info in that thread.
If you’ll notice, I contributed to that thread, so I have already read all of it. Look, I have a master’s degree in linguistics. I know of no clear evidence that some languages change faster than others. If you have evidence that this is true, cite it. Don’t just quote from some popularized account of linguistics though. Give me a cite from a linguistics journal or a clear statement in a linguistics text which gives some research showing that there are significant long-term differences in the rate of change of languages.
While that may not be possible for the past I’d wager a good chunk of change that the advent of recording technology (audio and video) will rapidly slow (???) the change in languages. Word choice may evolve but pronunciation won’t so much. Once records show up things tend to get locked in.
French from 500 years ago is difficult to understand because a lot of vocabulary has changed. For instance, there’s a lot of words I don’t understand in Villon’s poems. Sometimes I don’t get at all the meaning of a sentence. But the general structure didn’t change much. If you go back further, say around 1100 with the medieval poetry, I can’t understand the text without a translation in modern french. At best, I can make guesses at the overall meaning.
On the other hand, french has been very conservative since 1600 or so (that would be when the first dictionnaries were published, the french academy created, litteracy spreaded, etc…resulting in a crystalisation) , and barring some odd words that have changed, I can read a text from the 17th century as easily as a 20th century one.
Will there ever be a time where recorded speech will become unintelligble? I have recordings from the early 20th century and I understand every word. 500 years from now, assuming that the peoples of the earth can play these recordings, would they be able to understand them?
Probably not the rap videos 
And I kind of imagine some langauges change slower than others. I’m just thinking of the Chinese spoken dialects. Teh more southern in Chian you get, the more it resembles Ancient Chinese. So couldn’t you say the southern dialects haven’t changed as much as the northern dialects?
In 500 years, the tapes recorded today will be difficult to understand, but speakers of that language 500 years from now will be able to understand the tapes recorded today if they listen carefully and play them several times. It will be sort of like listening to a very strange dialect. In 1000 years, they won’t be able to understand today’s tapes anymore, but a speaker of that day, with a lot of practice, could slowly learn the differences and could eventually learn to understand the tapes. In 2000 years, it will be as difficult for a speaker of a language to understand today’s version of the language as if it were a completely unrelated language.
Sometimes events change a language very fast suddenly; while today’s Japanese people could probably understand the Japanese of a hundred years ago, I think the Japanese of a hundred years ago would never get what the hell a modern person was saying in conversations about many subjects because of the massive influx of English words. I imagine the same thing happened with French hitting English in 1066, say.
No one knows. It’s possible the mass media and sound recordings will work to slow the evolution of pronunciation, and we can only make educated guesses as to how things were pronounced five hundred years ago. You’ll have to wait another four hundred years to find out, I think.
In what respect? Cantonese, at least, has maintained all the final consonants present in Middle Chinese, unlike Mandarin and Wu (which includes, most notably, Shanghainese.) But in what other respects are the southern languages more conservative? They have more complex tonal structures, for instance, while Middle Chinese only used four tones. And Cantonese, at least, has fewer initial consonants than Mandarin or (to my admittedly lacking knowledge) Middle Chinese. Is its vocabulary somehow more similar to Middle Chinese than that of Mandarin?
I can tell you from personal experience that ancient (Attic) Greek is absolutely nothing like modern Greek (nor, for that matter, are either remotely like Biblical Greek).
I don’t have the links on my computer anymore, but don’t some argue that the Fujian dialects are even “older” than the Cantonese? Also, the way I remember it, they’ve actually been able to reconstruct the way Ancient Chinese sounded, mostly from Tang dynasty poems, because they followed certain rules, and so on… and Cantonese resembled it the closest. And ofcourse, the Mandarin dialects are derived from the way the Manchurians spoke it and enforced it and all that. This is all really old and fuzzy for me, sorry. I’m sure if you just google it or something a ton of info will turn out.
Some of the things are really obviously, say, when you read “hungry,” which in Mandarin is, “e.” If you look at the traditional characters, you can see it’s just the sound radical in front of the character for, “me,” which is “wo,” in Mandarin. In Cantonese, it’s “ngor” with a lower tone and… “ngor,” with a higher tone, respectively. Then as you look at the lone words in Korean and Japanese, I think a lot more of them resemble the Cantonese pronunciations than any other that I know of (admittedly, little, haha). Especially in Korean I think. And no, I wouldn’t pretend to me an expert on this, haha.