OK, let’s say Jesus, Mohammed, Gautama Buddha and Confucius returned to their respective countries, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Nepal and the Shandong province of China. Which of them would have the least trouble making themselves understood? I realize that all of them would have some difficulty, each of the languages having changed. What I’m getting at is which language has changed least?
Mohammed … no question … it’s [del]blasphemy[/del] impolite to change the Arabic language …
The better question is which of these prophets would understand what would see today hahahaha
Are we talking written language, spoken, or both? Written Arabic has been deliberately preserved in the form used by Mohamed, but it’s impossible to shackle a spoken language, especially in the pre-recording era, so there’s bound to have been some drift, there. And even today, there are dozens of different spoken Chinese languages, as different from each other as French is from German, but they all share (more or less) the same writing.
Maybe this should depend on whether they could write. Could they?
Muslims make a big deal out of the fact that Mohammed was illiterate, as they take this as evidence that his message was divine in origin. Jesus would have had some literacy in Hebrew, since observant Jews then, as now, were expected to study the written Torah.
Wasn’t spoken Hebrew lost at some point and then recreated?
Like Latin in the Christian churches, I don’t think it ever completely died out as a liturgical language. But it stopped being used in the vernacular around 400 CE, and remained dead for about 1500 years. I’m not sure how mutually intelligible the modern and ancient varieties would be.
More importantly, though, Jesus’ vernacular speech would have almost certainly been Aramaic, not Hebrew. For a Galilean, Hebrew would have been treated as a liturgical language, so an observant Jew would have been literate in it for the purposes of participating in daily personal practices as well as the mandated Temple observances. Some few Jews of the day were urbanized and Hellenized as well, so probably spoke Koine Greekas well as (or instead of) Aramaic.
I’ve seen it characterized that Aramaic was home speech (more so among the more rustic communities in northern Judea), Koine was trade speech (and more prominent in urbanized areas where Roman rule and Hellenic culture prevailed), and Hebrew was religious speech (but perhaps in daily use in Jerusalem, where Jewish religious practice was a way of life for a lot of the population).
Just to clarify, I’m talking about the spoken word. If any of the four approached a native in or near to the place of his birth and education, which of them would have the best chance of being at least partly understood and of understanding to even a small extent the person they spoke to? And yes, I’m quite aware of the profusion of Chinese languages which is the reason I specifed Shandong province, the region where Confucius was said to have been born and raised.
Well, if we posit that semantic and phonetic drift happens in all languages at roughly the same pace (it’s wrong, nowhere close to observable facts and borderline insane a suggestion, but physicians do that all the time :p), Muhammad was speaking 1200 years ago, Jesus 2000 and change, while Buddha hails from 400-600ish BC and Confucius is said to have been born in 551 BC so it’s likely the historical person or persons who bear the name wrote his stuff around the same time Buddha did (give or take a century - because historians get to do that).
Stands to Reason that, Muhammad being the closest to his faithful chronologically speaking by a wide margin, he’d face the least amount of difficulty asking where the loo is.
Bear in mind, however, that you wouldn’t understand a damn word if you spoke to an Englishman from the 1200s, let alone the 700s (hell, they would have spoken Celtic dialects with all too few vowels then anyway, wouldn’t they ? :). Or possibly Danish…). So “the least amount of difficulty” would still be close to “bloody impossible to recognize any of their barbaric gibberish”.
Writing it all down however might be easier - as the aptly named Chronos notes, written classical Arabic has some holiness to it in and of itself, and as I understand it both spelling and syntax haven’t changed much since then, so Muhammad could conceivably walk about with a scratch pad and get hotel rooms that way.
Jesus’ case has been adressed.
I have no idea re:Buddha, knowing precious little about the history of India or their languages. Someone else will have to fill in there.
As for Chinese, not only are there a billion dialects as has already been said, but the writing itself has changed immensely since the BC years. Here’s a quick and dirty visual guide to the evolution of hanzi - Confucius would have been writing in the Large Seal Script. The much more stylized Clerical Script which forms the basis of Modern Hanzi (be it the pre- or post-communist ones) dates from 200 BC at the earliest, and while you can sort of see how it’s based on the simpler pictograms, good luck tracing back to the pictograms from it without a large amount of help. So while people all across modern China can get by with each other by tracing the Hanzi on the palm of their hand to their “listeners” when their dialects are just too different, Confucious would get blank stares nor would he be able to grok modern Chinese’ attempts at “sign”.
By the 1200s, you’d be talking about what is generally thought to be “Middle English”, which wasn’t completely incomperhensible to modern speakers. Granted, that would be Early Middle English (not Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales English from the ~1400s). But markedly different from Old English. In 700, you’d likely be speaking Old English (of the Beowulf variety) which is about as mutually comprehensible to English speakers as is modern German. That is to say some, but not much. Vikings started raiding/settling in the 800s, not the 700s, so unlike you’d be speaking Old Norse.
But “religious speech” could mean “We speak it with all other members of our religious community, and only use other languages for Outsiders” (e.g. Hebrew in some Jewish communities in the U.S.), or “I can pronounce the words in the prayer book, and guess at most of the meanings, but couldn’t begin to ask where the bathroom is” (e.g. Latin, for literate but not Latin-educated Catholic, particularly when prayers were in Latin), to “Oh, yeah, that’s the funny words the priest says sometimes”.
I suspect Jesus and Hebrew was at best the second one.
I would guess Mohammed because many people can understand litterary Arabic. Distant second Jesus, because I’m not convinced at all he could speak fluently Hebrew. No clue about the Buddha. I would guess that Confucius situation would be hopeless.
However, English is a bad example because it undertook abnormally deep changes. We would stand a much better chance of being understood by Frenchmen from 1200, for instance.
Here are the immortal opening lines to “Layaman’s Brut” (i.e. Layamon’s
ode to/history of Britain), written circa 1200 :
An preost wes on leoden; Laȝamon wes ihoten.
he wes Leouenaðes sone; liðe him beo Drihten.
He wonede at Ernleȝe; at æðelen are chirechen.
3vppen Seuarne staþe; sel þar him þuhte.
I’ll respectfully stand by my “wouldn’t understand a damn word” assertion :).
True enough, hence my joke about the 700s. But if you think, my dear countryman, that you would grok thing one about 1200 French without a LOT of help, I would cordially invite you to enlist as an auditeur libre in my “Medieval sources” course finals, just for shits & giggles :).
(not that there really was a French in 1200 - there were at least two as seen from space, and a whole many more from the ground up. Hell, there even was regional Latin…)
Pure cold:
preost = priest (A priest was in ???)
wes = was
he wes Leouenathes sone = He was Leouenathe’s son.
chirechen = churches
Here’s another example from “the mid-1200s”, written by English friar named Thomas of Hales:
He is ricchest mon of londe,
So wide so mon spekeð with muð;
Alle heo beoð to His honde,
Est and west, north and suð!
Henri, King of Engelonde,
Of Hym he halt and to Hym buhð.
Mayde, to þe He send His sonde,
And wilneð for to beo þe cuð.
Ne byt He wið þe lond ne leode,
Vouh ne gray ne rencyan;
Naveð He þerto none neode,
He is riche and weli mon!
If þu Him woldest luve beode,
And bycumen His leovemon,
He brou3te þe to suche wede
That naveð king ne kayser non!
… Yes ? I mean, I can sort of tell it’s about King Henry and he’s the richest man in London (or possibly in the land ?), and it’s kind of a diss in the end, maybe (“that knave king ain’t no Emperor” ? I think ?) but what the hell is muð and how should I spek it ? 
Yes, you and I can maybe hunt and peck a word here, a word there (and even then I have no idea how many false friends there could be). But this is the salient part : would you be able to ask where the loo is in that language, or understand when they ask you the same ? Non beode luðley.
You goalpost was “wouldn’t understand a damn word”. I understood quite a few words.
The other thing is sometimes the spoken word is easier to understand than the written and vice versa. With the spoken word, there is a certain amount of “getting used to the accent” and of course whether the two people are trying to make each other understood or not. And, our language today is based on the prestige dialect around London back in the day, so the further you get away from London, the harder it’s going to be to understand-- there was not one “English” but several dialects (true today, too, but not to the same extent).
Oh, one other thing. The 1200s were pivotal, and probably saw the most change in English as any century. English of the early 1200s wouldn’t be at the same as English of the late 1200s. After that, the change was not quite so rapid.