I just realized you probably meant 1900, not 1600.
Classical Arabic is intended to freeze the language used at the time of the writing of the Koran (c. seventh century AD), primarily for religious study but Modern Standard Arabic is closely related and used throughout the Arab world for formal purposes. Everyday colloquial language in Arab countries is various dialects of Arabic. My wife is Egyptian and speaks Egyptian Arabic fluently but has never studied Classical Arabic and cannot understand speeches or news broadcasts on Egyptian TV.
I have no expertise at all, so I’m posting this mostly to be educated by responses from the more informed, but I had always heard that Hebrew HAS changed over time, especially with regard to marks indicating vowels, e.g. Jehovah vs Yaweh.
It also seems to me that if you are less strict, and consider a language unchanged if it can just be figured out, even with some difficulty, by modern readers, then many languages seem to stop “changing” once they are enshrined in a dominant culture’s holy scriptures. For English, it’s the King James Bible that is about the limit how far back a modern layman can go before English becomes unintelligible — Chaucer is too far, and Beowulf might as well be Greek. You could argue that Shakespeare might have been as great an influence, but IMO the tie is broken by looking at Arabic, where (I have heard) that the original text of the Quran, which is older than Beowulf, is approximately as easy to read for modern Arabs as the original KJV is for English readers, and the OP’s example of ancient Hebrew, going back another thousand+ years.
Does this work for other religions? Can a modern Sanskrit reader understand the oldest copies of the Vedas, or a modern Chinese understand the oldest copies of the Analects?
Actually. my guess is that the process started around 1600. It seems obvious to me that print, widespread literacy, mass media and centralized education have stabilized languages - while vocabulary and colloquialisms continue to evolve, grammar changes much slower these days than it did in the past.
Question: Since Hebrew is now spoken within the Jewish population. Is Yiddish a dying language?
Isn’t Sanskrit a liturgical language at this point?
And Chinese has gone through a couple of writing reforms since Confucius.
Neither of those examples quite supports your thesis. As CookingWithGas notes, speakers of vernacular Arabic dialects, which have evolved from Qur’anic or Classical Arabic as spoken languages, aren’t necessarily going to be able to understand Classical Arabic or its present-day variant, Modern Standard Arabic.
Yes, people who have studied Modern Standard Arabic can read the Qur’an, but MSA is a learned language for at least the vast majority of Arabic speakers.
Similarly, modern Hebrew speakers can read ancient Hebrew only because modern Hebrew was deliberately and artificially reconstructed from ancient Hebrew and then consciously adopted as a spoken language.
So neither of those is a good example of the ancient scriptural form of a language successfully slowing down the linguistic evolution of its spoken form to a really significant extent.
The scriptural or “learned” form itself does get somewhat mummified and stops evolving rapidly, but the vernacular or “living” spoken form just charges ahead regardless. After a few centuries, the vernacular speakers will need to consciously study the learned form of the language in order to understand the scriptures written in it. (This will doubtless happen to spoken Hebrew in another few hundred years too; Hebrew-speaking children’s mother tongue will be different enough from Biblical Hebrew that they won’t be able to read the Hebrew Bible without studying the ancient language.)
[QUOTE=TonySinclair]
Does this work for other religions? Can a modern Sanskrit reader understand the oldest copies of the Vedas, or a modern Chinese understand the oldest copies of the Analects?
[/QUOTE]
Sanskrit, like Latin, stopped being a living spoken language about a couple thousand years ago, although like Latin it has retained a very strong liturgical and scholarly role since then. The standard learned form of the language is called Classical Sanskrit, and it bears about the same relationship to Vedic Sanskrit (or “Old Indo-Aryan”) that Classical Latin or maybe Late Latin does to Old Latin, the most archaic known form of Latin.
So yes, somebody who’s studied Classical Sanskrit can understand a lot of the content of Vedic texts, although there are lots of archaic forms and vocabulary that they’ll need help with.
Chinese, AFAICT, is a whole other kettle of fish, given that the same ideographic script can represent quite different spoken languages; but I know almost nothing about it.
Just like the speed limit is the law and no one ever exceeds that? Just because something is the law does not mean it is not subject to change nor does that mean that the law corresponds with reality.
You can call total bullcrap if you want but that simply doesn’t jibe with reality. Just because something ‘is a law’ doesn’t make it true.
To be truly unchanged, ancient Hebrews should be able to understand modern Hebrew speakers. But if that is so, then modern Hebrew speakers must not be able to talk about modern things, since they cannot have created new words.
But they can, they have, and the ancient Jews could not fully understand them.
To put a point to it: the claim is bullshit.
I find Chaucer, and to a much lesser extent Beowulf, are much more comprehensible if read aloud, rather than trying to puzzle it out in your head. For example, try saying the following portion of The Legend of Good Women aloud:
This woful Cleopatre hath mad swich routhe
That ther nis tonge noon that may hit telle.
But on the morwe she wol no lenger dwelle,
But made hir subtil werkmen make a shryne
Of alle the rubies and the stones fyne
In al Egipte that she coude espye;
And putte ful the shryne of spycerye,
And leet the cors embaume; and forth she fette
This dede cors, and in the shryne hit shette.
Almost the whole thing is intelligible. Cleopatra has chosen to die, and to this end she has made her workmen construct a bejewelled shrine, in which she will bring a serpent to bite her and send her to the afterlife.
Beowulf is almost unintelligible, but its strange to read it aloud and to almost, *almost *know what its trying to say.
Ic þé nú ðá | I then now you
brego Beorht-Dena, | prince of bright Danes
biddan wille, | bid will
eodor Scyldinga, | Scyldinging’s protector,
ánre béne: | one boon
þæt ðú mé ne forwyrne, | That you me not refuse
wígendra hléo | warrior’s shield
fréawine folca, | loving-liege of the folk
nú ic þus feorran cóm | Now I this far come.
To make the one-to-one connection between the OE words and the modern words evident, I had to muck up the grammar a bit, but even so this speech from Bewulf is easily understood. The only words that are not clearly derived from their OE equivalent are protector (from Latin, protegere), refuse (from Latin, refusare), prince (from Latin, princeps), warrior (from Latin, guerra), and liege, of uncertain etymology.
I agree that Chaucer is not completely opaque, and you can puzzle out the gist of it, but it’s clearly, IMO at least, a different language.
As an analogy, I have a couple of years of high school French, and I wouldn’t dream of claiming I had any facility with it, but given a page of French I would know the pronouns and common verbs, a few dozen common nouns, and be able to recognize cognates for probably several hundred words. That lets me get the gist of it, not quite as well as I could with Chaucer, but probably within an order of magnitude.
I’m afraid I’m missing your point about Beowulf being easily understood, though. Your translation of Beowulf is of course intelligible, but as I said before, the original might as well be Greek. That doesn’t mean it’s complete gibberish, because I know the Greek alphabet and a lot of Greek words from their English descendants, but it’s certainly a foreign language to me.
Chaucer is fairly understandable, and reading aloud might help, but it would not help to have it read aloud in the original accent. The spelling has changed less than the pronunciation has. Old English, maybe with some practice, but it is as much a foreign language as Dutch or German is to the modern speaker since we’ve replaced so may Germanic words with Romance ones.
Most Sanskrit readers learn Sanskrit from the Vedas, so they won’t need much help with the forms. Unlike Latin, there isn’t a large number of ancient Sanskrit texts other than the Vedas.
Interesting to note that there is a lengthy sequence in Dante that is written in an older variety of Italian.
Very few people know how to read Chaucer with period-appropriate pronunciation. And I disagree with your second statement; Chaucer’s English is much, much more understandable to a modern English-speaker than either Dutch or German.
Compare this German passage:
Der Türmer, der schaut zu Mitten der Nacht
Hinab auf die Gräber in Lage;
Der Mond, der hat alles ins Helle gebracht
Der Kirchhof, er liegt wie am Tage.
To this passage from Chaucer:
This Minos hath a monstre, a wikked beste,
That was so cruel that, without areste,
Whan that a man was broght in his presence,
He wolde him ete, ther helpeth no defence.
And every thridde yeer, with-outen doute,
They casten lot, and, as hit com aboute
If you tell me that the Chaucer passage is as difficult to comprehend as the German passage, and that it is clearly an entirely separate language from that which I am now typing to you, then I will be forced to disbelieve you and all you have to say on the subject.
If you say it is not fair, as that German passage is from Goethe, long after Chaucer’s time, then let me present this passage from the late medieval German poet Johannes Hadlaub:
Wa vunde man sament so manig liet?
Man vund ir niet in dim künigriche
als in Zürich an buochen stat.
Des prüevet man dike da meister sang
Der Manesse rank darnach endeliche
des er diu liederbuoch nu hat
Edit: On reread, I see you were referring to Old English, while Chaucer wrote in Middle English. OE, while still clearly the ancestor of our language, is substantially different. My point stands that Chaucer’s is very comprehensible.
Yep. But that doesn’t change the validity of what I said. You’ll understand more of Chaucer reading it than listening to it spoken as it was at the time.
Old English. Chaucer is Middle English. Beowulf is Old English.
Chaucer isn’t Old English. He was referring to the segment of Beowulf.
OK, but that’s exactly what I said. Written Chaucer is pretty accessible to the modern reader. So your point stands inasmuch as it agrees with me. 
There are a few radical ultra-Orthodox sects that still use Yiddish in day-to-day life, but other than them, I’d say the age of the average Yiddish-speaker is somewhere around 80.
The Talmud has a bunch of requirements – nay, entitlements – the master is required to fulfill in obligation to the “eved ivri” (Jewish slave). Kiddushin 20a basically says you have to give him a bed, food, and drink that’s the same quality as yours. It derives these rules from a ridiculously, well, Talmudic interpretation of a Biblical verse.
The treatment of the eved ivri, among Orthodox Jews, is one of the more well-known rules; because the existence of slavery in the Bible is so problematic for fundamentalists, some rabbis (and Dennis Prager) like to point to how nicely this type of slave – or as they sometimes call him, “indentured servant” – is treated. As an Orthodox rabbi, Rabbi Lapin either accepts that entitlements were mandated for the “eved ivri” or finds himself outside the mainstream of what is standard, accepted, well-known Orthodox Jewish tradition.