I was under the impression that the Vedas started out as an oral tradition and were only later written down. Was the writing system used to write them down in place 3500 years ago? Is the 3500 yo date the date at which they were first written down, or is that when they were composed?
Aw, man. This thread was really fun until the copts showed up.
Oopsie. :o Yes. You´re right - the Vedas were passed down in a spoken tradition. Diverse recensions of the texts have so much in common that we are fairly sure that the texts haven’t changed very much (hardly at all) over time. In fact, many of the texts that were only transmitted in a written form is actually more corrupted than the orally transmitted ones. This is (in part, at least) because the scribes who copied the texts often weren’t scolars themselves, and also because some of the alphabet characters are notoriously difficult to tell apart in the manuscripts - leading to often very corrupted versions of the original texts.
The Vedas didn’t become written texts as such until much, much later, Wikipedia says a few centuries BCE. Remember that in India the oral traditions were always rated above written ones; the power of the Vedas could only exist in the spoken word, so the oral traditions have continued pretty much to this day.
As an aside that further disqualifies Sanskrit in regard of the OP’s question: The current alphabet used for Sanskrit & Hindi - Devanagari appeared around 1200 CE. The fact that all these old Sanskrit traditions are so well preserved tends to make me forget that they originally weren’t written texts at all in the proper sense of the word.
Not to hijack, but I’m curious about Tuckerfan’s last sentence. It’s well documented that the invention of printing, and the spread of literacy, has slowed down most aspects of language change in languages like English. Why would a yet “faster means of communication” not do the same?
I’m also skeptical about an absolute constant like the Hubble constant–my example would be that 10th-century Persian poetry like Ferdowsi is still read, understood, and recited by modern Persians, while Anglo-Saxon literature of a comparable age like is very much a foreign language to us. Ferdowsi’s language looks highly archaic to modern Persians, of course, like Shakespeare does to us, but it’s still highly intelligible (given a few footnotes). Persian has not remained static, it’s changed a lot, but survival of intelligibility for 1,000 years must count for something. But it should be noted that the pronunciation in Iran went through its own Great Vowel Shift about the same period as the GVS in English. If a 10th-century Persian speaker were to be resurrected, their speech would be hard for modern Iranians to follow (but easier for a Dari or Tajik speaker from Afghanistan, where the pronunciation did not shift as it did in Iran).
My point was that even though rates of change may vary from language to language, in general over thousands of years there will inevitably be language change and sooner or later the older form will become unintelligible.
Persian went through major changes during the 7th-9th centuries, so that Persian only 3 centuries before Ferdowsi’s time is considered a different language and given a different name, Pahlavi. It went through time of more rapid change because of the 7th-century Arab conquest (compare the Norman conquest’s effect on English), and then settled into a more stable pattern. Maybe call it “punctuated equilibrium.”
About half the publications on the magazine/book rack in my neighborhood grocery are Spanish. I found a copy of* El Poema del Cid* among the usual low-brow* selections. It included a translation into modern Spanish, but the original was fairly readable. The work is roughly contemporary with Chaucer. The Roman roots of Spanish go very deep.
- The English selections are pretty low-brow, too. No Chaucer at all!
The changes that occur with the spread of printing focus mainly on adding vocabulary and on standarization of spelling and pronunciation. After the printing press came into use, the Midlands dialect of English, primarily from London, became the standard for much of spelling, as well as certain grammatical rules. If the English printing industry had not been centered in London, we might refer to a pair of shoes as “shoen”. As a matter of fact, some of the very strange pronunciation/orthographic problems in English stem from the spelling being taken from one regional dialect and the pronunciation from another.
I don’t. 
“Communication among people of different languages”, perhaps? Of course it will require Tuckerfan to explain it himself, just giving you my WAG.