What language has changed the least in the past… say… 1000 years? I know Olde (I like that spelling) English is pretty much incomprehensible to me. Although I’ve never heard it mentioned, I see no reason that there isn’t Olde Spanish, Olde French, etc.
But could a Russian of today understand his ancestors of 1000 years ago? Could the Japanese? Are there any still-spoken languages that haven’t changed at all?
To get it out of the way, no I don’t mean Latin. I want non-dead languages.
Icelandic is governed by linguistic purity laws.
I’ve always heard that present day Icelanders can still read the old sagas from centuries ago. Here’s what Wikipedia says:
It does also say that pronunciation has changed a lot since then, though.
[ETA] Ah, beaten to it…
I think we’ve been through this a few times before. As noted, Icelandic (and its close relation Faeroese) remain remarkably close to their ancestral forms of about 1000 years ago.
Greek is an extremely special case, worth looking at. First, Greek has several times split into dialects that are only marginally mutually intelligible. And contemporary Greek consonants and vowels have undergone significant shifts from Koine or Attic forms. But that being said, it remains the case that a speaker of modern Greek without special training can still make sense out of Paul’s Letter to the Romans or Plato’s Republic in their originals.
Finally, something that presumes a great deal of hypothecation but remains a highly interesting fact. It is a strong inference from the mode of evolution of the daughter languages that the origins of Indo-European were a set of highly synthetic dialects with a very complex grammar. Discounting the claim of a few Indians to still speak Sanskrit, the daughter language which has changed the least in the several millennia since Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was spoken is Lithuanian. This is not to say that if someone traveled into the past in a time machine and when coming back brought a PIE speaker, that person and a modern Lithuanian could have a good casual onversation. It is saying that if we knew early Lithuanian and its ancestor Proto-Baltic, forms of it would likely be intelligible to a modern speaker of Lithuanian for far longer a span of time than would be the case for any other Indo-European language.
If the question is “What reasonably well-known language which was spoken in 1007 A.D. and is spoken today has changed the least over that period?”, where describing a language as spoken means that it’s learned by children as their first language, then Icelandic is apparently the best answer. Classical Latin wouldn’t count, since it hasn’t been used as a first language by children for over 1500 years. Ancient Hebrew wouldn’t count either, since it hasn’t been used as a first language by children since about 200 A.D. (or possibly even earlier than that). Since the 1940’s, there’s a language called Modern Hebrew which is now learned by children as their first language in Israel, but that’s not the same thing as Ancient Hebrew. Modern Hebrew is slowly changing like any ordinary spoken language.
Classical Latin and Ancient Hebrew are examples of religious ritual languages, which are languages which are used by the clerics of religious groups to write and speak to each other, but which aren’t learned by children as their first language. They don’t change very much, since most of the processes of linguistic change are driven by child language learning. (They do tend to acquire new vocabulary for new things though.) Latin is the ritual language of the Catholic Church and Hebrew is the ritual language of Judaism. There are a few other such languages, including Sanskrit, which is the ritual language of Hinduism.
The claim is that Icelandic has changed surprisingly little since about 1300 A.D. I’m a little dubious about this claim, since in general languages change no matter what anyone wants. Language academies don’t actually have that much effect on the amount of linguistic change. L’Académie Française, for instance, has had less effect than it thinks it has on French. But, by most accounts, Icelandic has changed less than most languages do in a comparable period since about 1300 A.D.
Incidentally, the usual definition of the time periods of Old English, Middle English, and Modern English is that Old English lasted from about 500 A.D. to about 1100 A.D., Middle English from about 1100 A.D. to about 1500 A.D., and Modern English since 1500 A.D. These are arbitrary boundaries, of course, since English, like most languages, was always slowly changing. Incidentally, nobody uses the spelling “Olde English.” Most of the other languages which have written forms over the past thousand years or so are also split up, again somewhat arbitrarily, into periods of Old, Middle, and Modern (or some similar such terms).
Just a minor nitpick that the Latin of the Roman Catholic Church is not really the same as Classical Latin, which typically means the earlier and more literary form of Latin of the time of Cicero and others…
I dont know if its true or not but I once read that modern French is actually updated Latin .
Can someone more informed then me vouch for/discredit this?
Lust4Life writes:
> I dont know if its true or not but I once read that modern French is actually
> updated Latin .
It depends on what you mean by “updated.” Present-day English is updated Old English in some sense. Present-day French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and several other languages are updated Latin in some sense. Present-day Greek is updated Ancient Greek in some sense. Present-day Hindi (and several other languages of India) are updated Sanskrit in some sense. All current languages are updated versions of languages which existed a couple thousand years ago, which are themselves updated versions of languages that existed a couple thousand years before that, which are themselves, etc. Languages are always evolving, sometimes a little faster than other times, but always evolving. They are also frequently slowly splitting into different languages.
I apologize, but I don’t know where to even start if you don’t know that modern French is one of the languages that Latin evolved into. You might want to get a book on historical linguistics and read about how languages change and split into different languages. You might instead want to get an introductory book on linguistics. No linguist would use the term “updated,” since that seems to imply that the changes in languages are conscious, as though your system administrator regularly plugs in a new module to update your language ability.
Indeed. The similarities between Lithuanian and Sanskrit are nothing short of astounding. Ditto for Latin. Of course there are many differences as well, but looking at Lithuanian, Sanskrit and Latin (and Greek) screams out to the observer-- these languages are all related.
I believed this to be the case for a long time, having read something to that effect in an old Mario Pei book years ago. But when I recently asked a Greek friend about it he maintained that there was no way he could read ‘that older stuff’ and further added that his Greek in general didn’t take him much further back than he thought our English does us. Now, he’s just a regular guy like me, not a linguist or anything, and the both of us are wholly unqualified to say how one language compares to the other, but it did come as a bit of a surprise to me to hear him say that.
From wikipedia:
I have to wonder, though, if this is true only of the written language. Sound shifts can occur independently of the written language, and a language with a literary tradition as old as Greek could easily fit that patter. Hell, look at English-- if we updated our spelling, we might not recognize much of written Middle English.
Miscue writes:
> . . . having read something to that effect in an old Mario Pei book years ago . . .
Mario Pei is in general not to be trusted about any details. He was a professor of Romance languages who wrote popular books about linguistics. He often got the details wrong.
I had to do Chaucer for my "O"level it was a foreign language to me, I find French quite easy to get by in,though it probably outrages the locals,I’m ok with German,but strangely enough I can get by quite well in Italian,I wonder if subliminally I am remembering Latin from grammar school because as far as I know I have no real experience in speaking in Italian.
I’ve heard the same thing about Italian. If an citizen of Rome was flung 2000 years forward to the predent day could s/he understand spoken (or written) Italian?
And the same thing should be said in response. There’s no such thing as an “updated” language. All languages change over time, and the Romance languages all started off as Latin (of some variety).
Depends on what you mean by “understand”. He’d probably be able to pick quite a bit up from a newspaper (except he’d probably be confused by terms for things that didn’t exist in his day, like “radio”). Even today, Italians and Spaniards can speak to each other and make themselves understood-- especially if they make an effort to do so by speaking slowly, enunciating the words well and not using slang. If he was just eavesdropping on a conversation, he’d have a lot more trouble.
I should have added…
Keep in mind that what we call “French”, “Spanish”, “Italian”, and “Portuguese” are sort of social constructs more than real things. Sure, there are standard versions of each of those languages in the written form, but the language people use in everyday conversation varies from that standard in such a way that they blend into each other. The dialect* of Spanish spoken on the border with France (Catalan) is quite similar to the dialect* of French spoken on the Spanish border (Occitan). As you travel from Spain to France, neighboring villages almost always speak a dialect that is mutually intelligible, even if they also speak the standardized version of their country’s language as well. Link.
*some people would call it a distinct language, but let’s not get into that debate.
We don’t have to, because it’s not even a debate. Catalan is not only not a dialect of Spanish, it’s not even in the same sub-branch of the Romance languages as Spanish – it’s a Gallo-Romance language, like French or Occitan (which are in separate sub-sub-branches of Romance, for their part), not an Ibero-Romance language like Spanish, Portuguese, or Galician. For one thing, it’s got completely different verb morphology from Spanish.
This is not a political argument; it is simply not a subject of controversy for anybody in modern linguistics. It’s no more a dialect of Spanish than French is.
we might as well get into that debate, as it explains how languages evolve. take for example, the areas of eastern ontario / south & southwestern quebec (and new much of new brunswick.) “frenglish” is a valid description of several closely related dialects in these regions. and these dialects bleed (over time, and at varying paces,) beyond their boundaries.
for a language, or even just a dialect of a language, to remain constant over time, the people who speak that language or dialect must have some separation – whether religious, political, geographic, etc. from the influence of neighbouring languages or dialects.
and so the icelandic language makes sense as an example of an “old” modern language… it’s an isolated place.
not discounting that here & there cultural differences may keep geographical neighbours linguistically separated, even significantly; but the more close influences available, the more bleeding of vocabulary, grammar, etc. is possible, and over time, likely.
OK, but that doesn’t really matter wrt the point I was trying to make. If Portugal, Spain, France and Italy were one political entity, it’s unlikely we would use the terms we use today to describe the language(s) spoken there. We’d most likely be talking about dialects of one language that pretty much vary continuously over the geographic area of that country. Or, we’d set up other somewhat arbitrary areas to try and define a discrete number of languages. Political boundaries make convenient lines of demarcation, but they don’t reflect the linguistic reality of the situation any more than our concepts of race reflect the genetic reality of situation we find.
Romanian, on the other hand, is a bit of an outsider in the group, since it is isolated geographically from its linguistic cousins, and so does not share that same continuity, even if much of the language is still recognizable to other speakers of the Romance languages.
No, I don’t think that’s true. Certainly some concepts would be rearranged, but that’s not the same as saying we’d think of them as dialects of one language. You seem to have the idea that these things have been divided up more or less arbitrarily into a single taxonomical layer of languages. In fact, the various Romance languages are divided into numerous branches with greater or lesser “genetic” (i.e. historical and diachronic – one language branching off into several over time) relationships between them. The border fuzziness essentially emerges at the lowest and most recent level of division.
We might not think of Galician and Portuguese as different languages, for example, although there are grammatical differences between them, just as most people don’t think of Catalan and Valencian as separate languages. But there are major, obvious, and uncontroversial differences between, say, the Italian, French, Catalan/Occitan, Spanish, and Portuguese groups. It’s not just woolgathering to account for arbitrary political boundaries – these are observable phenomena that are the fruit of linguistic and social changes diachronically.
Besides, we already recognize, despite the best efforts of assorted political movements, a panoply of related but separate languages extant in single countries – even in an intensely unitary republic such as France.