How much has Arabic changed since the 700s?
Which version? 
Had I posted only what you copied in your reply, I would agree that it’s not true.
I take it that’s a way of saying “A Lot”? Since Latin, Sanskrit and Old Hebrew are ritual languages only, but a lot of people still speak Arabic as a first language (and I assume some always have), I wondered how intelligible a Mohammed-era Quran would be to a modern (literate, but not scholarly) Arab (let’s say from the area around Medina, to narrow it down)
I don’t understand this comment. My response was to everything you wrote.
In any case, we began only with your assertion that Catalan is a dialect of Spanish. That’s what I took issue with in the beginning, and I don’t think you’ve responded on that front.
I don’t know if it applies here, but I often find people getting confused between:
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Catalan is a Spanish dialect. (True, but only in the political-geographical sense. It is a Romance dialect spoken in Spain. “Dialect” here is used in the sense of “division among a larger group of related speech communities.”)
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Catalan is a dialect of Spanish. (False, for the reasons given upthread.)
I don’t know much about Catalan, but I know this is a regular confusion for Italian dialects / dialects of the Italian peninsula.
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), known in Arabic as “fusha” (???), is very similar to Qur’anic Arabic. Anybody who’s studied MSA can read the Qur’an, and most educated Arabic speakers have done so. Most newspapers, books, news broadcasts, etc., in the Arab-speaking world are in MSA; Arabic-medium formal education overwhelmingly uses MSA.
But MSA is not the native spoken language of every Arab speaker (or even of most of them, AFAICT). There are lots and lots of regional Arabic dialects, many influenced by other languages and/or language families, and many of them are mutually unintelligible to their speakers.
They do not. The term for what you’re talking about is a “dialect continuum”. There exists a dialect continuum between Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese. These are all in the same major language sub-branch and are arguably mutually intelligible along that continuum (but seldom along the edges of the continuum). The same cannot be said of French, Spanish, or Italian.
Catalan could be argued to lie on a dialect continue with French or Occitan, but there’s no argument that Catalan is distinct from Spanish. It is an error to suggest otherwise. French, Occitan and Catalan are all in the Gallo-Romance language family. Spanish is in in the Ibero-Romance language family.
I don’t know if anyone ever calls Catalan a “Spanish dialect” with the meaning that you’ve suggested here - frankly I doubt it - although I have heard it called “a Spanish language” or “one of the Spanish languages.” (What do you mean by “Romance dialect” here, anyway? Is French also a Romance dialect?) But John Mace actually referred to Catalan as “The dialect of Spanish spoken on the border with France,” which is what I was correcting.
As Cosmic Relief says, it’s not polemic or offensive or whatever – it’s just erroneous, just like it would be erroneous to call French a dialect of Spanish.
(Unrelated fun facts: I did a paper on the history of Catalan translation for my professional certification. Did you know that the first identifiably Catalan texts are attested back to the 9th century, and that the first Bible printed in a Romance language was in Catalan? And that the Catalan religious tract El Desitjós, translated into English, was a seminal text of Quakerism?)
Yes. So is Spanish, for that matter. I know what you and John Mace are saying, and I have no quarrel with you on this. I was just pointing out that “Spanish” has two different referents (language and country), and that, at least for the next country over to the east, both usages are applied to the dialects. It’s a tangential point at best and I probably shouldn’t have brought it up.
That’s a rather… idiosyncratic definition of “dialect” you’re using, in that case. We might have spoken of them as “lects” or “varieties” (used as neutral terms to describe debatable entities without referring to them as languages, dialects, sociolects, idiolects, etc.), but “dialects” is not normally something you hear applied to entities at the level of French or Spanish.
Well, “idiosyncratic” is a bit harsh. My terminology comes from having studied linguistics through historical linguistics, particularly Indo-European Studies, which occasionally diverges from mainstream linguistics in both terminology and notation, and which has a decided historical bent. But it’s certainly a term I learned from usage in edited publications rather than making up because I’m unclear on the concept of a dialect. I’m not a linguist myself and so am happy to defer.
You’re right, it was rather harsh. I see you are coming from a background where different terminology is used. Mine was an unspecialized linguistics degree, so it’s interesting to see what other terminology is used in other fields. Sorry.
I am not an expert on Arabic dialects and their putative mutual intelligibility, but from past SD questions on Muslims in Malaysia, Mali, or Mauritius being able to read the Quran, plus the information linked to, I gather that the Arabic of the Quran is a more-or-less-artificial literary language founded in 7th Century Hejaz dialects, from which what you’d use to order Hummus in Homs or Shishkebab in Sfax is so substantially removed as to constitute effectively a different language.
Maybe Tamerlane or Johanna would be willing to clarify and amplify this.
Re Catalan, if I brought up “las otras lenguas españolas” here, it’s a tossup between whether Colibri’s trained flock of vampire hummingbirds or Lissener’s cap troopers from “The Abomination That Shares the Name of a Heinlein Novel” will get me first! 
However, the point I want to make with that is that, as Nava has pointed out, the Spanish government has a vested interest politically in giving the impression that the other linguistic forms spoken in Spain are actually dialectal forms of Spanish, differing from castellano puro but cut from the same cloth. In a similar way, the official stance of the French government is that Alsatian and Breton are “French dialects” – although most people would consider them a dialect of German and a P-group/Brythonic Celtic language respectively. Like “All good patriotic Americans support the War in Iraq” and “There is no such thing as a gay Zimbabwean,” the linguistic memes supporting some countries’ political stances do not necessarily correspond to the reality, linguistic or otherwise, which they purportedly describe.
Regarding Greek, let’s try this: “El Greco Anecdotalis” who reportedly can or cannot read classic Greek documents, appears to be bringing various levels of effort to the table. As a parallel, Sam Straightdoper, the random member here without a special interest in older literature, is (a) capable of reading The Pilgrim’s Progress, Shakespeare, or the KJV Bible, with only a small set of annotations clarifying where meanings have changed in 400 years; (b) capable of trudging his way through Le Morte D’Arthur or The Canterbury Tales with a rather more extensive set of annotations, including notes on changed grammatical forms, but can read it without translation; (c) unble to read Beowulf or The Song of Caedmon in the original. My impression from a collection of people making various comments is that the typical intelligent, well-schooled but non-expert-in-Classic-Greek Greek speaker finds the Epistle to the Romans or The Trojan Women to fall in category (b) for himself. I stand ready to be corrected.
New bumper sticker: “You’ve got a Friend in Catalonia”
With respect to Greek, there is a difference between the vulgar Greek of the New Testament and the formal Greek of the Grecian ruling classes. It has been my experience that it is the former that modern Greeks can understand fairly well.
You’re missing a past tense here – the current Spanish government is very comfortable with the separate existence and use of Catalan, Basque, Galician, and even Valencian.
Llionès, Astur, and Aragonese might take a little longer.
I’m confused. I poked around ethnologue and found this tree for Western Romance languages. I think everyone agrees all these languages are closely related. Now compare to the West Germanic tree.
“German” is often used as an example of a language continuum, from the Low German lects in the Lowlands, going south and West to the High German lects. From a cladistic standpoint, it would appear the Western Romance lects also form a continuum.
So, the question (in my mind) is how different can lects be and still form a continuum. Of course there will be differences as you move along the continuum, but I don’t see why that should be enough to disprove its existence.
Why isn’t the correct answer to the Original Post, “Modern Hebrew”?
Classical Hebrew was a literary language, not a “ritual language”, as it’s been used through the centuries in all sorts of written works.
This language is the language that was revived in spoken form for the modern state of Israel.
It’s not just a matter of lects being closely related; it’s a matter of gradual changes over a geographical span such that everyone can understand their neighbours but the “poles” can’t understand each other. The canonical example is the Rhenish fan: to oversimplify grossly, as you move from (say) Amsterdam to Stuttgart, the rural spoken language shifts gradually so that people understand the people they’re closest to; but the people at the ends (Amsterdam and Stuttgart) don’t understand each other. That doesn’t mean that either German or Dutch is a dialect of the other, or that they’re dialects of some uber-language.
I’m not familiar enough with the situation of Romance languages, but AFAIK you don’t get the same phenomenon as you move from Spanish-speaking regions to Catalan-speaking regions. You do get it as you move north from Catalan-speaking regions to Occitan-speaking ones, and I think also as you move from France into northern Italy, and from central France north into languages such as Picard. But it’s not the case that simply having two speech communities next to each other will result in a smooth gradient of forms, even if they’re members of the same language family. That has to actually be demonstrated on its own.