What still-spoken language has changed the least?

[Wendell_Wagner]

Rusalka writes:

> Classical Hebrew was a literary language, not a “ritual language”, as it’s been
> used through the centuries in all sorts of written works.

It’s the same thing. Hebrew, just like Latin or Sanskrit, became the official language of a religious group. (There are also a few other examples of this in other languages and religious groups.) They ceased to be the native language of anyone at some point, but they continued to be the language of the religious group and quit evolving. Sometimes new vocabulary items were added for things that hadn’t existed previously, but there was no dropping of old vocabulary. There was none of the usual slow change in grammar and pronunciation. Sometimes the pronunciation of the language would not be quite what we can now determine is the original pronunciation, but there would be an official pronunciation (as has happened to Latin, where Ecclesiastical Latin is pronounced somewhat differently than our best guess for how Latin was pronounced in, say, 1 A.D.)

The important point is that no one grew up speaking Latin, Sanskrit, or Hebrew for many centuries. They were learned in schools. They were used in various religious writings. Often, since it was the only language used (in some sense) over an entire civilization, it was the de facto scholarly or diplomatic language over a wide group of countries with shared history. If you’re going to count Hebrew, then you have to count Latin, since they have both continuously been used as the official language of a religious group for many centuries, they both have continuously had many things written in them, and Latin has certainly been learned by many more people than Hebrew during those centuries. The only distinction that Hebrew has is that people decided in the late 1940’s to make a version of the language the official language of a country. It appears to me that this means that for a language to be completely revived after it had ceased being a native language learned in infancy, it takes both a religious reason and a political one. That is, Hebrew got revived not only because it had a religious history as a ritual language, but because it was felt important for political purposes to make it the official language of Israel.

[Johanna]

@Polycarp

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.

The Prophet was quoted as saying that the Qur’an was “revealed in seven ahruf.” Now, nobody today knows what exactly harf means in this context, but it’s usually taken to mean dialect.

In other words, the text of the Qur’an allows for seven different dialectal readings, which conceivably could have been true at the time. The consonantal text allowed for readings with a range of different vowels. There are certain orthographic conventions surviving in Qur’anic text which do not correspond to the received pronunciation, and must have been developed as a compromise allowing the uniform text to be read by speakers of variant dialects. Today there is is only one standard pronunciation of the Qur’an that everyone learns, and the variant pronunciations have long been forgotten (with the exception of a variant taught in parts of northwest Africa until recently).

Nowadays, the dialects on the ground are different from whatever the original ahruf of the Qur’an may have been. The dialect of Hijaz in the Prophet’s time is nothing like the Hijaz dialect of today. If you have only learned the Classical Arabic of the Qur’an, you could not understand the colloquial speech in present-day Medina. To understand the situation of the Arabic language today, consider this analogy:

All of the contemporary Romance languages, like Catalan, French, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish are called “dialects of Latin.” None of them is recognized as a language in its own right. However, they are used only as spoken language. All writing, including newspapers and gum wrappers as well as belles lettres, is in an artificially modernized form of classical Latin–a language that everyone learns in school but no one actually uses in conversation. It’s used only for making speeches and news broadcasts. All movies as well as sitcoms on TV are in some local “dialect.” If you ask anyone from Portugal or Italy or Romania what language they speak, they’ll answer “Latin.” However, only people with several years of education are capable of reading the Vulgate Bible or medieval Latin literature, and almost everyone is incapable of reading Cicero without extensive annotations. Imagine that most of the movies and TV shows come from France and are distributed throughout the Romance-speaking world–as a result, when foreigners set out to learn to speak “Latin” they practice phrases like Comment allez-vous and Où se trouve la salle de bains for use in Spain, Italy, Romania, etc. People speaking neighboring “Latin dialects” are often able to make themselves understood to one another, but someone from Portugal will be at a complete loss to understand the speech of Romanians. If educated, they can converse with one another in something like a blend of Vulgate or Ecclesiastical Latin with the “dialect” of France.

Arabic is just like that–Modern Standard Arabic, based on Classical Arabic with updated vocabulary, is the only written form of Arabic, and is studied in schools from one end of the Arab world to the other. As an artificial language, it’s exactly the same anywhere you travel, but no one actually speaks it. The “dialects” like Iraqi, Yemeni, Levantine (which breaks down into several subdialects like Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian), “Gulf Arabic” (another group of dialects), Egyptian, and Maghribi, to name the better known ones, are as different from one another as the various Romance languages. When foreigners study Arabic through Berlitz tapes and the like, it’s invariably Egyptian dialect–which does not actually allow you to converse with Algerians or Omanis. Just as Romanian is remarkably divergent from the other Romance languages, the farther Maghribi dialects of Morocco and Mauritania might as well be Martian for all that an Iraqi could understand them.

[Alessan]

@Wendell Wagner

. The only distinction that Hebrew has is that people decided in the late 1940’s to make a version of the language the official language of a country. .

Late 1940’s? Go back 40 years. The Zionists adopted Hebrew as the sole spoken language of the Yishuv around the turn of the century. By 1948, the first generation to speak Hebrew as their first language already had children of their own.

Form the Wikipedia Article:

In 1909, the first Hebrew city, Tel Aviv, was established, on the streets and in the cafes of which Hebrew was already widely spoken. The entire administration of the city was carried out in Hebrew, and new olim or those not yet speaking Hebrew were forced to word their statements in Hebrew. Furthermore, street signs and announcements were written in Hebrew. A writer said in 1913 that in Tel Aviv “Yiddish is more treif (non-kosher) than pork. To speak it a person needs great courage.”

Israel didn’t spring fully-formed out of the UN’s forehead in 1948, you know.

[Wendell_Wagner]

O.K., thank you, Alessan. In any case, the point is that Hebrew wasn’t the native language of anyone for over 2000 years. It had ceased to be spoken by children as their first language at least by 200 B.C. and didn’t get revived as the first language of anyone till after 1800 A.D. Between those times, it was strictly what I refer to as a religious ritual language, which means that it was used both in religious ceremonies and in writing books but not as the native language of anyone.

[Johanna]

Hebrew was on ice for all those years which preserved it from the usual processes of language change. Once it was thawed out and became a native language again, it went right back to changing like any other language. If it had been spoken in everyday usage all that time, you can bet the result would be at least as different from Biblical Hebrew as Italian is from Latin. So while Hebrew could win the thread, it would be sort of cheating.