# Age of a language - meaningless or well-definable ?



## englishman

I've seen a couple of postings on this forum regarding the "age" of a language, with suggestions from one or another person that it's either a meaningless concept or a useful one.

Does anyone know enough about this question to summarize the two sets of arguments ? As far as I can see two potential arguments are:

a) It is a useful idea: No one spoke modern English/French/German 2000 years ago, so we have an upper bound on the age of those languages of 2000 years, and we merely have to do some investigative work to reduce the upper bound.

b) It's meaningless: modern English (say) merges seamlessly into middle English, and that becomes peppered with Norman French, and it's thus pointless to try to distinguish the "point" at which modern English was spoken.

I can't make up my mind which is the better argument.


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## Outsider

If I wanted to state how old a language is, I might look for things like "When was it first written?", or "When did it become official?"

But these kinds of events are subject to all sorts of historical contingencies. Perhaps language B only started to be written down later than language A because it happened to be spoken in an area where writing had not been invented yet; but it could have been spoken for as long or longer than language A.

Another thought to ponder about: the Greek language has changed a lot since the time of Homer, yet we still call it Greek. The Latin language has similarly changed, but now we call it the "Romance languages". Does this make modern Greek older than the Romance languages? I wouldn't say that. What happened was the while Latin branched out into several languages, Greek remained one. So Latin only "died" because it was split, while Greek "survived" because it remained united. All this, however, was due to arbitrary historical and political events. It was hardly pure linguistics.

Any attempt to define the age of a language too rigorously is bound to bump into the brick wall that is the subjectivity of the very concept of "language".


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## englishman

Outsider said:


> If I wanted to state how old a language is, I might look for things like "When was it first written?", or "When did it become official?"



I can't see how either of those things help you define the age of a language for the reasons you go on to explain ..



> But these kinds of events are subject to all sorts of historical contingencies. Perhaps language B only started to be written down later than language A because it happened to be spoken in an area where writing had not been invented yet; but it could have been spoken for as long or longer than language A.


You're doing an excellent job of demolishing your own proposition here. 



> Any attempt to define the age of a language too rigorously is bound to bump into the brick wall that is the subjectivity of the very concept of "language".


Well, given that linguists use terms such as Middle English, Old English, Norman French, Old High German, and so on, I would guess that they believe that those terms refer to an identifiable construct, whose historical period can be defined fairly closely. I'm not convinced that it's impossible to come up with a useful definition of "language" that allows you to pin down its age reasonably accurately.

For example, we could define the point at which a "language" "dies" by the point in time when the average historical descendant of the speakers of that language fail to understand, say, 50% of the words in the texts of the language. So for example, a speaker of modern English may have to read texts dating from 1500 in order for that criteria to be fulfilled.


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## Outsider

englishman said:


> Well, given that linguists use terms such as Middle English, Old English, Norman French, Old High German, and so on, I would guess that they believe that those terms refer to an identifiable construct, whose historical period can be defined fairly closely. I'm not convinced that it's impossible to come up with a useful definition of "language" that allows you to pin down its age reasonably accurately.


Identifiable, yes, but objective...?


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## Frank06

Hi,

I am probably one of those people who find absolute statements as 
(1) "Hebrew/Sumerian/Sanskrit/... is the oldest language"
(2) English is 1400 years old
(3) any absolute statement about the absolute age of language X, Y, Z
completely meaningless.

The short answer: simply because it cannot be quantified. 

I think Trask summarizes it all:



> The question is *meaningless*. Apart from a few special cases such as creoles, all languages are equally ''old'', and *no language is ''older'' than any other*. Languages do not have beginnings, and therefore they do not have ages.[my stress]


Or to quote another linguist:



> There is absolutely no need to interview linguists about this as we





> are all pretty much agreed on this one. [...] THERE IS NO OLDEST LIVING LANGUAGE.[capitals used by author]


The complete (mini) articles and other reactions by linguists can be found here (links at the bottom of the page).

Quite a lot of people who do make that kind of statements (especially statement 1) most often have a political or religious agenda. For example, but not exclusively, in the case of Hebrew we have Biblical literalists and Orthodox Jewish organisations and in the case of Turkish we have a certain kind of "Kemalist linguists".
There are two possibilities : 
1. People who utter this kind of peculiar, absolute statements in relation to the absolute age of a language certainly don't have a linguistic agenda, let alone a basic book on (historical) linguistics level 101.
2. Or they have primary sources about any possible language used at any possible time since the first word was uttered (whenever that was), which nobody else have. 
To be honest, I stick to the first possibility.


The long answer:
In my humble opinion, there are two problems: the labels and the continuity, or otherwise said: synchronic linguistics (dealing with well defined periods, well defined meaning using basically arbitrary but conventional and practical labels and periods) and a diachronic point of view (dealing with language change over a great(er) period). The big mistake is that the diachrony is often considered to be the result of the (mere and blind) addition of the several synchronic 'components'. It's necessary to point out that even for a diachronic analysis of a language one need *conventional* starting points.

Statement (2) is an apparantly more tricky one, though I think both statements (1) and (2) are very much the same. I also think that Outsider already explained that the problem lies in the name giving, the labeling.



> Another thought to ponder about: the Greek language has changed a lot since the time of Homer, yet we still call it Greek. The Latin language has similarly changed, but now we call it the "Romance languages".


 
I really don't think that we can say that "the English language" is +/- 1600 years old. It would be pretty, erm, weird and meaningless, to make the following mathematical calculation: 
Age of English = (period of Old English + period of Middle English + period of Modern English up to now) = +/- 1600 years.

First of all, we're dealing with very arbitrary periods and dates, even in the case of the various phases of English. Every linguist who deals with let's say "Old English" or "Middle English" is very much aware of the convention (or even convenience) of the dating. That's why most of them will also explain (shortly) why exactly they picked those dates.
To give one example:



> 1400, the year of Chaucer's death, serves as a convenient but arbitrary terminus for the Middle English period (1066-1400). [my stress]


[From: Mitchell: An Invitation to Old English & Anglo-saxon England, 1995].
1066 is as arbitrary, but also as conventional (and convenient) as 1400: it's not as if the Normandians influenced the local language(s) by merely setting one foot on English soil. It's not as if people who burried Chaucer said "Let's speak Early Modern English, now we got rid of him".
You can also wonder why they picked out the conquest by William as a closing date, and not, say, the arrival of the Danes, a few centuries earlier.

Secondly, the labels are pretty arbitrary, but yes, practical as a convention. But they can also be very confusing, as the case of 'Persian' shows:
the age of Persian = (period of Old Persian* + period of Middle Persian + period of Modern Persian)? I don't think so, for several reasons (also because it doesn't take into account Avestan). [*Old Persian, by convention, is the language written down in cuneiform during the Achaemenian period]

Back to the label "Old English" (or "Anglo-Saxon" if you prefer the old one). What do you understand by it anyway? The language of the Germanic inhabitants of modern days Britain from the first arrival in the middle (beginning?) of the 5th century? The group of closely related dialects spoken by them? The language spoken between 700 to 1100 AD (of which *we* only have texts!)? Or the languages/dialects conventionally labeled as Kentish, West Saxon, Mercian, Northumbrian? Early West Saxon or late West Saxon? Or do you prefer to think of "Old English" as "Primitive Old English + Early Old English + Late Old English"?

Thirdly, every author is aware that certain phenomena in - let's stick to English - Middle English, already started in the Old English period, that some traits of what we call Modern English, find their origin in Middle English etc. Readers should be aware of that too, and they should be aware of the consequences.
Despite the rather static labels, the language itself is an incredibly dynamic... erm, thing. It's difficult to pinpoint periods (and even labels), but it is possible to make abstractions and conventions.

For following comparison I need your fanatasy. I think we can compare it with water in a river: let's take a river of 4 meters wide and 1 meter deep. Let's say that it could be of interest to follow 1 meter (by 1m by 4m), hence 4 cubic meter of water, from point A to point B, or from moment X to moment Y. Apart from problems at the start (which we'll ignore for the time being), I guess it is pretty difficult to follow our 4 cubic meters.
The same goes for language. But the big difference is that we can make, up to a certain point, abstractions and models of a language, using labels and dates, which can have practical value (e.g. a handbook of Old English). We should only be aware of the abstractions and of the continuity of the object of our studies, viz. language.

Fourth point: the differences between e.g. the verbal system in a synchronic Old English grammar and a synchronic Middle English grammar are huge. But we shouldn't forget the diachronic aspect. If we could ask a native speakers from 1065 and native speakers from 1067 to compare their languages, I think they would shrug their shoulders. Imagine that in 500 years, a linguist would decide to come up with the term "Really Really Modern Modern English" and imagine that she'd decide to let it start in 2007... What would you think about that?

Finally, If you are to accept the previous points, then consider the question "What before Old English?". 
We don't *call* it "Pre Old *English*", but so what? If you'd decide to call it like that, and the peer group of linguists accept that term and your justification, then nihil obstat.
"English", "Old English" as such are just labels that came into existence by sheer coincidence. Reality doesn't act according to our (arbitrary, cenventional and or coincidential) labels.
If you look at the differences between Old English and Middle English, and you find still have a reason to call both "English", then why not doing the same with "Pre-Old English" and "Old English"? Answer: convention, labels. Despite those labels, our labels, if we'd ask a native speaker of 399 and a native speaker of 401 to compare their languages...
We could do the same with "Pre-Old English" and "Proto-Germanic", "Proto-Germanic" and "Proto-Indo-European", some even say "Proto-Indo-European" and "Nostratic"... and then we have to stop, for the simple reason that we don't have texts which are old enough to read and/or to use as a basis for further (plausible) reconstructions.


Groetjes,
Frank


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## HistofEng

> The question is *meaningless*. Apart from a few special cases such as creoles, all languages are equally ''old'', and *no language is ''older'' than any other*. Languages do not have beginnings, and therefore they do not have ages.[my stress]


 
The thing is that linguists aren't exactly sure how creoles form, and we certainly don't know exactly which languages could be considered creoles today. Some linguists surmise that many natural languages go through creolization as they evolve (on a continuum), it's just the extent of it and other historical factors that make it conspicuous or not.


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## vince

I agree that the age of a language is meaningless.

Greek (as in the national language spoken in Greece today) is not any older than Afrikaans or Ukrainian.

Language is continuously changing and the Greek spoken by Homer is not the same language spoken by Greeks today in Athens.

The reason why a language is popularly perceived to be "older" than another is only because its proto-language only bore one modern descendant with its own written standard. E.g. if French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian, etc. were suddenly wiped out and all traces of literature in those languages erased, and only Italian remained spoken and written, then Italian would be "Latin" again.

If Greek broke up into two forms spoken in different areas and with separate written traditions and with favorable political/nationalist conditions, then "Greek" would cease to exist and two new languages would come out.

A very funny situation in my opinion, due to being completely opposite to popular knowledge, is that it can be argued that the "Chinese language" as spoken and written today all over China, Taiwan, and Singapore is less than 80 years old. The "Chinese language" written 90 years ago throughout China is unintelligible except to the educated class due to differences in grammar and vocabulary. This is due to a sudden shift in the basis of the written language from Classical Chinese to one matching the Mandarin "dialect". Similar arguments can be made to say that Turkish is less than 70 years old: though grammatical changes were not as significant, the vocabulary was different enough to cause loss of intelligibility with Ottoman Turkish, in addition to switching to a different script.


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## Athaulf

While I certainly acknowledge all the points made in the posts above, I think it could still be meaningful to look for living languages that are "the oldest" in the sense of remaining most similar to their ancestor languages or close relatives from centuries or even millenniums ago. This can be tested pretty easily in practice if old written documents are available: just see to what extent the archaic language of these documents is intelligible to a modern speaker. 

Now, of course, it's impossible to devise an objectively precise measure of intelligibility, and there are also many other variables that have to be accounted for (e.g. whether the archaic language is widely taught as a second language, or whether the present spelling standard, being archaic, hides certain phonological and morphological changes, like in e.g. English or French). Still, I think that some rough measure could be made -- for example, I can usually make a lot of sense out of Old Church Slavonic, whereas Old English documents of similar age are utterly incomprehensible to a modern English speaker.

Of course, even with this method, there is no way to precisely quantify the "age" of a language for the purpose of directly comparing any two given languages. However, in cases where there are drastic differences in the rate of language change, I think the above method can meaningfully answer which language has changed more in a given time period.


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## Montaigne

Phonetics evolve, spelling evolves, grammar evolves (more slowly) and above all vocabulary evolves through borrowings from other idioms.
Now, suppose language A said to be 1500 years "old" borrows words from language B
(3000 years "old") and from language C (850 years "old").
How "old" is language A +some B +some C ?
Ah Ah !!


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## modus.irrealis

One thing I've noticed is that attempts at objectively determining the age of a language (or whether two languages are the same language and so on) often result in paradoxical situations. For example with thinking of age in terms of the intelligibility of older forms of the language, the Greek spoken today is closer to Ancient Greek than the Greek spoken two hundred years ago because of the massive influence of the ancient language in all areas from vocabulary to inflection to syntax. Does this mean Greek has gotten younger in the last few centuries? And Greek is not unique in this aspect -- the Romance languages have borrowed an enormous number of words from their earlier form (Latin) with mostly cosmetic changes, so at least in vocabulary (and perhaps in other areas) they too have become closer to their earlier stages. In that sense I'd say the age of a language is not well-defined because these biological analogies can only go so far before they break down.

Another way I think you can talk about the age of a language, though is not in terms of the language in and of itself but in terms of the language as perceived by its speakers. For example, at some stage in the history of Latin, the Latin speakers in Spain and the Latin speakers in France decided they spoke different languages -- the same thing seems to be happening in the former Yugoslavia. With Greek, on the other hand, although the facts on the ground were analogous to those with Latin, no awareness of having different languages arose. You can't date these events precisely but you can give approximate ages. Although this seems to be more about society and culture, than about the language itself.


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## Lugubert

vince said:


> A very funny situation in my opinion, due to being completely opposite to popular knowledge, is that it can be argued that the "Chinese language" as spoken and written today all over China, Taiwan, and Singapore is less than 80 years old. The "Chinese language" written 90 years ago throughout China is unintelligible except to the educated class due to differences in grammar and vocabulary. This is due to a sudden shift in the basis of the written language from Classical Chinese to one matching the Mandarin "dialect".


A counterexample is what my (Swedish) teacher of Chinese has demonstrated several times. We sometimes have students of Chinese origin in Chinese language university classes in Sweden. Some of them have just left high school in China, and are on a grant for studying Swedish; some are born in Sweden but of Chinese ancestry. So, teacher quotes two or at the most three words from the beginning of an eighth century poem, by, say, Li Bai. More often than not, there's one of them reciting the poem to its very end and translating and/or explaining it into at least English, or even into Swedish!

To refer to the thread question, I think that the "age" question is pretty meaningless.


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## SDLX Master

I am positive there is no way to actually tag languages by dates of start and expiration. All we have, for the sake of historical records, is the reference to moments in history when a given language was thought to be put into widespread use or extinction by communities in their corresponding dwelling areas. Other than that, there's nothing you else you could fall back on to determine their age, not even carbon14, smoke signals or drums beating.


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## Sepia

Outsider said:


> If I wanted to state how old a language is, I might look for things like "When was it first written?", or "When did it become official?"
> 
> ...
> 
> ..



Good think to look for, but only in a few cases. Lots of languages have existed in writing for centuries without any set standard for its writing - so the writing will have changed gradually just as the spoken language. And official? What is official in that sense - many countries still have not any law determing which langage is their official language because doubts about this were never raised. Denmark is a good example of this because it has existed as a state for some 8-900 years. The basis of its civil law dates back to 1200-and-something - Jydske Lov - a lawbook that also had significant influence on modern day civil law in other countries, like the German BGB. Denmark's constitution is approx. 150 years old and mentions nothing about languages at all. They are both written in some kind of "Danish", but for the original Jyske Lov one needs a translation into modern Danish. (It is probably closer to Old Norse than to modern Danish) But they are both valid law-texts in today's Denmark. 

I'd say, the only states that determines which language is official are the ones where different languages were spoken by significant numbers of people in that state.


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## Outsider

By "official" I simply meant "used in official documents". To be perfectly clear: when a will is written, is language A used, or language B? When a law is published, is it written in language A, or language B? And so on.


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## Lugubert

Outsider said:


> By "official" I simply meant "used in official documents". To be perfectly clear: when a will is written, is language A used, or language B? When a law is published, is it written in language A, or language B? And so on.


That still requires tricky definitions. Researching our family's history, Mother (now 91) has deciphered church records, wills and other documents from the late 1600's. They're arguably in Swedish, although not immediately accessible to everyone today. If you go back to our earliest law texts, from, say, 1200 ce, they're almost as difficult to contemporary Swedes as Beowulf to an average Englishman of today. Swedish? Depends on your definition. You would encounter difficulties in drawing a clear line between some of that "Swedish" and coexisting "Low German". Moreover, in my home town Gothenburg, Dutch, English, German and Swedish were regarded as official languages during the 17th C.


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## Outsider

Lugubert said:


> Researching our family's history, Mother (now 91) has deciphered church records, wills and other documents from the late 1600's. They're arguably in Swedish, although not immediately accessible to everyone today. If you go back to our earliest law texts, from, say, 1200 ce, they're almost as difficult to contemporary Swedes as Beowulf to an average Englishman of today. Swedish? Depends on your definition.


As long as it's not Latin... All languages change, of course.



Lugubert said:


> You would encounter difficulties in drawing a clear line between some of that "Swedish" and coexisting "Low German".


That does make it trickier, as I believe German was a language of culture in eastern and northern Europe for a long time.


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## Sepia

Outsider said:


> By "official" I simply meant "used in official documents". To be perfectly clear: when a will is written, is language A used, or language B? When a law is published, is it written in language A, or language B? And so on.



I understand that, but that still does not make any sense when you cannot pinpoint any time in history where a gradually changing language has turns from language A into language B, rigth? Because there isn't any - it is changing gradually. Take a look at French or possibly also your own language and compare texts that were written now 50 years ago and around the 14th century. Take a closer look at the verb forms ...



Outsider said:


> As long as it's not Latin... All languages change, of course.
> 
> That does make it trickier, as I believe German was a language of culture in eastern and northern Europe for a long time.



Depends of which "German" you mean. With the publication of the first printed translation of the Bible High German (in a similar version to contemporary "official" German) gained acceptance. Socalled "Low German" is a whole group of languages that have lots of similarities not only with High Geman, but also with all of the Scandinavian languages. Nevertheless, they are different languages.


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## Outsider

Sepia said:


> I understand that, but that still does not make any sense when you cannot pinpoint any time in history where a gradually changing language has turns from language A into language B, rigth? Because there isn't any - it is changing gradually.


Sometimes, there is. Portuguese began to be used in official documents in the late 13th century, by order of King Denis.

Of course, it had been used prior to that as well, two write popular poetry.



Sepia said:


> Take a look at French or possibly also your own language and compare texts that were written now 50 years ago and around the 14th century. Take a closer look at the verb forms ...


Hey, I was one of the first people in the thread to say that defining the birth of a language hinges on defining "language", which is itself problematic and subjective! Essentially, we have the same point of view on this. I merely took issue with a minor point you'd made.



Sepia said:


> Depends of which "German" you mean. With the publication of the first printed translation of the Bible High German (in a similar version to contemporary "official" German) gained acceptance. Socalled "Low German" is a whole group of languages that have lots of similarities not only with High Geman, but also with all of the Scandinavian languages. Nevertheless, they are different languages.


What is the same language and what are different languages is a matter of opinion and politics. Which is another reason why the original question, "What is the age of a language?", is not very informative.

I any case, I was referring to High German -- didn't the elites of Eastern Europe use it widely as their language of culture for centuries, due to Teutonic domination, and later German cultural influence?


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## vince

Lugubert said:


> A counterexample is what my (Swedish) teacher of Chinese has demonstrated several times. We sometimes have students of Chinese origin in Chinese language university classes in Sweden. Some of them have just left high school in China, and are on a grant for studying Swedish; some are born in Sweden but of Chinese ancestry. So, teacher quotes two or at the most three words from the beginning of an eighth century poem, by, say, Li Bai. More often than not, there's one of them reciting the poem to its very end and translating and/or explaining it into at least English, or even into Swedish!



I'm sorry, I don't think I get your point.  Are you arguing that written Chinese has stayed constant enough for modern Chinese people to understand it?

I'm sure that if you studied Old Norse you would also understand it, it doesn't make it the same language as Swedish just because certain Swedes who were taught Old Norse may understand it.


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## avok

What about Creole languages? As a consequence of European colonies, some Creoles were born. We can actually pinpoint the birth (thus, the age) of those reole languages. If not, we have to accept that, for instance, Papiamento, a Portuguese creole dates back to Latin (?)


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## Frank06

Hi,


avok said:


> What about Creole languages? As a consequence of European colonies, some Creoles were born. We can actually pinpoint the birth (thus, the age) of those reole languages. If not, we have to accept that, for instance, Papiamento, a Portuguese creole dates back to Latin (?)


See post #5 (also for full reference):


> The question [about which is the oldest language] is meaningless. *Apart from a few special cases such as creoles*, all languages are equally ''old''...[my stress]


 
Groetjes,

Frank


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## Sepia

Outsider said:


> Sometimes, there is. Portuguese began to be used in official documents in the late 13th century, by order of King Denis.
> ...
> 
> I any case, I was referring to High German -- didn't the elites of Eastern Europe use it widely as their language of culture for centuries, due to Teutonic domination, and later German cultural influence?




Portuguese - would a modern day Portuguese native understand that without having studied the old language?


East German Elite:

I have never really focussed on that, but it is possible that there was a strong influence. At least one Russian Emperor - Peter the Great - was very fond of German culture and named his city Sankt Peterburg; this is more or less the German spelling. A lot of High German words entered the Russian language during that time.

Earlier German language influence, during the Middle Ages, in the North Atlantic and Baltic coast merchant cities seems to come mainly from Low German., though. If you look closer you'll recognize a lot of Low German in Scandinavian artisan's and marine terminology.


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## Outsider

Sepia said:


> Portuguese - would a modern day Portuguese native understand that without having studied the old language?


You can judge for yourself:

The oldest written document in your mother tongue
Livro da ensinança de bem cavalgar toda sela
Translation help: Dom Duarte document
Equestrian text of Dom Duarte


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## Lugubert

vince said:


> I'm sorry, I don't think I get your point. Are you arguing that written Chinese has stayed constant enough for modern Chinese people to understand it?
> 
> I'm sure that if you studied Old Norse you would also understand it, it doesn't make it the same language as Swedish just because certain Swedes who were taught Old Norse may understand it.


My point is that I understand that for young fairly average Chinese, way less study effort is needed to understand very ancient poets, than what would be required for me, the rather seasoned language learner, to understand Old Norse or Swedish of a similar age.


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## vince

That has to due with properties of the Chinese writing system, which preserves word etymology and not phonology. It's not a matter of the language not changing as much. Old forms of Chinese, as well as unrelated languages Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese written in old Chinese script, will always be somewhat intelligible to people who can read Chinese. The caveat is that they have no idea how the words are pronounced and just pronounce the characters as if they were in Mandarin.


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## Athaulf

vince said:


> That has to due with properties of the Chinese writing system, which preserves word etymology and not phonology. It's not a matter of the language not changing as much. Old forms of Chinese, as well as unrelated languages Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese written in old Chinese script, will always be somewhat intelligible to people who can read Chinese. The caveat is that they have no idea how the words are pronounced and just pronounce the characters as if they were in Mandarin.



It's similar with the English written system (although its feature of artificial preservation of reading intelligibility doesn't extend nearly as far as Chinese). Most words are nowadays spelled more or less the same as 600 years ago, so Middle English texts are still somewhat intelligible to a modern reader, despite the fact that their original pronunciation wouldn't even be recognized as anything resembling English.


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