i'm trying

Us: speak only limited German

Lady: barely speaks English

Us:

Lady:

Lady: Czech? Slovak?

Us: Czech

Lady, to herself: Czech, that's a Slavic language right

Lady: understand Yugoslavian?

Us:

Waiter: Germany?

Me: No, Czechia.

Reminds me of the time when we were in Poland and I tried to order a burger using a truly unholy mix of Slovak, Russian and Ostrava dialect (which in itself is like an unholy mix of Czech and Polish).

*Each of us talking in their mother tongue*

Me: Bla bla bla.

Russian: I don’t know this “bla”.

Czech: Oh, we have “bla”! We also call it “that”!

Russian: Oh I know “that”! It’s a very old version of “this”.

Me: Oh, we have “this” too, but it means something slightly different.

Imagine that you had a time machine. If you are like me, there would be many times and places that you would like to visit. In most of them, how- ever, no one spoke English. If you could not afford the Six-Month-Immersion trip to, say, ancient Egypt, you would have to limit yourself to a time and place where you could speak the language. Consider, perhaps, a trip to England. How far back in time could you go and still be understood? Say we go to London in the year 1400 CE.

As you emerge from the time machine, a good first line to speak, something reassuring and recognizable, might be the opening line of the Lord’s Prayer. The first line in a conservative, old-fashioned version of Modern Standard English would be, “Our Father, who is in heaven, blessed be your name.” In the English of 1400, as spoken by Chaucer, you would say, “Oure fadir that art in heuenes, halwid be thy name.” Now turn the dial back another four hundred years to 1000 CE, and in Old English, or Anglo- Saxon, you would say, “Fader ure thu the eart on heofonum, si thin nama gehalgod.” A chat with Alfred the Great would be out of the question.

Most normal spoken languages over the course of a thousand years undergo enough change that speakers at either end of the millennium, attempting a conversation, would have difficulty understanding each other.

Because yes, English in the 21st century is not mutually intelligible with the Old English of 1000 AD. But one really major event happened within those thousand years: the Norman Conquest. The difference between the Old English in Beowulf (written down around 1000) and the English of Shakespeare (late 1500s) is wildly greater than the difference between Shakespeare’s English on our own. It didn’t change at a steady rate. Shakespeare could not have read Beowulf, and he might have had some difficulty with Chaucer. Would the parent language of Old English of 500 AD have been as different from the Old English of Beowulf as Beowulf is from Shakespeare?

Now, part of this could be that Shakespeare lived in the time of the printing press, and that increased volumes of printed material and increased literacy meant that language changed more slowly than in earlier times. But even if both of those reasons contributed, English seemed like an atypical case to be using as an illustrative example. And the book uses the “1000 years = rough time period for a language to change beyond the point where the ‘parent’ and ‘daughter’ languages are mutually intelligible” formula pretty extensively in formulating its theories.

So I’m curious how this works for other languages. Would a typical French person today be able to read and understand (roughly) the French of Charlemagne’s time? Could an average Chinese person understand the gist of something written during the Song Dynasty (and for non-alphabetic languages, is that even applicable to estimating whether two speakers could theoretically understand each other)? The spread of Arabic really got started in the 600s, and there are several not-mutually-intelligible versions of spoken Arabic in different regions, which seems to suggest a time frame of 1000-1500 years is roughly accurate? Or was the interaction between Arabic and, say, North African languages as extensive as that between Old English and Norman French? How much does change depends on the level of interaction of the language with other languages? If a language was spoken by a small group of people in an area where other languages predominated, would we expect it to change substantially faster (this relates to some evidence the book presents regarding the ancient near east)? How much faster?

The unfortunate answer is that 'language clearly changes at different rates but we still don't really have a great handle on why'. There are some factors that seem to influence it - isolation can result both in extra fast and extra slow change (Faroese grammar is very conservative compared to continental Scandinavian but its phonology has gone totally off the rails), and spreading out over a new area can result in slower change (see eg how American English is much more conservative than prestige varieties of English English) - but overall it's frustratingly hard to pin down. Part of the issue is just that quantifying how much change has happened in a given time is far from straightforward (how much change is 'one change'? are all 'one change's the same amount of change?), part of the issue is that in many cases it's hard to know when a change actually started, and part of the issue is that many changes spread over a wide area of many languages and aren't really internally driven anyway. It's all quite complicated!

Thank you so much! This is exactly the kind of stuff I wanted to know! Fascinating that languages can change faster in isolation in some respects.

Would a typical French person today be able to read and understand (roughly) the French of Charlemagne’s time?

Read? Probably. Hear and understand? That would be much more difficult. Île-de-France French is probably the single most innovative Romance language (among other things, it has ended up with phrase-final stress not by moving stress but by deleting everything that happened to be after the stressed syllable), and Old French would probably sound much more like Spanish or Italian to modern ears. Honestly a modern Spanish speaker might find it easier to understand than a modern French speaker would!

(Edited to add an extra side note - Icelandic is often trotted out as specially conservative, and it certainly is grammatically, but its conservative spelling hides a good deal of phonological changes and I doubt that a modern Icelandic speaker could understand spoken Old Norse without a good deal of practice. It might be closer to eg modern unofficial-standard Norwegian vs modern Danish, though, where once you can figure out how to convert the phonology you can understand the words being said just fine.)

Could an average Chinese person understand the gist of something written during the Song Dynasty (and for non-alphabetic languages, is that even applicable to estimating whether two speakers could theoretically understand each other)?

Average Chinese person? Probably not, though I'm not sure what the average level of literacy in Classical Chinese is for Chinese people (I imagine 'not very high'). Chinese in particular is a complex situation, in that a form of Chinese as spoken in the centuries surrounding Confucius (500s-ish BC) remained the ostensible written standard - albeit with more and more admixture from modern varieties - into the 20th century. That said, the standard only covered written Chinese, and since the Chinese script references pronunciation more than it encodes it, spoken varieties were free to diverge without any pressure at all from the standard. Old Chinese - a term that covers a massive period of time but is usually reconstructed around like the 500s or 700s BC - is overwhelmingly different from any modern Sinitic language. It didn't have tones, and had all kinds of complex consonant clusters - and maybe even some affixes here and there! Some of those affixes are preserved in various ways in modern Sinitic languages, eg by tone alternations or maybe slightly different outcomes of the rhyme part of a word or whatever, and sometimes maybe even just by being written with different characters whose pronunciations have now merged. To be clear, in premodern times standard / prestige varieties rarely had much influence on pronunciation anyway. Romance is a fun example of this, because it took a long time for anyone to realise they 'weren't speaking Latin anymore' - they just wrote in Latin and would convert it when reading into whatever early Romance variety they spoke. The earliest non-Latin Romance writing we have is for an oath taken by a Frankish prince in the 800s, who would have spoken Frankish rather than Old French and thus couldn't just convert from Latin - he had to have it written out for him the way he needed to say it.

The spread of Arabic really got started in the 600s, and there are several not-mutually-intelligible versions of spoken Arabic in different regions, which seems to suggest a time frame of 1000-1500 years is roughly accurate? Or was the interaction between Arabic and, say, North African languages as extensive as that between Old English and Norman French?

I am less of an expert in Arabic linguistics, but I would say that timeframe is generally relatively sensible, though it can be much shorter. I'm pretty sure there's been some extensive interaction between Arabic and Berber languages, but also Arabic varieties on the other side of Egypt are just as divergent from each other. I would default to assuming that most of the divergence is simply due to there having been a long time for different varieties to drift apart.

(There are some highly divergent Arabic varieties, like that spoken in South Sudan, but those are due to much more influence from local languages.)

How much does change depends on the level of interaction of the language with other languages? If a language was spoken by a small group of people in an area where other languages predominated, would we expect it to change substantially faster (this relates to some evidence the book presents regarding the ancient near east)? How much faster?

This a possible probable yes. Especially if this language is in contact with one or more similar-to-each-other languages with much more cultural prestige, it will probably start to change to more and more resemble those languages. We can see this process in a lot of places - many modern indigenous languages spoken in now-Anglophone regions of the world have strongly English-influenced sound systems and are often picking up English phrasings in their grammar, and we can see many other examples of languages growing closer to each other over time. Fun examples are Ionian Greek (now dead but documented in the 1920s), which had Greek words and inflections on a mostly Turkish structure; Akkadian and Sumerian, which we can watch influence each other in real time until they both went extinct; and Quechua and Aymara, which have nearly identical sound systems but share <20% of core vocabulary and thus are almost certainly not related.

That said, there's nothing stopping a language that's largely isolated from just carrying on with innovation as much as it wants to. Japonic languages show this enjoyably - Japanese is the most conservative phonologically by a good margin, despite having a significant amount of what looks a lot like Koreanic influence in its grammar (in many ways grammatically it's the least Japonic-looking Japonic language), while the much more isolated Ryuukyuuan languages phonologically look almost like 'Japanese but shoved through a bunch of extra sound changes'. Miyako in particular is quite spectacular - Japanese uru 'sell' is vv in Miyako, hito 'person' is pztu (note the /p/ is a retention where Japanese changed it), and kushi 'comb' is ff!

So yeah, language change speed is tremendously complex, and very hard to pin down to much in the way of general principles.

wish i had anything to add regarding studies, but work has been extra hectic the past two weeks. classes started yesterday though, so i will finally be able to crank out some posts!

currently reading: infocracy: digitization and the crisis of democracy by byung-chul han

- 05.07.2025 -

It's been a minute ! It's finals season... I feel like everyone's already on vacations lol it's so hard to focus on studying while it's summer, someone finish me.

I have 2 weeks off to prepare for 6 exams

2 written exam

2 partical exams

1 research paper

1 oral exam

SEPT 28 / 22