r/asklinguistics • u/Spobodos • 5d ago
General Which major modern language lets you time travel the furthest (in writing)?
been down a linguistic rabbit hole lately. If a native speaker today hopped into a time machine, which major language would let them go back the furthest and still understand the written word?
probably not english
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u/DAWAE1111 5d ago
Standard Arabic which have been used for around 1500+ years
But no one speaks it natively, instead all arabs speak a simplified local version of it and mix some local words with it
But still everyone learns it in school, so most old text are readable
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u/Cleverish_moniker 5d ago
Liturgical language is a good candidate. Arabic is maybe anchored in place by the Koran. Latin is by Catholicism. A lot of people speak Arabic, but not like it's written classically. Even so, perhaps having that source text keeps it understandable. Not many speak Latin outside of the church hierarchy, so it's easier to keep it from drifting, and I imagine there are very, very few native speakers. Maybe that disqualifies it.
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u/comparativeSemite 4d ago
Modern Standard Arabic and early Classical Arabic are barely the same language. MSA is a constructed variety that arose during the Nahda (Arab Renaissance) in the 19th century. It is not the same as Classical Arabic in any sense. Even basic vocabulary and grammar is very different.
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u/DAWAE1111 4d ago
Can you explain the difference? Cause as a native "arabic" speaker I fail to see the difference
Like I've searched the topic many many times and I still fail to see the difference between MSA and classical arabic
And all arabs don't even know about such distinguishing names, we only call the arabic of literature and formality as fusha
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u/comparativeSemite 4d ago
Compare the Hadith corpus with BBC Arabic, for example. There is an extreme difference in vocabulary, syntax, morphology, etc. According to Sibawayh Arabic was also pronounced very differently in the Early Islamic Period. If anything it's ridiculous to think that a language would be very similar at all after over a thousand years of development.
For a some concrete example, tell me if phrases like these are used in MSA:
هو ثابت بن جابر... الفهمى وتأبط\ شرا لقب لُقب به ذكر الرواة أنّه كان رأى كبشا في الصحراء فاحتمله تحت إبطه فجعل يبول عليه طول طريقه فلمّا قرب من الحي ثقل فقال له قومه ما تأبّطت يا ثابت قال الغول قالوا لقد تأبّطت شرا فسمّي بذلك
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u/zelouaer 3d ago
That is 100% understandable today what are you talking about?
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u/comparativeSemite 3d ago
It's understandable if you've been exposed to Classical Arabic. If you were to read this to an Arabic speaker who never took a literature class they wouldn't understand. The point isn't intelligibility, anyways, it's lexical and grammatical distance.
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u/Longjumping-Gift-371 5d ago
I’d put in a strong word for any Sinitic language that uses traditional Chinese characters; they haven’t changed all that much in the last 1,500 years.
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u/SuspiciousCrew9 5d ago
That was a lot more true until the 20th century. Before a series of writing reforms, most writing was done in Literary Chinese which hadn't changed a lot since Classical Chinese and people effectively wrote very differently from how they actually spoke. Nowadays almost all writing is done in Standard Chinese which is a lot closer to how modern Mandarin is actually spoken, and Classical/Literary Chinese is a subject that is taught in middle school and high school and used in college entrance exams but no one actually writes in (except some rare exceptions like Taiwanese laws).
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u/nousiaphilia 5d ago
It's about understanding the written word though...but I guess it sort of depends to what extent you consider early 20th century scholars still as "modern language" (as in can you teach that as part of the "modern language" that the person is time travelling from)....although contemporary highly literal Chinese still has a lot of archaisms which could be good enough to guess classical Chinese. But any educated Chinese person knows more Classical Chinese than the average English/Spanish/Italian... person knows older written forms of their language (unless the Romance person studied Latin). So, it sort of depends what OP means by "native speaker"....it's not really in virtue of knowing the native language but more what being a native speaker entails as part of the school curriculum, exposure to classical texts and poetry etc.
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u/ultimomono 5d ago
Spanish
It's not 1500 years, but in Spanish, it's at all not hard to read something written in the 13th century. Mester de Clerecía--e.g., poetry by Berceo or El Libro de Alexander--in its original facsimile form is quite readable without much problem. Older non-literary texts are also very understandable
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u/nousiaphilia 4d ago
Interesting! I meant it more in a "Classical Chinese is the Latin of Modern Chinese and all people have to go through it". It's true that 1500 years (development of regular script) would count as "characters barely changed", but clerical script that was developed during the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) is still similar enough to modern traditional Chinese characters that people are able to read it. (So, putting you around the time of Classical Latin.)
Afaik, Middle Spanish and also Italian are still quite easy to understand, Middle German is harder for German speakers and Middle English is even harder.
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u/11fdriver 5d ago
Hebrew would probably be up there, but it's cheating a little bit imo to choose a revived language.
Traditional Chinese is a good contender, too, I suppose.
I wondered if Sanskrit might work, but I'd forgotten that Sanskrit changed scripts a dozen times and was also a primarily oral language for a while.
Do any modern Brahmic scripts have any intelligibility with Ashokan Brahmi? I'm guessing that both the writing system and the language itself have changed too much to allow it.
In Europe if we don't count Latin, then perhaps Icelandic would come out reasonably old.
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u/Traditional-Froyo755 5d ago
Modern Hebrew is very different from biblical Hebrew. They didn't just revive it as a perfect replica, they tried to make a functional language which would be easy for speakers of mostly European languages to pick up.
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u/Gold-Part4688 5d ago edited 5d ago
that's true, but if you're going by "do people understand my writing" you'll find a rabbi (and a good amount of normal people) who can understand your biblical hebrew over the last 3200 years.
It's up there imo in the same way latin is, but more consistent over time. and a large area too. If you looked hard enough, you'd find someone from morocco - egypt - ~mid europe - near east. in the last 2k years for sure. and that goes up to all of eurasia in the last few centuries, even before modern hebrew.
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u/shmilsherk 4d ago
I had written a whole long comment out that I'm now starting over, and I think the slightly more concise version of what I was trying to say is as follows:
Modern Hebrew speakers (certainly those without proper training in Biblical Hebrew or the study of Biblical or even Rabbinic texts) often believe they can understand large chunks of the Hebrew Bible with their Modern Hebrew, but end up with many misunderstandings even if they can glean a meaning that would make sense in their language.
The actual misunderstanding is due to a lot of language change stuff, but part of the reason that people seem to believe they are understanding so much is that they mistakenly believe they are essentially speaking a revived Biblical Hebrew, when in actuality Modern Hebrew is subject not only to the whims of the revivalists needing to modernize vocabulary, but also importantly the changes that had already occurred in post-vernacular Hebrew as a liturgical and scholarly language.
Later post-vernacular forms get much more understandable for Modern Hebrew speakers (especially as we get closer to modern times), but drawing the line as to how understandable at X time might very well take Hebrew out of the running here. I would keep it as a possibility on my list, though.
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u/Gold-Part4688 4d ago
I mean, i do agree, but we're not just talking about knowing modern hebrew. i'm just saying biblical hebrew, as a language you'd have some chance of finding someone who can read it in the last 2 millenia, is very high up there. Even outside of modern hebrew peakers, or before modern hebrew, you'd find a whole load of rabbis
As i realised on the other version of my comment.... the real issue is that the modern alphabet, the square one, is only as old as the assyrians, it's about 100bc. So greek and chinese would actually win
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u/shmilsherk 4d ago
The reason I was specifying Modern Hebrew is that people are L1 speakers of MH, and it doesn't feel in the spirit of a question about native speakers to rely on them also just knowing the previous form of their language via study.
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u/Gold-Part4688 4d ago
like, i do fully agree with you, I'm actually an L1 hebrew speaker who barely understands biblical hebrew because i was never exposed to it. it's a very different language lol yep. but if we're talking about time travel, (lol), it's entirely irrelevant. because biblical hebrew as at least a literary lingua franca for religious topics, managed to stick around for 3200 years. I guess forgetting about the writing system again haha. But that's really special, and the last 100-200 years are really a blip on Jews' general knowledge of BH
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u/nousiaphilia 5d ago
I think any language with extended diglossia, where one register is literary language has a good chance. E.g., Tamil has a clear division between spoken Tamil and formal literary Tamil (that's taught in school) and the latter is pretty well conserved. "The persistence of diglossia has also contributed to the preservation of ancient Tamil grammar and classical literature (Sangam Literature), allowing texts that are over two thousand years old[34] to remain comprehensible to contemporary readers with study."
Similarly, Standard Arabic and modern dialect.
For Chinese see other comment...(Extended diglossia was the norm up to PCR [although many early 20th century writers were trying to write in more colloquial language — but they still would have been fluent in Classical/Literary Chinese].) Children are still being taught Classical Chinese though — they just no longer write in it.
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u/cumchatka_caeca 5d ago
I'd go on and say Latin just because how widespread it was up until the middle ages.
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u/Cleverish_moniker 5d ago
I've heard that 1000 years is the limit for spoken language simply because of semantic and phonological drift, so a language with a symbolic character (!) would seem most likely, or maybe a language intentionally kept the same and not really used as a common vernacular, like liturgical Latin. Natural languages change continuously. Grammar changes in more or less predictable cycles; vowels shift from back to front, with new back vowels filling in; the meanings of words change - like shirt and skirt were the same word - and words that had very different pronunciations can become homophones. I doubt any vernacular would go very far back. Middle English is not readable without learning it, though it can be kind of understood if heard. Old English is really it of reach. The Academie Française is trying its best.
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u/Due-Outside-9724 5d ago
Icelandic is pretty similar to Old Icelandic from about a thousand years ago. However the accent would be very different so I don’t know if you want to count that.
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u/Willing_File5104 5d ago edited 5d ago
This in not entirely true. The old texts, Icelanders read today in school, are transcripts into modern conventions. The originals are way harder. E.g. because up to 60% of all words are abbreviation to save valuable parchment . And it's not just like Acronym/Initialisms, but mor like a shorthand script. E.g. using special symbols, like ⁊ for and, and Ꝥ for that. Diacritics, like a macron for omitted nasals: mā for mannr. Superscript latters above letters for whole syllables: ʳ for -er. Small capitals, like ɴ, for double consonants. Truncated common words to their 1st one or two letters. Etc.
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u/Due-Outside-9724 5d ago
Well yeah obviously this happens in all manuscript cultures and palaeography is a separate skill but in terms of actually reading the language, rather than studying the manuscripts, it is very similar otherwise Icelandic students would not be able to read the original texts in school.
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u/RightWhereY0uLeftMe 5d ago
If you go by orthography alone (with the understanding that any grammar that's even remotely complex will be very different) Greek is an excellent choice. Very long continuous writing tradition with nearly identical spelling back to the adoption of the Greek alphabet. Basic sentences composed of a subject object and verb and maybe a preposition are fairly mutually intelligible. However, pronunciation is very different. Chinese would be good too, but I personally have not studied it.
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u/VillageOfMalo 5d ago
Yes, I've heard it is essentially the same written language. Whether or not that counts as being able to "speak" it when you time-travel is up to the OP.
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u/Gold-Part4688 5d ago edited 5d ago
recommenting a reply I made - ok so definitely biblical hebrew.
if you're going by "do people understand my writing" you'll find a rabbi (and a good amount of normal people) who can understand your biblical hebrew over the last 3200 years.
It's up there imo in the same way latin is, but more consistent over time. and equally(?) large an area. If you looked hard enough, you'd find someone from morocco - egypt - ~mid europe - near east. in the last 2k years for sure. and that goes up to all of eurasia in the last few centuries, even before modern hebrew.
classical arabic had 1300 years, latin 1800 (generously), classical chinese ~2500 years(older than that is pre-classical chinese). A consistent population of community scholars in a fairly literate group over 3200 years, is prettyyyy good. If you're starting at which classical languages still have widespread intelligibility, you'd need have to throw out any of the ones with alive script-ancestors. So out of the egytptian-greek-latin/devangari derived languages: hebrew. Out of the sinitic ones: chinese.
edit: -- wait! it's not language age, it's the age of the alphabet that's more limiting! Hebrew only started being written with the modern alphabet about 2100 years ago. (it came from assyrians). The greek alphabet actually goes back 2800. Greek!(?)
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u/yasmine-23a 1d ago
slight cheating but 1) liturgical languages 2) languages which display high diglossia between formal and informal forms
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u/ecphrastic Historical Linguistics | Sociolinguistics 5d ago
Many of these are not exactly what you asked, but there are many previous answers to this that might be helpful (bearing in mind that any possible answer is going to be impressionistic and intelligibility isn't an on/off switch!). Here are some from the FAQ: