Comment by maze-le | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maze-le | Hacker News Reader

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Languages change -- sometimes dramatically -- over the course of centuries. English wasn't even a thing until the 1100s or so (Middle English). It would be very hard to exchange thoughts and ideas with the people of this time -- not only because of the different cultural and technological contexts but also because of its pronunciation and phonology.

Its predecessor: Anglo Saxon is even more distant from it. Try to read the passages here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English#Beowulf

Latin (as an artificially conserved language) has not changed that much since Roman times, but it isn't a language that is actively used in everyday life -- so you cannot claim it is: "continuously spoken over time".

Hebrew and Arabic could be interesting cases -- maybe someone more knowledgeable than me can chime in on these... But I assume ancient Hebrew and Arabic are also not mutually intelligible with the corresponding languages today.

Even for Latin, apparently Ecclesiastical (Church) Latin, which is more familiar to most people today, differs in pronunciation from Classical Latin. For example, Ecclesiastical Latin uses a soft 'c', where the ancient Romans would have used a hard 'c' -- Cicero's name would have been pronounced like "keekero" in his day, whereas most people now think of him as "Sissero". Although the Roman empire was large and diverse enough that Latin probably had quite a variety of dialects and maybe Ecclesiastical Latin was one of them.

Hebrew is an unusual case because, like Latin, it was mostly a dead language that for centuries only continued to be used in religious and a few other contexts. It was revived in the 19th century. Because of its long period of cryostasis the parts that were preserved probably haven't changed that much, although necessarily it's expanded greatly into a living language.

Farsi (Iranian) is another one that lasted a long time without too many mutations as far as I know.

Arabic is divided into "proper, classical" Arabic which is used for religious purpose (and maybe some other "official" things), a bit like Latin in the middle ages; and various mostly unintelligible dialects used day to day.

If I remember correctly, modern Hebrew is pretty much the same as old Hebrew, with various additions to fit the current world. It's somewhat artificial in that it wasn't really spoken before, and was the chosen as the official language in the early 20th century. It's like if someone decided nowadays to use Latin as the official language.

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