Dragaera

Name similarities and pure speculation

Mark A Mandel mam at theworld.com
Thu Jul 22 17:36:12 PDT 2004

#Oh - that case is too complicated for me.  Do priests talk to the gods in
#a particular language?  How stable have Hebrew and Arabic proven to be?

Hebrew was not used as a vernacular language (spoken language of
everyday life) for 2000 years or more.  Modern Spoken Hebrew is quite
different from classical Hebrew, which itself comprises many layers
spanning over a thousand years of history.  A coworker of mine, and
native Israeli living in the US, told me that while she has no trouble
reading the (Hebrew) Bible, her children, who were growing up in the US
speaking modern Hebrew at home and attending American schools, could
make no sense of it: it was as foreign to them as, perhaps, Chaucer or
Aelfric are to us.

In my previous post I mentioned Lebanese Arabic.  The language spoken on
the street varies so widely across the Arabic-speaking world that a
Moroccan and a Saudi, speaking colloquially, will find it difficult to
impossible to understand each other.  When Arab speakers meet, they move
"up the scale" to more and more formal, standardized Arabic to reach a
level where they can understand each other.

#> #Could someone important who lived the entire time (and was much at
#> #court) single-handedly stabilize the language?
#>
#> Not in our world. It would require magic or something comparable,
#> constantly affecting the minds of all speakers.
#
#If Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar was still alive today, and had
#spent the intervening time having new adventures and being glamorous,
#it seems to me I might be using a much harder language right now.

Nonsense.  I mean that literally.  No language is "hard" to its native
speakers, until they get into reading and writing and the levels of
formalized and standardized language, such as the "dialect" of the
biomedical texts that I work with every day.

#> Now, *something* has held back technological evolution for both races,
#> so maybe there is something. But it's not in the nature of human
#> language (counting both races as human) to be so stable.

#> #How much has Chinese changed over the last 3k?
#>
#> As much as Latin, I think. The near-complete unity of the writing system
#> across the "dialects" -- languages, by other criteria, such as
#> intercomprehensibility -- tends to mask this.

#Has Latin changed that much?  I think I ought to be able to read the
#Vatican newspaper if I could figure out the phrases they use for
#"terrorism" and "motion picture" and "chocolate", and relearned classical
#Latin.

I'm talking about French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician,
Sardinian, Romanian, Italian,...: the Romance languages.  That's what
Latin has changed into, in the normal development of a living language.
The Latin of the Vatican is a dead language, preserved for cultural
purposes and nobody's native language for millennia.

-- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian,
   Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody
   a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel
[This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]