>From: Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> >On Mon, 15 Aug 2005, Mark A. Mandel wrote: > >(It's about the amount of skew you'd get in a few > > hundred years at most -- languages become totally unrecognizable within >a > > few thousand, let alone 200,000 -- but that's a longstanding question > > about the world of Dragaera, so let it pass.) > >Eternal entities like gods, and long-lived authority figures like >priestesses, plus the occasional magical talking horse, seem like >a simple explanation for lack of drift to me. > >Incidentally, how stable have Hebrew and Arabic (and other languages >strongly tied to religious texts) been? Well, I don't know much about those languages, but Latin has also been very much tied up in religious use, and has mutated all over the place. There's quite a bit of difference between Latin and French nowadays...