On Tue, 16 Aug 2005, Martin Wohlert wrote: > >From: Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> > >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... Modern Latin (as written in the Vatican) is more or less Ciceronian, isn't it? Well, except for new words like however one says "nuclear reactor". And as far as I understand (elements of) Christianity only recently came to the view that 0) Xians should have a personal unintermediated interaction with the text 1) in a particular language 2) in a literalist way.