>From: Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> >To: dragaera at dragaera.info >Subject: Re: Language drift WAS: Re: Vlad and Kiera >Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 16:09:54 -0700 (PDT) > > > >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. Well, my point was more or less that the descendants of the Romans nowadays speak Italian or French, and not Latin. :)