--- Martin Wohlert <martin_wohlert at hotmail.com> wrote: > >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. If you have them or other supernatural forces -- or Jenoine tinkering -- in effect. Otherwise, they have too little regular intercourse (SOCIAL! LINGUISTIC!) with the mass of the population to make a difference. > >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... Right. A language doesn't "stabilize" in the way Philip (?) is talking about till it's dead. The Arabic of the Koran is the same for all Muslims. The artificial construct called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is more or less the same across the Arab world, with a very strong emphasis on "more or less": it is nobody's native dialect, but something learned with education. The spoken Arabics of Lebanon, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia are quite different and often not mutually comprehensible. The written languages are the same... but only because they're all writing MSA, or trying to. Nobody writes the dialects, with rare exceptions like some Egyptian comic strips. It's not just Arabic, but many dialects, like Schwyzert?tsch (Swiss German). Biblical Hebrew shows many layers spanning maybe a millennium. Talmudic Hebrew evolved and changed from that over a span of centuries, and the Hebrew used in further rabbinical writings continued to change, because even though neither of these was a birth language or used for daily life, they were studied and learned and used heavily for writing about daily life. Modern Hebrew (MH) is a product of a great deal of language planning and deliberate construction and adaptation, starting with its creator, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_language has a good article. A former coworker of mine, a native Israeli living in the US, had a bilingual home, raising the kids in English and Modern Hebrew. She told me that she had no trouble reading Tanach (aka "the Old Testament")-- it was in her own language, as far as she was concerned-- but that her children, who had never studied the texts or the language they were written in, could not make sense of it even though they were fluent native users of MH. -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail for Mobile Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Check email on your mobile phone. http://mobile.yahoo.com/learn/mail