Eternal English: Difference between revisions
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All languages are always changing, all the time, so long as someone is alive to speak them. This is the basic idea behind [[wikipedia:Historical linguistics|an entire discipline of linguistics]]. It means that a thousand years' difference (for example, between [[History of English|Old English and modern English]]) can make two versions of the same language completely unintelligible; another thousand (as with the 2,000 years dividing Latin and modern French) and you might not even realize they're related.
In real life, [[Fish Out of Temporal Water|a character traveling into the distant future]] would literally have to learn [http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/futurese.html a completely new language]: even if people are still speaking what they call "English", it won't be similar enough to the character's English to allow intelligibility.<ref>Languages have different rates of change, of course, and English is highly mutable while--for example--Icelandic is quite stable, but all languages change somewhat.</ref>
In many future settings, the writers will try to balance this out by throwing in [[Future Slang|a couple of new slang words]]. Others will try to [[Justified Trope|attribute this trope]] to the advent of recording technology. This may or may not turn out to be the case: after all, we are discussing tropes and memes on a wiki hosted on the web. Someone from the year 2000 wouldn't understand some of that sentence, while someone from 1990 would understand almost ''none'' of it (hell, a good number of people ''today'' still wouldn't understand it).
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* Played ridiculously straight in ''[[Honor Harrington]]'', where everyone speaks Standard English, unless they happen to represent a specific culture/country in real-world Earth. In which case they'll supposedly speak that language and dabble it into their Standard English that they otherwise speak all the time. It's stated that sound recordings have slowed linguistic change to a crawl. Enough that Honor has no problems reading [[Shout-Out|C.S. Forester's]] ''[[Horatio Hornblower]]'' and the only problem she has is in dealing with the archaic units of measurement.
** In some places it is clear [[Translation Convention]]: The Republic of Haven speaks French, the Andermanni speak a bastard German-Chinese language, San Martin spoke Spanish until the Republic of Haven came in. Most language issues are handwaved due to good translation software.
** In another [[David Weber]] book, ''[[The Apocalypse Troll]]'', it's somewhat
* Addressed in David Severn's 'The Future Took Us' in which the protagonists only gradually realise the locals are speaking a futuristic version of English. "Bread" has become "brade" and "man", "mun".
* Addressed in Leo Frankowski's ''Conrad Stargard'' series. When Conrad goes back in time to 13th-century Poland, he realizes how lucky he is to be there, where the language hasn't drifted very much in 700 years, as opposed to England, where he would be completely incomprehensible.
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== Real Life ==
* Language change is a constant, which causes problems in real
** This is still the case with the Tamil language of South India. The written standard is still most the same as it was in around the 14th century, while the spoken form kept changing as normal, resulting a written form that contains extra vowels and diacritics that no on actually pronounces. This is further complicated by the fact that different social classes speak drastically different dialects that use different words derived from completely different roots to represent the same concept.
** This is also somewhat the case with Arabic, where the written language is closely based on Classical Arabic, spoken at the time of the Qur'an. Colloquial Arabic differs greatly from it and there are several spoken dialects which are closer or farther apart from each other. A common debate among Arab intellectuals these days is whether or not to change the standard language; on one extreme, you have classicizers who think that all the modern dialects are rubbish, and on the other, you have local nationalists who want to break up the Arabic language altogether. Even the middle is somewhat divided: there are some who think the situation is fine as-is, or with minimal changes, while others advocate abandoning the current standard and creation of a new one based on the educated speech of Cairo (Egyptian Arabic is more or less universally understood, and Cairo is unquestionably the center of modern Arabic-language culture).
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** Modern Icelandic speakers often have less trouble understanding thousand-year-old Old Norse than modern Danish speakers have understanding modern Swedish speakers. It's said that Leifr Eiríksson, the first European in America, would be able to be understood in 21st century Iceland.
* For a straight example, the page quote itself. That's obvious in some cases, of course (eek? hadden prys?), but it's even trickier than it may appear; there's at least one false friend in there. "Nyce," to Chaucer, meant approximately what "stupid" means to us.
** James II supposedly described St Paul's Cathedral as "awful", "amusing" and "artificial"
** The English formal written language remains almost unchanged from the late 1800's on, but the spoken language is almost alien to a speaker from 1700.
* Even though it ''did'' lose its incredibly complex and powerful tense system and is still leaking cases, Russian is a remarkably slow-changing language. A 12'th century epic poem "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" is still (barely) understandable to the modern speaker, for example. Even the 9-10'th century texts (like the Novgorodian birchbark letters) can be figured out by the readers uneducated in the language.
* Similar to the Finnish example above, Irish and Scots Gaelic are two Goidelic languages that diverged from one another 1600 years ago. Yet despite this, and despite both going through many many changes in that time, they are still mutually intelligible.
* A subtrope of creationists is Babelists, who believe in, yes,
* Hebrew is an example in that, while there are definitely obvious differences between Biblical and Modern Hebrew, one can nevertheless understand a lot of Biblical passages on the strength of a Modern Hebrew education alone. But this is kind of cheating, since Hebrew was revitalized as a vernacular in the 19th century, so it didn't have the same kind of organic growth as other languages would have.
** For instance, students in Israel going on a field trip to see the Dead Sea Scrolls can simply ''read them unaided''. It's helpful to think of the relation between Biblical and Modern Hebrew as similar to that between Shakespearean and Modern English.
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