Eternal English: Difference between revisions
Rescuing 1 sources and tagging 0 as dead.) #IABot (v2.0.8
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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 [https://web.archive.org/web/20131218051547/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 fiction, however, linguistic drift is almost universally ignored. For writers, it's a lot of trouble to translate into an ancient or imaginary language, and audiences often prefer to watch a show in their native language. Therefore, people hailing from vastly different time periods will almost always speak the language of the audience, and rarely with so much as [[Just a Stupid Accent]] (though characters from [[The Middle Ages]] or thereabouts get to speak [[Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe]]).
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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