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Eternal English: Difference between revisions

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The absence of [[Language Drift]]. Compare with [[Aliens Speaking English]].
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== Anime and Manga ==
* In ''[[Fate/stay night]]'', Servants are summoned from the distant past and seem to have no problem conversing fluently in modern (even accentless, in the anime) Japanese. This is probably a case of ''[[Translator Microbes]]'' too, since most of them aren't even from past ''Japan'', instead hailing from places as distant as England. Ninth century England, no less, where they spoke a language even most modern English speakers would be hard-pressed to understand.
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* [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] in ''[[Batman|The Return Of Bruce Wayne #2]]'': a man in Puritan times says to time-shifted Bruce Wayne: "All agree thy speech is ''stranger'' even than the Dutchman's here. As if the ''King's English'' were not thy ''native'' tongue." Which is understandable, since they all speak [[Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe|(an approximation of)]] 17th century English, while Wayne speaks modern English.
* A ''[[New Mutants]]'' story involving time-travel brought them to the middle ages where Wolfsbane (Rahne Sinclair, aged 14 or 15) was able to converse fluently with Robert the Bruce just by virtue of coming from Scotland while her teammates weren't. There was no indication that Rahne had learned Middle English or indeed Scots Gaelic (should Robert have even spoken the latter).
 
 
== [[Eastern Animation]] ==
* Played with in ''The Mézga Family'', a Hungarian cartoon from the 70s. The titular family, living in the 20th century, manages to contact a descendant called MZ/X, who lives in the 30th century. At first they don't understand a word he's saying, as MZ/X speaks "new Hungarian", which is just modern day Hungarian with EVERY word abbreviated to one syllable. Thankfully he has a telepathic helmet he can put on when he wants to talk to his ancestors from "the atomic dark age", as he calls them.
 
 
== Film ==
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* ''[[WALL-E]]''. Of course, there's a good reason why humans haven't really changed language a lot in a few centuries.
* ''[[Planet of the Apes]]''. It's 2,000 years in the future, and the apes are still speaking perfect English. Although they don't call it that...Cornelius just says it was the language taught to him by his father and his father before him.
 
 
== Literature ==
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* On ''[[Babylon 5]]'', the official language of the Earth Alliance is English. A [[Translation Convention]] is in effect, but it doesn't explain how the characters can get away with verbatim quotes of Abraham Lincoln (or, in Garibaldi's case, ''[[Looney Tunes]]'' cartoons).
** In one episode there is a delusional man claiming to be King Arthur, they figure out that he isn't who he claims to be because he speaks modern English. Though earlier [[Jack the Ripper]] was portrayed with just a British accent.
* In one of the few ''[[Primeval]]'' episodes involving human incursions, a 14th Century knight strays into modern London and speaks perfectly clear Essex English, as does the local back in his time whom the ARC scout questions. Despite the fact that what passed for English back then was actually closer to modern Dutch. Even the fact that the ARC's knowitallsknow-it-alls can understand him when he speaks Latin is questionable: chances are that our pronounciationpronunciation of Latin has drifted almost as much as the living languages.
* [[Word of God]] says that this was the case in the new ''[[Battlestar Galactica Reimagined(2004 TV series)|Battlestar Galactica]]'', which was bit of a shock for the fandom who had comfortably assumed [[Translation Convention]] to be taking place, considering that the show took place {{spoiler|150,000 years ago}}.
* Embraced with an almost unseemly eagerness by the 1960s [[Irwin Allen]] series ''[[The Time Tunnel]]''. No matter how many centuries in the past the poor displaced travelers end up, no matter where they are on the globe at the time, ''everyone'' speaks perfect mid-20th-Century American English.
 
 
== Tabletop RPG ==
* In ''[[Rifts]]'' the dominant language in the former United States and Canada is called American, which despite the different name, is indistinguishable from Modern English. Despite the game taking place 300 years after the apocalypse, where uneducated humans live in scattered, mostly isolated communities, there have been no regional language shifts.
** In the ''Phase World'' setting, Galactic Trade Tongue Four is in fact the descendant of the English Language, where an English Speaker has roughly a 50% chance to understand Trade Four. Mind you, so much time has passed in the Three Galaxies universe that everyone has ''forgotten where Earth was''.
 
 
== Video Games ==
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* In ''[[The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim]]'', at one point in the main quest you either have a vision of the past or travel back in time a couple thousand years. When you do this, you find that people speak the same sort of english they do in your time, though this may be a function of the vision/time travel, rather than a true case. It's fairly vague on this point.
* In ''[[Asura's Wrath]]'', a game with a story not constrained by reason or logic in all other aspects, Asura can no longer understand the language of humanity after 12,000 years in limbo, although he can still understand his fellow gods just fine.
 
 
== Webcomics ==
* In ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]'' Torg and Zoe have no problems communicating with the locals when they go back to [[The Middle Ages|Medieval Europe]]. Subverted with Berk, a man from 25 years in the future, whose constant use of future slang makes him nearly unintelligible. Even other people from his time can't understand him.
* ''[[Xkcd]]'' subverted this [http://xkcd.com/771/ once].
 
 
== Western Animation ==
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== Real Life ==
* Language change is a constant, which causes problems in real life—the written form of the language tends to freeze at a certain point in development, while the spoken language keeps changing. [[Captain Obvious|This causes definite problems in literacy]], even when merely limited to works of literature and legal documents. Eventually the literary and vernacular languages become totally different (called ''diglossia'' by linguists, Greek for "two tongues"), and later still the spoken language becomes the new written standard in place of the old one. This is what happened to Latin (replaced by Romance languages), Classical Chinese (replaced by Standard Mandarin) and Classical Greek (replaced by Modern Greek), among others.
** 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 diacriticsdiacriticals that no onone 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''[[The Qur'an]]'' was written. 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).
** Tibetan's standard orthography hasn't changed since the 1100s, and is essentially the same in all the Buddhist Tibetan-speaking regions. Amazing for a language that went from having complex consonant clusters and no tones, to having much simpler consonants and many dialects having developed tones to make up for lost consonants. (To give an example, the Dalai Lama's surname 'Gyatso' (generally pronounced ''chatso'') is spelled ''rgyam-tsho'' natively.)
** After the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, literate people (i.e., monks) continued to write in semi-classical Latin, while the spoken Latin language evolved into several Romance languages, though these were still considered "Latin". By the time anybody realized that what people were speaking was no longer Latin, it had become a [[Sacred Language]] in the Catholic Church.
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* Also the case with Burmese, where there is a formal written language and a spoken form which is never written; they are pronounced quite differently.
** Officially, Afrikaans kept spelling in Dutch until a few years in to the 20th century, although some people spelled phonetically before then. One reason for this is that at the time, most people (even the majority of Afrikaans speakers) considered the language to be a dialect of Dutch. Since acknowledging a dialect's status as a language would usually go hand in hand with translating the Bible into it, many Afrikaans speakers were reluctant to do so, considering it disrespectful to translate Scripture into what was then still widely regarded as an uneducated-sounding, slang-littered dialect.
** It's also pretty much the reason that English spelling is so different from its pronunciation (many words, like ''name'', still retain Chaucer-era spellings - it was pronounced ''na-meh'' then). Combine this with etymological spellings (''homage'' from French), ''false'' etymological spellings (''island'' is not from Latin ''insula'' and didn't have an s until people thought it was), and the like, and you basically get modern written English.
*** The related Scots language, though, takes a more phonetic form, in part because no universally accepted standard has existed since the eighteenth century. Scots has also retained the Voiceless velar fricative or "hard ch", meaning that many of the superfluous appearances of "gh" in English- "through", "night", "thought", etc.- are actively pronounced in Scots.
** English has mutated dramatically just in the few centuries since [[Shakespeare]] wrote his plays -- as any high school student will tell you, 90% of his wordplay is completely lost if you pronounce everything in the modern fashion -- but if you pronounce it in authentic Elizabethan English (or, at least, our best reconstruction thereof), it doesn't sound very much like English at all.
** English gets a bad rap, but people tend to not mention that [[Everything Sounds Sexier in French|French]] is also very different from its written form. To an Anglophone learner, it may seem as if half of every word is silent because they represent sounds which are no longer pronounced but included for etymological reasons.
* Many <s>ideographic</s> logographic written languages (such as Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphics) remain readable at least to some degree even after ''millennia'', because often the written glyphs change much more slowly than the spoken languages. And when these are shared for writing across languages whose spoken forms have ''never'' been related (such as Chinese with the native vocabularies of Korean and Japanese adapted to Chinese characters), written texts can be partially readable across language boundaries because of shared meaning of glyphs.
** Only partially - maybe on the level of one or two characters, definitely not whole texts. While the written form of a character may not change much in a thousand years, just like a word its meaning can shift dramatically - 好 in Japanese means "(to) like", and in Chinese means "good". There's a poem written in Classical Chinese deliberately so that when read with modern Mandarin pronunciation, ''every single syllable'' is "shi", just with different tones - surely some of those words have long since fallen out of use.
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