Modern and ancient language mutual intelligibility

[sfuqua]

I can make some sense of Middle English just from knowing modern English, but I can't really say I can make much sense of Old English.

I have read that readers of Icelandic can read the ancient sagas. A Greek friend once said that he could read ancient Greek.

Are there other examples of places where just knowing a modern version of a language would make an ancient one comprehensible?

[tarvos]

This rarely happens - usually language changes too much, unless it's purposely being influenced to remain pure (Icelandic is a very good example of the latter case). I'm not sure this is possible in Greek at all.

[Josquin]

With Icelandic, it's absolutely possible to read Old Norse sagas. I know it, because I've done it. You have to get used to some different spellings and some minor differences in grammar, but other than that the only problem might be changed meaning of words. The vocabulary of 12th century Iceland is of course different from the one you would need in the modern society, so there will be words you haven't met, which have fallen out of use, or changed their meaning. But these cases are rare and generally speaking it's no problem at all.

Also, Modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew are very close. I don't think an Israeli would need a lot of instruction in order to be able to read the Hebrew Bible in the original. Once again, some minor differences in grammar and vocabulary, but nothing dramatic.

Generally speaking though, most languages have changed too much in order to read former stages that are 1,000 years old or even older. I can't read Middle High German, for example. I can get the gist of a MHG text, but there are lots of unknown words and the grammar is weird. Let alone Old High German, it's completely incomprehensible with some intelligible words here and there.

The same goes for other languages I know. Old Irish is mostly incomprehensible to me although I might recognize a word once in a while. I second tarvos that Ancient Greek and Modern Greek are not mutually intelligible. At least, you would need a lot of extra information in order to read Attic texts on the basis of the modern language.

The best example for language change might be the Romance languages though. 2,000 years ago there only was Latin and it would be really difficult to read Caesar or Virgil only based on the knowledge of Modern French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, or Romanian. The language has changed beyond recognition!

[tarvos]

Also, Modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew are very close. I don't think an Israeli would need a lot of instruction in order to be able to
read the Hebrew Bible in the original. Once again, some minor differences in grammar and vocabulary, but nothing dramatic.

Which, if you know Hebrew history, makes total sense.

[galaxyrocker]

One interesting thing to note, after some searching, is that the Norse Sagas seem to be about the same age as Middle English, not Old English. It is also likely that its modern descendants didn't really start to diverge until the 14th century or so. So, when you think about it, the fact that Icelandic speakers can read Old Norse isn't really that different from the fact Middle English is fairly intelligible.

[Josquin]

Also, Modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew are very close. I don't think an Israeli would need a lot of instruction in order to be able to
read the Hebrew Bible in the original. Once again, some minor differences in grammar and vocabulary, but nothing dramatic.

Which, if you know Hebrew history, makes total sense.

Yes, I know. I was going to mention that Hebrew was only comparatively recently revived, but then I forgot it. In any case, there are some differences in grammar, as Modern Hebrew was influenced by Germanic and Romance languages. Biblical Hebrew is VSO, while Modern Hebrew is SVO. Also, Biblical Hebrew had a set of possessive and object suffixes that aren't really used any more.

What's more, Biblical Hebrew had a complex verbal tense system that was rather based on aspect than tense, while Modern Hebrew has a more conventional European tense system. The great thing about Biblical Hebrew was the narrative construction aka "waw conversivum", which would turn an imperfect tense verb into a perfect tense verb and vice versa. I don't know if that exists any more.

[Josquin]

One interesting thing to note, after some searching, is that the Norse Sagas seem to be about the same age as Middle English, not Old English. It is also likely that its modern descendants didn't really start to diverge until the 14th century or so. So, when you think about it, the fact that Icelandic speakers can read Old Norse isn't really that different from the fact Middle English is fairly intelligible.

Yeah, but the interesting thing about Icelandic is the degree to which the language has not changed in about 1000 years. Apart from some spelling conventions and some minor grammatical details ("ek" became "ég", vocalic -r became -ur, mediopassive -sk became -st), the language is virtually still the same! Of course, phonology has changed, which means things are pronounced differently today than they were then, but the language itself, its words and constructions has practically remained unchanged.

[Axon]

You hear a lot about Chinese people being able to read ancient Chinese, though that's stretching the truth even more than Greeks being able to read ancient Greek. Lots of young people in the PRC today can read traditional characters without too much difficulty, and they're usually educated in the basics of Classical Chinese.

But I've been to quite a few museums in China with documents from the 18th and 19th centuries. These aren't quite Classical Chinese but they're pretty removed from modern writing. So much so that they take significant effort for the average educated Chinese person to read through, and if the printing is messy or the topic isn't familiar, it might be possible to only get the gist.

I get the sense that, at least for the young people I've talked to, there's just not as much practice reading those types of things as there is in the United States. When I was growing up we read plenty of diaries and letters from the American Revolution and the Civil War. This stuff was dry but definitely understandable.

[ilmari]

Hebrew
http://www.cartoonhebrew.com/modern-biblical-hebrew-differences
http://www.languagesoftheworld.info/southwest-asia-and-north-africa/modern-hebrew-old-or-new.html

[Vedun]

When I first tried reading Old Bulgarian I could only make out few words here and there. But after a few months of studying Russian, I could make sense of some parts of Old Bulgarian texts - go figure.