Linguistic poll

Here is a quantification of my linguistic question thread. How far back does a POD have to be to give you a 50% chance of mutual intelligibility?

Grimm's law

I voted based on Grimm's Law - that some fixed percent of the language drops out or changes every 500 years (I think it is 20%).

This would (of course) have to be adjusted by major linguistic events, such as the French overlay on Anglo-Saxon, the Improved literacy of a group, or (as may be happening now) the impact of sound reproductions and transmissions such as cd's, televisions and telephones.

tom said:

Here is a quantification of my linguistic question thread. How far back does a POD have to be to give you a 50% chance of mutual intelligibility?

Click to expand...

I don't understand what the question means

Grey Wolf

How far back can I go in diverging history and have a 50-50% chance of understanding a descendent of the language that was my language's ancestor? For example, if there is a divergence in the year 1000 would I be more or less likely than even to understand that world's version of English?

Gutenberg

I'll go with Gutenberg. Once you write a language down it changes much more slowly, and printing is a way to make literacy much more common.