AHC Languages

OK, this is a very difficult one.

The goal is to get English in England and Latin in Italy, Tunisia, Algeria, and France. And get Breton in Brittany, plus either Cornwall or Ireland. English can be as far as Early Modern English, or at least something mutually comprehensible with OTL English. (need >75% penetration on total population level and nearly all the elites speak target language). POD can be AD 69 or later, but can't butterfly a Christianity with papal primacy.

For Italy, find some way to stop the language drift. Well, it doesn't need to be completely stopped, but I mean Greek existed as a language for longer than Latin so that's certainly doable to keep the language drift at that "minimalist" level.

Oh... problem. English needs Old English + Normans. With no Normans, you'd at best get some Anglo- Latin mix. Which means France needs to go from Latin to French (so that we have a Norman dialect) to... Latin. Ugh

Edit: And When I say "England, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria, France, Brittany..." I'm talking about OTL geographical locations. These kingdoms and in some cases even the place names are butterflied away if the POD is early enough. So the boarders might be completely different, or maybe Europe is all Roman with English being one dialect in Britannia, or something, but the places are still going to be there even without OTL names and boarders.
 
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English can be as far as Early Modern English, or at least something mutually comprehensible with OTL English.
This puts a time and space frame on our PODs. They can't have a big impact on England until around 1500, since their English would not be mutually intelligible with our English otherwise.

Latin in Italy, Tunisia, Algeria, and France
Italy and France already speak Latin. For Tunisia and Algeria, for some reason the Muslims adopt Latin as their primary language as they did with Persian in Iran.

And get Breton in Brittany, plus either Cornwall or Ireland.
Centralized France is butterflied away in the 15th century. Brittany ends up an independent country with two official languages, Breton and Gallo. Brittany becomes a leading colonial power like the Dutch and conquers Cornwall (which, after all, is culturally and linguistically close to Brittany) during the upheavals of the Tudor or Stuart era. Eventually Cornish becomes Bretonized just like Scots became Anglicized.

For Italy, find some way to stop the language drift. Well, it doesn't need to be completely stopped, but I mean Greek existed as a language for longer than Latin so that's certainly doable to keep the language drift at that "minimalist" level.
...this is all semantics.

All languages change enormously in 2000 years. Ancient Greek and modern Greek, or Old Chinese and modern Chinese, are totally different languages, just like Latin and Italian are. They're just both called "Greek" for historical reasons, it has nothing whatsoever to do with how much the language changed.

Italian, French, Spanish, and Romanian are Latin in the same sense that modern Greek is the same language as Ancient Greek.
 
All languages change enormously in 2000 years. Ancient Greek and modern Greek, or Old Chinese and modern Chinese, are totally different languages, just like Latin and Italian are. They're just both called "Greek" for historical reasons, it has nothing whatsoever to do with how much the language changed.
Among those historical reasons is that Modern Greek is the only major language descended from Ancient Greek.
 
All languages change enormously in 2000 years. Ancient Greek and modern Greek, or Old Chinese and modern Chinese, are totally different languages, just like Latin and Italian are. They're just both called "Greek" for historical reasons, it has nothing whatsoever to do with how much the language changed.

Wait... unlike Old English vs Modern English, Greek changed a lot less. In fact, even the differences between Latin and Italian is more pronounced looking at the texts. The "minimalist" drift means that Modern Greeks without formal training can understand a good degree of the old texts (assuming the text itself is in good condition). It's been said on History Channel that Ancient and Modern Greek are similar and probably mutually intelligible (then with a disclaimer that since we're looking at texts and not audio recordings, so guaranteeing anything is pretty much a crapshoot).
 
Oh and when I said "France" or "England" I meant the geographical areas of OTL kingdoms, obviously we're butterflying away them if a POD is during Roman times.
 
. unlike Old English vs Modern English, Greek changed a lot less. In fact, even the differences between Latin and Italian is more pronounced looking at the texts. The "minimalist" drift means that Modern Greeks without formal training can understand a good degree of the old texts (assuming the text itself is in good condition).
Reading actually isn't a good measure of mutual intelligibility. Language is an oral (or signed) thing, writing is just a representation of language. Comprehension of written texts is too deeply affected by orthographic depth (e.g. French preserving the Latin spelling "est" while Italian has "è" even though the pronunciation is identical) and prior exposure/cultural attitudes to the language (e.g. Greek students being taught literary Classical Greek).

The phonological shifts were massive and I can guarantee that nobody in modern Athens would be able to understand Socrates, except maybe a dozen linguists and historians. That's the only thing that matters.

Oh and when I said "France" or "England" I meant the geographical areas of OTL kingdoms, obviously we're butterflying away them if a POD is during Roman times.
A Roman or Medieval POD could not plausibly have any language be mutually intelligible with today's vernacular languages. They might have a West Germanic language in Great Britain that underwent grammatical simplification and a great deal of Romance influence, but this language would not be comprehensible to English-speakers. Linguistic evolution's timescale is pretty quick.
 
I don't see why. 99.9% of times you get a West Germanic Language under various conditions under Romance influence would obviously not be mutually indelible with OTL language, but I don't see why that outcome is strictly impossible.
 
I don't see why. 99.9% of times you get a West Germanic Language under various conditions under Romance influence would obviously not be mutually indelible with OTL language, but I don't see why that outcome is strictly impossible.
I said implausible, not impossible.

For a comparison, it's like having a POD several million years ago and expect that anatomically modern humans will still evolve. It's not an impossibility biologically speaking, but it is so unlikely that it might as well be.
 
Fine, just try to get creative juices going to try to meet the challenge.

Now, I don't think Latin + Old English would get us to something close to OTL English, since new Norman vocabulary that wasn't in the Latin base contributed to OTL English. Whatever that ends up as is likely going to be more different than Italian and Latin.

This means that even if we have an early POD, we need to make sure it's small enough that we still end up with a more Norman-ish language and going off to England (or whatever it would be called) and ruling it. it doesn't have to be a Battle of Hastings type takeover, I guess a queen with a Norman consort might do. However that happens, our POD also needs to bring Latin back to France. I suppose we need a POD that makes "North dialect Latin" (more like OTL Norman) drift in the North, but then "Old Latin" (OTL Latin) makes a comeback in the geographical area that is OTL France. It's a hard one
 
it doesn't have to be a Battle of Hastings type takeover, I guess a queen with a Norman consort might do.
Probably not. The Normans wholesale displaced the Old English aristocracy, no? Just a single royal consort wouldn't have nearly that much influence on the popular language, just like English isn't full of Dutch words just because William III was also William of Orange.

our POD also needs to bring Latin back to France.
All languages in Metropolitan France, except Basque, Breton, and a few Germanic dialects, are Latin. Latin can't "make a comeback" because it never went away in the first place.

You can't have "OTL Latin" returning, that would be like modern Greeks all deciding to use the Greek of the Macedonians or modern Americans deciding to speak in the way Chaucer wrote. The spoken language during the Roman Empire was Vulgar Latin, not the Classical Latin you're thinking of, and French is a direct descendant of Vulgar Latin.
 
Don't some places go back and forth from one language to another as people move in and out?
The issue is that you're still thinking of French and Latin as two different languages. They aren't. French is the local evolution of Vulgar Latin. It's the regional variety of Modern Latin, so to speak.

In places that did "go back and forth from one language to another," there were discrete demographics that spoke the languages in question. This doesn't exist for Latin and French, because the French speakers of today are just the Latin speakers of yesterday.
 
Is there something that could slow down the language drift in Italy but not Northern France? This is a problem without audio recordings.
 
Is there something that could slow down the language drift in Italy but not Northern France? This is a problem without audio recordings.
Italian is already far, far more conservative than French (Italian is the most conservative national language, while French is actually the most divergent of the Romance languages and has the most Germanic influence). Sardinian is the most conservative, and it's already pretty close to Italy. So a few small PODs could make Italian even closer to Latin.

But no, Italy will never be speaking the Latin of Cicero.
 
Is there something that could slow down the language drift in Italy but not Northern France? This is a problem without audio recordings.

As others have said, you can't just "stop" or "slow" language evolution. Languages might have slow evolution in very isolated regions (Iceland); but in a place like Northern France, the center of Europe in the Middle Ages, it is going to happen at an OTL pace.
 
You can't have "OTL Latin" returning, that would be like modern Greeks all deciding to use the Greek of the Macedonians
Which, to be fair, they tried. And failed.
There is of course a known successful example of such a thing: Hebrew. The circumstances where this happened have been rather extraordinary and unlikely to be replicated, but even here, the chances of prophet Ezekiel understanding anything in a modern Tel Aviv street are very slim.
 
Ok, so without audio recordings there is no way to completely stop the drift.

How about making so that Modern Italians reading Latin scripts using modern pronunciation rules is completely understandable? This means no syntax changes, but since the written records survive, that again is like the Modern Greek and Macedonian Greek kind of thing. The script doesn't say much about the language itself, but if moderns can read the old script the say way I read Shakespeare in English class, this means the syntax is the same and the underlying structures are the same.

And have THAT version of "Latin" (which would not be Cicero's Latin obviously) occupy the target regions. While at the same time meeting the other languages.
 
Bringing back ancient Latin requires a conscious effort akin to modern Hebrew or katharevousa (artificially ancient) Greek, both of which began due to nationalism. I guess if the Risorgimento was substantially different (maybe the movement is virulently anti-Tuscan and therefore it is anti-Tuscan dialects) you could see an attempt to revive Latin in Italy, but like katharevousa it would struggle to supplant local dialects. France has its own Gallic identity that it has cultivated since the Hundred Years' War, it doesn't need the prestige of an ancient language to support its nationalism.
 
How about making so that Modern Italians reading Latin scripts using modern pronunciation rules is completely understandable? This means no syntax changes, but since the written records survive, that again is like the Modern Greek and Macedonian Greek kind of thing. The script doesn't say much about the language itself, but if moderns can read the old script the say way I read Shakespeare in English class, this means the syntax is the same and the underlying structures are the same.

Also impossible. I mean, we can't read Beowulf. Hell, we can barely read the Canterbury Tales, and that was written 800 years ago.

As for Italians, there are already difference between the Florentine of the Baroque period and modern Italian, let alone the drift between that and Dante's Italian. And again, that's 800 years of linguistic drift between it and the modern day, and 1200 between the Latin of Cicero and it. And even in Cicero's day there were already Italian dialects drifting from the norm.
 
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