AHC Languages

IFwanderer

Banned
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.
They are different languages. They aren't mutually intelligible and they have very different grammatical systems (for example, Latin had a case system* while French pretty much doesn't but the latter has articles, unlike the former).

*Edit: Morphological case system, French case appears in the syntax (apart from pronouns) while in Latin case is shown by suffixes in the words themselves, and there's six (seven counting locative) of them (French has four).
 
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They are different languages.
They certainly are different languages in the same way that Old Chinese and modern Sinitic languages are different languages, but they're also the same in the sense that we identify both Old Chinese and its descendants as Chinese, or both Old Persian and Modern Persian as Persian.

My point there was not to say that Latin and French are mutually intelligible, but to distinguish the relationship of direct descent that is the Latin-French (or Chinese-Minnan, etc) relationship from cousin languages or "nephew" languages (e.g. literary Sanskrit and Hindi).
 
Ok, so we don't have a way to freeze the language itself per say.

I don't see why Latin's syntax, synthetic perfect, and case system MUST fall when going to "Modern Latin" (Italian). As long as bureaucrats and others use writing and the writing is standardized, it provides an "anchor" for the spoken language. Even if Latin is a minority language for some time, butterflies could make a language spoken by say 14% of the general population and 100% of bureaucrats and the royal court could turn back into a general use language.
 
They certainly are different languages in the same way that Old Chinese and modern Sinitic languages are different languages, but they're also the same in the sense that we identify both Old Chinese and its descendants as Chinese, or both Old Persian and Modern Persian as Persian.

I don't think this is a good comparison. It's not so simple as saying that Latin just became French after 1,000 years. French pronunciation underwent drastic changes, which are presumably due to non-Latin influence: either due to a Celtic (Gaulish) substrate or Germanic (Frankish) superstrate. The very conservative, etymological-based spelling system masks the degree of changes.
 
As long as bureaucrats and others use writing and the writing is standardized, it provides an "anchor" for the spoken language.
In China, bureaucrats and others used the classical language and the orthography was standardized for 2000 years. Classical Chinese is pretty different from Mandarin, and Classical Chinese never became a "general use language" or even a spoken language at all (the official spoken language of government was Nanjing Mandarin).

To go into pointless detail, here's the simple question "Did you not make these plans?" in Standard Mandarin and Classical Chinese:
  • SM: 你沒有製定這些計劃嗎?
    • ni is the pronoun "you." The pronoun exists in CC, but CC had at least six other pronouns all pronounced differently and all meaning "you": 汝 ru, 乃 nai, 爾 er, 而 er, 戎 rong, 若 ruo, and 您 nin. Almost all these have been lost.
    • 沒有 mei you is "did not" (literally "not have"). The use of 沒 to negate the past tense does not exist in CC. In CC, the primary meaning of 没 was "to sink; to drown" and it may have had an additional function as a negative verb, not an adverb as it is in SM.
    • 製定 zhiding is "to make," a verb which did exist in CC.
    • 這些 zhexie is "these, " also not found in CC. 些 originally meant "not much; small; few," but it has taken on a wider usage in SM as a classifier. Old Chinese originally did not have classifiers (Confucius never uses them) and it remains optional in Classical Chinese.
    • 計劃 jihua is "plans," a noun that exists in CC. But CC writers would generally just write 計. SM nouns are almost all two-syllable due to phonological shifts, unlike CC where basic nouns are mostly monosyllabic.
    • ma is the question marker, which in CC just means "to curse," "to verbally abuse."
  • CC: 汝不爲此計乎?
    • ru is the pronoun "you," no longer used in SM.
    • bu is "not," used in SM but generally not for the past.
    • wei is the verb "to do," "to act for," "to consider," but in SM it's usually a conjunction.
    • ci is "this," still used.
    • ji is "plan"
    • hu is the original question marker which has been mostly supplanted by SM question markers like 嗎.
As this example probably shows, a speaker of Mandarin with no experience at all with Classical Chinese cannot understand the latter. Despite the writing system being logographic.

And this is a very simple sentence -- CC becomes more bizarre the more complex things you have to say.
 
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I don't think this is a good comparison. It's not so simple as saying that Latin just became French after 1,000 years. French pronunciation underwent drastic changes, which are presumably due to non-Latin influence: either due to a Celtic (Gaulish) substrate or Germanic (Frankish) superstrate.
That's why I brought up Persian. Middle and Modern Persian were much more influenced by a foreign superstrate (Arabic) than French ever was, and to some extent it happens in Chinese too (the erhua shift probably reflects a Tungusic superstrate), yet we generally consider them the same "Persian" and "Chinese" language in some ideal sense.
 

IFwanderer

Banned
They certainly are different languages in the same way that Old Chinese and modern Sinitic languages are different languages, but they're also the same in the sense that we identify both Old Chinese and its descendants as Chinese, or both Old Persian and Modern Persian as Persian.
The situation with the different Chinese languages (as far as I can understand it, I'm more familiar with romance linguistics than those of Sintic languages, and you seem to know more here so correct me if I'm wrong) is that they are "the same language" due to political interests of the Chinese government in trying to present China as a continuous state/entity from the Qin dynasty to the PRC and the suppression of minority groups (and their languages). French and other modern romances are not similarly suppressed by a Roman (Neo-Roman?) state engaging in a political project of linguistic supremacy (in fact the standard versions of French, Spanish and Italian have benefited from such projects to the detriment of regional languages/dialects like Provencal, Catalan or Venetian).

OTOH, on Modern Persian vs. Old Persian I've got no clue.
 
Look, we're not looking to stop language drift at this point. But maintaining the syntax should require less butterflies.
 
Look, we're not looking to stop language drift at this point. But maintaining the syntax should require less butterflies.
Latin syntax was quite flexible when it came to word order, which was largely a result of extensive case, gender, and tense systems. The loss of any part of these would make word order less flexible by rendering the language more ambiguous. Modern Romance languages adopted grammatical articles to reduce ambiguity, but all lost the freedom of word order that Latin possessed. They also lost a number of verb constructions and gained others, further altering the syntax. It would be hard to keep the case system intact, since the general pattern for Indo-European languages seems to be an overall reduction of cases over time. The gender system hasn't remained intact either, with almost all of them losing the neutral gender.
 
The situation with the different Chinese languages (as far as I can understand it, I'm more familiar with romance linguistics than those of Sintic languages, and you seem to know more here so correct me if I'm wrong) is that they are "the same language" due to political interests of the Chinese government in trying to present China as a continuous state/entity from the Qin dynasty to the PRC and the suppression of minority groups (and their languages).
The point I was more trying to make isn't that Taiwanese Hokkien and Mandarin Chinese are the "same language" (the two diverged in the Old Chinese phase, so Hokkien is actually as if Umbrian somehow survived as a non-Romance Italic language). It's more that we still refer to all modern Chinese languages as, well, Chinese in the same sense that Old Chinese was Chinese, and in a similar vein all Romance languages are Latin in a way.

Of course, this doesn't mean a modern Mandarin speaker could understand Hokkien or Old Chinese.
 
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