alternatehistory.com

So, I've been reading a bit about the pre-Islamic period lately, and it occurred to me that there have been a number of interesting changes to the world's language makeup, for example the demise of the East Germanic languages, or the relative decline of the Iranian languages and their displacement by Turkic and Mongolic languages on the steppes. So...what are interesting changes to languages which could themselves be a PoD, or plausibly created by other alternate histories, and what might the effects be?

One particularly interesting one would be the decline of Coptic in Egypt following the Arab conquest of the region. It was a direct descendant of Ancient Egyptian, and was commonly used until some time after the Arab conquest. If the Arab conquest never happens (say, because the Muslims are defeated by the Byzantines, or because Islam never originates), then it quite likely remains the predominant language of Egypt until the modern day (of course undergoing further evolution). Where this really gets interesting is when the idea of archeology is created. The people who deciphered hieroglyphs did so partially by relating them to Coptic. Since Egypt will probably be more plugged into the overall European scene without a Muslim conquest (and assuming Europe still assumes a predominant character in the world), this will make their job much easier, and might lead to the hieroglyphs being understood earlier. It will also be a linguist's paradise, since there will be at least one language over 5000 (!!) years old, with numerous texts available for much of that time, to study. That would obviously be a boon for the understanding of how languages evolve and change.
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