What's curious to me is that some languages, and writing systems, preserve better than others.
Latin, having become a dead language used principally by the Church and for a time science / natural philosophy, remains highly-readable across centuries so long as you read Latin. Similarly for classical Greek.
I'm given to understand that Arabic, itself significantly preserved in the Quaran as a literal verbatim transmission from the 7th century.
Written Chinese, zhōngwén, or 中文, is logosyllabic, where symbols represent the concepts rather than the phonetic representation of a syllable. It is not only generally readable across millennia, but even across largely mutually-unintelligible dialects of Chinese, or other languages (Korean and Japanese, for example).
Contrast written English which becomes highly idiosyncratic even only a couple of centuries ago (long-S, nonuniform spellings, highly stylised and formalised expressions), and both difficult to read and understand (verbally) from as few as five centuries ago.
Numerous of the modern languages of Europe (Spanish, English, French, German) date only to about 900--1,000 CE or so, and the forms spoken then would be difficult or impossible for most moderns to understand. Written forms ... often didn't exist at all (government and business being transacted in Latin, Greek, or Arabic throughout much the region).
Latin, having become a dead language used principally by the Church and for a time science / natural philosophy, remains highly-readable across centuries so long as you read Latin. Similarly for classical Greek.
I'm given to understand that Arabic, itself significantly preserved in the Quaran as a literal verbatim transmission from the 7th century.
Written Chinese, zhōngwén, or 中文, is logosyllabic, where symbols represent the concepts rather than the phonetic representation of a syllable. It is not only generally readable across millennia, but even across largely mutually-unintelligible dialects of Chinese, or other languages (Korean and Japanese, for example).
Contrast written English which becomes highly idiosyncratic even only a couple of centuries ago (long-S, nonuniform spellings, highly stylised and formalised expressions), and both difficult to read and understand (verbally) from as few as five centuries ago.
Shakespeare, for example: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=YiblRSqhL04>
Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M>
Beowulf (c. 700--1000 AD): <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M>
Numerous of the modern languages of Europe (Spanish, English, French, German) date only to about 900--1,000 CE or so, and the forms spoken then would be difficult or impossible for most moderns to understand. Written forms ... often didn't exist at all (government and business being transacted in Latin, Greek, or Arabic throughout much the region).