The New Leader Of The Shamed...
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No best answer has yet been selected by glenis. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.
For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.hey babies this is a question in glosso-chronology !
I betcha didnt know that.
and the answer is....in 960 the Carta da Capua was written in italian (earliest example of) because they say by then Italian and Latin had become sufficiently different to make a difference.
well anyway that is what my Italian textboke said in 1970 - Si dice cosi - I think but I cant remember.
Any Latinist should be able to just start talking holiday Italian.
As for Greek, my Classics teacher could not make himself understood with his ancient greek in the fifties, but that could have been an issue with pronounciation. He would be using HMC 1906 (all the HeadMasters at a Conference agreed on a standard, and then a forty years later they agreed on a different standard !). Modern greeks can understand my New Testament greek so long as it is in sentences and occur in the NT.
Arabic - no problem as Q has limited mutation in Classical Arabic for 1,400 years.
Classical Mandarin they say didnt have any tones but did have final letters (which sort of fropped off and were replaced by the four tones) and has been 'reconstructed' by linguists - who clearly have nothing better to do with their right arms.
I hope this helps
PP
For what it's worth, apparently Dante regarded himself as writing in Latin. In any case, there was no such country as Italy until the nineteenth century, and even nowadays many dialects are mutually comprehensible only with great difficulty, some preserving more early features than others. (An Italian TV series about the Sicilian Mafia had to be shown with subtitles in the rest of the country.)
As far as Greek is concerned, there are problems apart from changes in stress and pronunciation. In modern Demotic Greek, as opposed to the Puristic version which is used less and less nowadays, much of the vocabulary consists of borrowings, often from Turkish times, Even, if not especially, names of everyday objects bear no relation to the classical. However, the comparison is still closer to the Modern English/Chaucer parallel than to Beowulf.