1

What are the slowest changing languages (as measured by, e.g., a "glottochronological constant" or other methods)?

Geremia
  • 382
  • 2
  • 11
  • I don't know all languages, but Greek is slow enough that Modern Greek speakers can pretty much understand Classical Greek. Just the grammar of the verb has changed. This question is difficult because many languages do not have ancient writings. – Perry Webb Dec 26 '23 at 12:19
  • 5
    @perry They can more or less get the gist of written Classical Greek. If they’re not trained in it, they would have very little chance of understanding a Greek speaker from 2,500 years ago – and even more so the other way around. Lots of other things have changed than just the verb, of course, but it is true that vocabulary has remained a lot more stable than in many other European languages. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 26 '23 at 19:04
  • Those languages are spoken in the areas where nothing ever happens. Take Lithuania — nothing happened there for 2000 years, no conquests, no migrations, no genocides. There's no other quieter corner of the world like Lithuania! – Yellow Sky Dec 26 '23 at 19:31
  • 1
    @YellowSky it's rare that a comment here makes me wish for the wider array of reactions available on facebook, slack, etc, but yours certainly made me long for a laugh reaction – Tristan Dec 27 '23 at 09:46

1 Answers1

1

In general, languages that are not in contact with other languages, and that are strongly standardized. Dead liturgical languages are a special case of that. Icelandic, Latin, Non-Colloquial Arabic and Sanskrit are the paradigm case. Lithuanian, Slavic languages and Tamil are also on the more-conservative end of the continuum.

user6726
  • 83,066
  • 4
  • 63
  • 181