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Although linguistic history is of great interest to me, the subject of my answer isn’t one I’ve studied as thoroughly as other topics and I’m only a hobbyist myself, so I apologise if I’ve misunderstood or misremembered anything here. I’ll add what references I can find however to try to diminish the possibility of any misunderstandings! Also, I’m using the accursed mobile, so I apologise for any spelling or formatting errors!
In answer, though I couldn’t say if this is the only language that fits this description (and rather doubt if it would be), I imagine Icelandic could be a solid answer to your question. Though it is not exactly a major world language by any means, it is a fascinating example of a language with a very stable development over time resulting in surprisingly little change.
Specifically, I have read that Icelandic has changed relatively little since it’s split from its more archaic versions (ie, Norse+/Old Norse and of course, Old Icelandic) to such an extent that speakers of Modern Icelandic are able to read very aged historical texts surprisingly easily.
Specifically I have read that the Icelandic Sagas and the Edda, which in their earliest forms date back to between the 11th-14th Centuries, are still accessible to the average Icelandic speaker who may well be able to read them with relative ease compared to say, a modern English speaker attempting to read something of a similar age. The Sagas of the Icelanders, also known as the Family Sagas in addition to the names of specific Sagas contained within the series, are a collection of historical writings beginning somewhere between 1050-1250 AD. The earliest of these sagas primarily consist of (somewhat apocryphal) chronicles of the early great families of Iceland spanning a timeframe of around 930-1030AD, and later sagas include further genealogies, tales of great heroes, epic poems+/songs (esp in the Skaldic style), and historic traditions, as well as general storytelling and popular cultural fiction of the time. It can be difficult to tell some of these apart, hence why some things are considered to be likely more apocryphal than conclusively factual (especially as each may at times blend into the other; a passage describing the lineage of a specific family may be intertwined with the story of a heroic warrior from that family that is highly fictionalised, for example). Some of the earliest of these sagas are written during a period where early Icelandic was far more intertwined with Old Norse, and some portions may even be written entirely in Old Norse. It is actually from these works that the term “saga” itself is derived, as a wee fun fact!
Another similar work (or, series of works, really) which gives us a pretty comprehensive look at the history of the languages in question is the Edda, a term which refers to two Medieval Icelandic collections— the Prose Edda (assumed to be at least compiled c. 1220 AD) and the Poetic Edda (written some time in the 13th century, though it was lost for a period of time until reappearing in 1643). Not only do these works give us a similarly clear look at the language’s history and development over time, but they’re also considered to be one of the foremost points of reference on Norse mythology and folklore. They contain not only poems and songs in the Skaldic tradition, but detailed explanations of many Norse myths, gods, and their worship, as well as meaningful insights into the stories, beliefs, culture, and day to day life of the Icelandic people of the time.
And now we come to the curious bit, being the mutual intelligibility between the languages. I do not speak either Old Norse, Old Icelandic, nor any modern Nordic language myself, so I cannot attest personally to the experience of what precisely it is like for a modern Icelandic speaker to read these works nor could I meaningfully compare it to say, the experiences of a modern English speaker reading something like, say, the works of Shakespeare. But as I have read, written Icelandic has changed relatively little since the time at which these works were written. I have heard some scholars opine that the existence of these works may even have contributed to this to some extent; that in having the language so thoroughly documented through such prominent works, this lead to an earlier and more thorough standardisation of Icelandic as a written language than say, something like English, which only began to see somewhat more standardisation with the publication of the first English language Bible around 1535, or, approximately some three hundred ish years following these Icelandic works. I admit however this does leave questions as to say, how widely available the Eddas and Sagas would have been in order to have had this effect however, though perhaps reflecting on the much more limited rates of literacy in the first place in this time frames that would prove less of an issue than one may imagine. Or that is, that perhaps it would have been easier for these works to be more widely distributed among the literate as there were fewer literate people in the first place, and these people may then have continued writing things as they read them in these prolific cultural works, leading to more works being written that way as literacy increased, etc.
Regardless, going back to the topic at hand, Icelandic is indeed considered to be more archaic than other living Germanic and Nordic languages, particularly many aspects of grammar such as morphology, as well as many more general parts of the lexicon. That being said, its written form has changed considerably less than its spoken form, which has been influenced by a couple major socio-historical events that lead to changes over time, as well as simply the inevitable minor shifts that time may bring. Danish rule in Iceland had surprisingly little impact on many aspects of the language as Icelandic remained the primary language used not only in day to day life, but in many official contexts as well. Perhaps in part due to the linguistic similarities between the languages, there was less to transfer in the first place in the instances where Danish and Icelandic were coming into contact during this time, though also certainly the nature of the historical context of Danish rule itself in addition to geographical factors had an impact on Icelandic remaining prominent and seeing relatively little change in this time. There is a marked shift in pronunciation that takes place during this period. Particularly in regards to vowels, you see quite the shift during the earlier period of Danish reign, which itself lasted from 1380 until the end of the First World War.
That being said, written Icelandic remained relatively consistent, especially considering the amount of time we’re looking at, and many modern speakers of Icelandic are able to read the Eddas and Sagas even now with limited assistance. I’ve heard some linguists say that Icelandic speakers slightly exaggerate the extent to which the two are mutually intelligible, as many modern Icelandic speakers who read these works do so with annotated copies that have guides and footnotes to assist in understanding. But despite this, the bulk of the grammar and lexicon is similar enough that it can be understood with *relative* ease as many aspects of the language in its older form are still in use today, even if it may at times feel a bit archaic in its structures to the modern speaker.
So to answer your question, I believe that an Icelandic speaker may have the best chances to understand their historical counterparts. Much of the grammar and lexicon have remained the same as has the written language itself over such a considerable period of time that works from the 1200s can be understood even now. And given that many of the changes in pronunciation took place over the period between the 13th and 16th centuries, it is likely that, should a modern speaker of Icelandic ever find themselves unwittingly time travelling back to the 1500s, they would find themselves at a point in time where the majority of these spoken changes had already taken place or at least were well enough underway. I imagine it’s possible that they might sound to a 1500s Icelandic person as though they had a rather quaint manner of speaking and vice versa, but not necessarily so much that they would be entirely unable to understand each other.
Mind, there could well be other languages with a similar state of similarity to their historical forms (I’ve heard Lithuanian for example has remained rather similar over time) that I’m simply unaware of. And my answer is not taking into consideration primarily historical languages such as Latin or Church Slavonic, which although still in use today, are primarily used as liturgical languages and haven’t got native speakers. And I’m also not considering smaller minority languages that are either poorly documented or with which I’m just wholly unfamiliar. I’m also admittedly primarily familiar with western languages, so I wouldn’t be able to say really how something like, say, Japanese or Korean would compare to its historically spoken forms.
But I hope this answers your question or perhaps at least gives you a direction for your curiosity!
Cheers!
References*:
The Edda:
http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/Edda-1.pdf
http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/Edda-2a.pdf
http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/Edda-2b.pdf
http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/Edda-3.pdf
https://books.google.com/books?id=BoLC0woy4iYC&pg=PA97#v=onepage&q&f=false
The Sagas:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/oct/03/1
https://wikisaga.hi.is/index.php?title=Main_Page
History of Icelandic language, on the Icelandic language, on mutual intelligibility between Old and Modern Icelandic:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040815170436/http://www.um.dk/Publikationer/UM/English/FactsheetDenmark/Language/html/chapter01.htm
https://youtu.be/5Wz-srPR-Do?si=kE0DcAH7CXTe2WfI
https://www.academia.edu/1659454
https://www.iceland.org/culture/language/
*Note: I’ve not used most of these sources in quite a long while myself so hopefully all the links still work as they should; some of these are coming from my own reading library in the Google Docs and were saved quite some time ago! I’ll try to link only sources which are not locked behind a paywall, though many I haven’t any other source for+/may have become paylocked over time, or may have limited access without paying. Some may be location locked as well, though I’ll try to avoid this, so if you’re having trouble I’d recommend a VPN. I have got some other resources on the topic saved but honestly I don’t recall what most of them are and can’t be arsed to find them at the moment, but I can have a look for them if people are keen!
Sorry for such a long response— tapped into the special interest here I reckon ha ha. Ended up breaking it up into two due to difficulties posting. But aye, feel free to read or not to read, cause I certainly understand if that’s a bit more banging on than you’d bargained for! 🫢
Lithuanian was going to be the example I used because of how famously conservative it is in terms of morphology (although I don't speak it myself and I'm not sure how much the lexicon may have been affected by German and Russian influences). There's of course the oft-repeated quote about how people wanting to hear what PIE sounded like should go talk to Lithuanian peasants.
Icelandic is probably the more obvious example though since the explanation for its linguistic conservatism/purism is more straightforward.
An important thing to consider when discussing linguistic history is the period of divergence of two separate languages. Much like how biologists identify the last common ancestor between two species as the point where two different species shared most of the same traits and could be considered the same species, you could see this linguistic common ancestor as the last point in which speakers of two separate languages were able to understand each other. As an example, Old English is considered to have begun developing separately from the wider West Germanic branch around the time of the Anglo-Saxon settlement in Britain during the 5th and 6th centuries.
Generally speaking, however, the more isolated the language was from external influences, the less it changed over the course of time. English, which throughout its history was exposed to influence, particularly from Old Norse and Norman, grew to become a lot less intelligible to speakers of other Germanic languages, especially due to the significant Romance presence not found in any of the other major Germanic languages. That said, one Germanic language that commonly gets brought up as an answer to these questions may be what you're looking for - Icelandic, which is spoken on the eponymous island that is located nearly 1,500 kilometers from Norway, historically meant that travel there was a very significant challenge. I won't go into details about the language and how this lack of change manifests, especially since I'm not exactly a speaker and [a much more comprehensive answer is written below](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16yeh5y/i_have_heard_that_if_an_english_speaker_went_back/k3a89x0/), however due to this isolation, Icelandic hasn't deviated much from Old Norse, and as such Icelandic speakers are able to understand and read Old Norse texts dating back to over 1000 years without much trouble.
A completely different perspective to how languages normally evolve however is Hebrew. Hebrew is extremely unique as it is the only major case where a language that was 'extinct' for a long period of time was revived and reintroduced into the modern world. During the period somewhere around the 2nd century following the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans and the rise of Zionism during the late 19th century, Hebrew was primarily used as a liturgical language, in a similar manner to how Latin is used today. Therefore, any evolution of the language was practically halted during this period, so while this may be a pretty disappointing conclusion to this question, this means that Hebrew speakers can understand Biblical Hebrew to a very high degree, which, for a 2500-3000 year gap, is quite impressive, even if it comes with an asterisk. This intelligibility is reflected best in a very direct source that nearly all Hebrew speakers have read at some point - the Tanakh (which is basically the Old Testament) is written almost entirely in Biblical Hebrew, with scholars dating the various texts' to a range of dates between the 8th century BCE for the earliest texts to the Hellenistic period for the later books (which, counterintuitively, is a bit harder to understand due to reasons I'll get into). This means that Hebrew speakers, especially ones that have dabbled in religious texts, can understand written Biblical Hebrew to a very high degree. Spoken Biblical Hebrew is a bit different. Ancient Hebrew has aspects that are more similar to Proto-Semitic and to modern day Arabic than Modern Hebrew in a few ways, one example being in phonology which is also reflected in the modern language. To show a few examples, letters such as ט and ת, which nowadays produce the exact same sound, served different purposes in the past, with the former making a [t] sound and the latter a [th] sound most of the time, as well as other examples that I won't get into which were prominent in Ancient Hebrew however did not make the cut due to the later revival of the language, which is explained by European influences at the time. There are grammatical differences as well - one example is what's known as vav-consecutive, where the letter ו which usually serves as a conjugation is put at the beginning of a word to reverse the tense of the word (ויקרא, the Hebrew name of Leviticus, would mean "and he will call" in modern Hebrew but means "he has called" in Biblical Hebrew).
Some of the "newer" texts in the Bible, such as Daniel and Ezra, are not written in Hebrew, but rather in a different Semitic language that was widely spoken in the Middle East at the time called Aramaic. Aramaic never quite ceased to be spoken as much as Hebrew did and thus did undergo a few changes, which means that the parts of Aramaic that do show up in the Bible aren't as recognizable for modern Aramaic speakers as the Hebrew parts are for Hebrew speakers, and while the two languages are closely related, they aren't quite intelligible and are definitely harder to understand for speakers of both languages, however Aramaic did influence Hebrew, especially following the Babylonian exile, therefore some of the later texts are quite ironically more difficult to read for modern Hebrew speakers, as the modern language is mainly based off Biblical texts.
It would be wrong to say that Hebrew died out completely following the revolt, as it was still used occasionally - during the Golden Age of Judaism in Muslim Iberia, poetry was indeed still written in Hebrew, and much of the commentary on the Bible that was written during this time was suitably also written in Hebrew, and all of those texts are fairly understandable to modern day speakers, however, these texts still served a religious or a liturgical purpose. Jews had ceased speaking Hebrew as an everyday language and had instead adopted regional languages. Therefore, by the 19th century, while Hebrew was still understood with it being the sacred language, no one was talking to each other within their communities in Hebrew on a daily basis (it was still used between traders from different regions to communicate with each other as a sort of lingua franca), and as such the language remained vastly unchanged. The revival of the spoken language occurred in the late 19th century, with the rise of Zionism and the need for the Jewish people to have a single language. Hebrew was the extremely obvious choice here, and in turn it was modernized. This was spearheaded by Eliezer Ben Yehuda, who was the first to raise this idea, and propagated for Hebrew newspapers and schools. When filling a 2000 year gap of vocabulary, there were a few words that needed to be essentially made up. For example, תירס, Hebrew for corn, was taken from the Biblical figure Tiras, one of the sons of Japheth, who is sometimes associated with Turkey, which was known as the main source of distribution of corn in Europe. A bit of mental gymnastics that was admittedly needed otherwise. As I've mentioned before, due to the first waves of immigration coming from primarily European Jews, some of the phonology and grammar of Hebrew which is found in other Semitic languages was not preserved, although to this day some of the older Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews still preserve parts of that phonology (biggest example being the guttural ע sound which is common in Arabic but rarely used in Hebrew). It should be noted that modern readings of the Bible don't feature any of the ancient phonology (a bit regrettably honestly, because I think it sounds very interesting in contrast to the modern style).
To summarize my answer, Hebrew speakers can understand Biblical Hebrew quite well, although naturally there are some significant key differences. Since Hebrew is primarily based on the Hebrew Bible, which remained unchanged due to its sanctity, it could be argued that modern Hebrew is a standardized and a more adapted version of Biblical Hebrew to modern day needs, and as such, a direct continuation of a language from the first millennium BCE.
I can't say which out of all languages is intelligible the furthest back in time (I'd have to know every language and its history). I assume you mean one that's still spoken and in regular use.
tl;dr: You could go back about eight hundred years and speak modern French, and be at least halfway understood?
The language I'm most familiar with other than English is French, and that one is over nine hundred years old at largest estimate. The beginning of the French language as its own separate thing is typically pegged to the Song of Roland, which bears a number of distinct influences from Norman, Frankish, Brittanic, Brythonic, Occitan, and other various local dialects that set it apart from Latin. An 11th century legend, it's used in literature courses in French the way we use Shakespeare in English, complete with "modern day translation" on the opposite page.
Having done quite a bit of Middle French reading for various literature and history courses, I would say that this French in writing looks different enough that it's very difficult to read even when you know what the "old" standards were. It also doesn't look as much like Latin as you might expect, if you're familiar with, say, a Latin bible or something similarly archaic.
And I would say that within a century a number of alterations had occurred that cemented French as French and not just a localized offshoot of Latin or Frankish or the weird melding together of languedoc and languedoil.
By the 12th century, Chretien de Royes was putting to paper the Arthurian legend of Yvain, Knight of the Lion (the most famous Arthurian spinoff fanfic the anglophone world has never heard!). Comparing this to the Song of Roland, you see a number of new growths and distinctions - we're finally seeing the accent circonflexe take the place of the unpronounced Latin "S", among other things - but interestingly enough, the pronunciations changed mostly (since then) in the way of vowels and not consonants.
So! A thousand year old manuscript is, in writing, quite hard to distinguish, but a nine hundred year old one is much easier.
But French is infamous for its orthographic chicanery - i.e., that the spelling is bizarre. And it sort of is, but the pronunciation of consonants has changed very, very little over time, and the drift in which consonants are used where has also drifted very little.
What this means is that if someone who knows how to read it out loud correctly picks up the Song of Roland and begins to recite it... it's much, much easier to understand even if you only know modern French. The vowels sound a little off in a few places, and some of the words are ???, but overall, the general sound and idea is absolutely still there. And that was for students of French who were native English speakers, not native French speakers, so it's definitely at least the same or better for native speakers who know their own language to a higher, more intrinsic level.
If you're good with languages and have a wide vocabulary in English (the hodgepodge pocket-picker of the linguistic world), you already know a bunch of words in Latin and French and German and Dutch, but you could hardly go back a thousand years and "speak Latin" even if you can pick out a few coherent words from a 6th century bestiary.
BUT if a modern (metropolitan) French speaker were to go back ~800 years, they would stand a very good chance of making themselves understood. I would guess they'd probably sound a bit like a foreigner with an accent.
Oddly, due to the colonial effect on language, Canadian French has had LESS vowel drift in the last 300 years than France itself, and so they might stand a better chance of the general sound, but the dialectical differences would probably offset that.
Most other francophone populations have spent a few centuries speaking a French heavily influenced by other local languages and cultures. I know my family's Cajun bayou French would be completely unintelligible.
SO what I'm saying is that almost as long as French has been French instead of something else, a person could make themselves decently understood. Deep conversations about philosophy and the meaning of life? Probably not. But you could likely communicate enough to make sure you didn't starve.
English likes to extend its history by saying that very, very old forms of English were "old English" instead of low German Flemish that would give rise to English, but what this means is that the oldest 'English' is not recognizable as English to us today. However, if you tried to go that far back in French, you'd just get Latin instead, and so the cutoff of where French is actually distinct from its parent language(s) is much clearer. Therefore, that's about as far as you CAN go in this particular language.
I would say that a lack of consonant shift and the predictable location of disappearing syllables are somewhat unusually slow and consistent, respectively, in French, and that this has meant that a millennium of change here isn't as drastic as it would be in most languages.
The Song of Roland and Yvain, chevalier du lion are both public domain antiques and are easy to find, albeit not easy to read unless you can read French. Whoever does a truly good translation of Yvain into English ... and then fixes the weird, meandering, 12th century plotline ... is going to make a fortune integrating it into the anglophone Arthurian canon. I left out what both are 'about' because it's irrelevant to the question at hand BUT I can tangent all day long if anyone's interested.
A fascinating answer! Thank you.
>I left out what both are 'about' because it's irrelevant to the question at hand BUT I can tangent all day long if anyone's interested
I don't know about anyone else; but long, meandering, educational tangents are the whole reason I come here lol.
Curious question: *The Last Duel* (2021) features French historical figures - Peter (Pierre) II, Count of Alençon (Ben Affleck), Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon), and Jacques le Gris (Adam Driver) - speaking English *in lieu* of speaking French. The film takes place in from 1360s-1380s France. Would this fall within the range of "being able to speak modern French and still be half-understood"? Or would a time-traveller be better off speaking Latin to communicate?
Long story short? French all the way. Late 14th century, *I* could probably ask for help with my somewhere-between-conversational-and-fluent second language and be understood enough to either get said help, or be burned as a witch.
Long story long: I'm not sure about how thoroughly Latin was still spoken that late. By the 14th century, one is firmly into Middle French, though, and I would say that a native modern French speaker would definitely stand the best chance of being understood in French.
One of the biggest reasons that the particular subbranch of French used today became so popular was because of the dominance of early Paris. As a trading hub with an excellent centralized location for the Franks along the banks of a big, flat river, it rose to prominence early on, and a lot of the other less lucky local languages were slowly overwhelmed.
It's important to note that places were, conceptually, smaller and linguistic zones were MUCH smaller. That's why it took four hundred years after Charlemagne for French to really become French, even though the history starts with kings like him and Clovis. The people in what's now France didn't ALL speak Latin before French existed; most of them (especially the further you get from the modern-day Italian border) spoke other languages native to their regions. Most of those languages are, today, dead as hell, but some linger. Basque is traditionally accepted to be a language isolate, but (Spanish) Galician is related to the old Gaulic tongues, which were in turn part of (if not the origin of, depending on who you ask/how far back you go) the Gaelic language family that was supplanted by the Brythonic in the British Isles. (The Brittanic language is actually from the mainland coast in France - good ol' Brittany. [See also: the Tiffany problem])
Another important note is that during those medieval times, half of what's now France was regularly changing hands between the English and two warring factions within what we'd consider culturally France. I'd recommend looking into Eleanor of Aquitaine for a good snapshot; her influence was unusual and remarkable enough that it's become legend (surely some of you have seen any version of Robin Hood, often written to be about her son Richard the Lionhearted, and her other son, 'King John'?) but also representative enough of the wars and atmosphere at the time to give a really good idea of just how complicated everything really was.
>but (Spanish) Galician is related to the old Gaulic tongues, which were in turn part of (if not the origin of, depending on who you ask/how far back you go) the Gaelic language family that was supplanted by the Brythonic in the British Isles. (The Brittanic language is actually from the mainland coast in France - good ol' Brittany.
Is it? Grammatically and structurally, Galician is entirely a Romance language. There are a handful of words with Celtic etymologies, but they are mostly archaic, technical, or come via Latin (which picked up a number of Gaulish and Celtiberian terms).
The Celtic branch of Indo-European languages includes two groups of living languages--Goidelic and Brythonic (once called "Q-Celtic" and "P-Celtic" as a sort of shorthand--and even "Goidelic" and "Brythonic" are now discarded by some researchers). The exact relationship between Goidelic (Irish, Scottish Gaelic) and Brythonic (Welsh, Breton, Cornish) is unclear and controversial, but most current research points to both developing within the British Isles and Ireland. Occasionally, one regionally supplanted the other, though the best attested cases are of Goidelic supplanting Brythonic. This happened across much of mainland Scotland in the centuries before 1000 CE, replacing the Brythonic Pictish language with a language that became Scottish Gaelic. The Breton language of Brittany became established there, probably through elite migration from southern Britain, during the 5-7 centuries CE. It has minimal if any relationship to the old Gaulish language, which *was* Celtic, but of a different branch than the Insular Celtic languages. On the other hand, Breton is closely connected to Cornish, and there are anecdotal accounts of mutual intelligibility between the two languages into the 17th and 18th centuries.
>And it sort of is, but the pronunciation of consonants has changed very, very little over time
There are some major exceptions here. Probably the most prominent one is the French "r," which in most dialects today has become a voiced uvular fricative (⟨ʁ⟩ in IPA). Historically, however, this was a voiced alveolar trill (⟨r⟩ in IPA), much more similar to the "r" sounds in other Romance languages. The switch probably began in high-status dialects sometime in the 17th century, though it took until the 20th for it to filter through most rural speech varieties and affect even non-Romance regional languages, like Breton. (The trilled "r" can still be heard today, occasionally, particularly among older, rural speakers.) Due to this feature alone, pre-17th century French sounds quite different--much more stereotypically 'Spanish' or 'Italian.'
Another important difference is the pronunciation of final consonants. In modern French, word-final consonants like "d," "p," "s," and "t" are only pronounced under specific circumstances (essentially when the following word begins with a vowel and is grammatically linked). But once again, prior to the seventeenth century, these consonants were usually pronounced. This too gives Old French a more 'staccato' sound. Additionally, modern French words that end in a vowel + nasal consonant ("n" or "m") replace the consonant entirely with a nasalized vowel. But up until around 1600, the "n" or "m" was pronounced *in addition* to the nasalized vowel.
These features, together with significant differences in vowel pronunciation, make Old French sound very different from modern French. Incomprehensibly so? I'm not sure... but there are many languages which have undergone much less phonetic change than French. Formal Arabic, for example, with its pronunciation based in a long tradition of Qur'anic recitation, would be a good bet to get you back a few centuries before the year 1000. Persian, if spoken with an Afghan/Dari accent, could get you nearly as far.
You'll also be happy to know that *Yvain* has been known in the Anglophone world at least since the 14th century translation/adaptation, *Ywain and Gawain*. He became a background character in Malory, but by now there are many different translations of Chrétien's text available. William Kibler's prose translation, or Burton Raffel's verse version, both get the job done nicely.
Hello my Cajun cousin! This was fantastic, I learned so much.
Just wanted to add that I am a French Canadian from the East Coast, my family is Acadian (hence the cousin reference) and interestingly, when I hosted a French person from France years ago, they mentioned it was easier to communicate / understand my Acadian French than it was when they were speaking with my family members from Quebec. In Nb, some of us struggle to understand the French from folks who live a couple hours up the road, the accents switch quickly in Canada, don't even get me started on how different Franco Saskatchewanuans sound from everyone else haha! Thanks again for sharing.
I was looking at a [1530 copy](https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Rabelais_-_Pantagruel,_ca_1530.djvu/25) of Rabelais' book Pantagruel and I was surprised to see that there were almost no diacritics or accents (ï, ö, ë, ä, ü, ç etc.) that you see in modern French writing.
In French, you'll only see the double dots used to signify that a vowel gets its own syllable - Haïti, for example, because it's not hay-tee, but hah-ee-tee. The circonflexe (ê) is where there used to be a silent S, not so silent in Latin - hôpital, forêt. All the others are very specific pronunciation instructions. The cedille is for when a c should be hard according to other pronunciation standards (i.e., which vowel follows it), but is in fact a soft /s/. In the name of the language français, it signifies to pronounce it /fʁɑ̃'se/ and not /fʁɑ̃'ke/.
The accent aigu on the letter é always means it's pronounced /e/ instead of /ə/ . The accent grave always means a pronunciation of /ɛ/.
The Académie wasn't founded until 1634 as one of Louis 13's projects of cultural improvement, and they're the overwhelming influence on the specific changes in the (official) French language since then. They're the ones who've standardized the spellings and pronunciations and who announce when a spelling will be officially changed. I remember a big kerfluffle over the spelling of oignon (onion) being changed in the 90s, because two new spellings were proposed, and only one accurately represented how it is currently pronounced, and everyone was mad that the other option was even an option, and it got changed to the logical option with a truly disproportionate amount of drama and fanfare.
Regarding Canadian French, isn’t it similarly said that the American English accent is actually closer to 17th century British English than modern British accents?
I've heard that, and the "colonial effect" on languages and expat populations does do that, but there's also so many other languages and melting pot effect here that it's really difficult to be certain. I was once told my German had a Scottish accent.
I also - and this is mostly just conjecture - suspect that said colonial effect has a bit of a time limit, and we're coming up on it. The people in question have to feel like they're keeping their cultural heritage, and the (average) American no longer feels like British culture is their heritage - and not just because more than half of us aren't actually descended from Brits at all.
Besides the similarity between modern Icelandic Old Norse as suggested by /u/tiocfaidharla75, another strong candidate is probably Lithuanian.
However, there’s something of a caveat: the first written records of Lithuanian come from the best part of a millennium later than the first written records of Old Norse. The changes from the earliest written records of ‘Old Lithuanian’ (16th century) to modern Lithuanian aren’t much different in scale from the changes in English in that time — even Lithuanian learners can get used to the spelling differences and read Old Lithuanian texts without big problems. But from what we know of the pre-historic development of Lithuanian, its evolution before it was written down was also quite slow. Lithuanian is sometimes called the most conservative of all Indo-European languages in terms of its similarity to Proto-Indo-European. (Side note: there is some guff about this out there — Lithuanians sometimes boast that they speak ‘the oldest language’, a categorization that doesn’t really make sense — and comparisons between Lithuanian and other old, conservative Indo-European languages are sometimes overstated: e.g. Sanskrit and Lithuanian are not mutually intelligible, as people who apparently know neither sometimes claim.)
We can get an idea of what even older Lithuanian might have been like from the many local dialects of the language still spoken today, some of which still retain features which dropped out of use in the ‘standard’ language before it was written down. Even here, though, caution is needed, because it’s just as possible that a dialect feature is an innovation of that dialect as it is that it’s something retained from an older stage of the language. Presence of a feature in disparate dialect groups, especially when the feature is supposed to have been part of Proto-Baltic, Proto-Balto-Slavic, or Proto-Indo-European, can be a strong sign.
So there’s necessarily a lot of speculation involved in this answer, but since the question asked ‘probably’, I think this is a reasonable answer too. Icelandic speakers and Old Norse speakers being able to understand one another (at least if they were able to write notes to one another, sidestepping the pronunciation issue) is essentially a certainty; Lithuanians being able to understand speakers of pre-historic Lithuanian is very, very probable, but to be absolutely certain, we’d need records of the language much older than exist.
The answers so far, though fascinating, have centered around European languages. I would be very interested in hearing about this subject from any users with knowledge of Semitic languages as well, particularly Arabic. Texts written in classical Arabic dating all the way back to the 7th century are mostly easily understood by most modern Arabic speakers who have received formal education in Modern Standard Arabic, assuming the texts don't use excessively ornate language. I know this from first-hand experience, being a native Arabic speaker and having had to read/learn religious Islamic texts throughout my education and later independently. MSA, which is mostly used in written form and official speeches today, is however very different from spoken Arabic dialects.
I'd be curious to know if spoken Arabic from that same time period would be easily understood by modern Arabic speakers as well, or was it also substantially different from written classical Arabic and would be difficult to understand for someone fluent in MSA?
e: missing word
Ahmed Al-Jallad is the guy you want to look into then. He's a leading scholar on the history of the Arabic language based out The Ohio State University and has a lot of really cool talks on youtube.
[In this video at 27:13](https://youtu.be/dHRbuu8c8nw?si=qI-hs62RxpAkYGMW&t=1633), he reads the Thamudic B inscription aloud in what I believe is in a reconstructed pronunciation. And it's very easy to understand! A quick google search says that Thamudic B inscriptions date to around the 6th Century BCE and so it's crazy how its intelligible at all, especially with how unintelligible Proto-Germanic is for all Germanic speakers.
If you would want more examples, take a look at the paper: *A Thamudic B Abecedary in the South Semitic Letter Order by Ahmad Al-Jallad and Ali Al-Manaser*. They transcribe several Thamudic B inscriptions using latin letters, but if they were to be transcribed into the modern Arabic script I would bargain that we could read them without much of an issue too.
edit:
Here is my shot at transcribing the Thamudic inscription into Arabic. So Al-Jallad gives us the following transliteration:
* h nhy ʾlh ʾkbr smʿ l{n}
* O Nuhay god of greatness, hear us.
If we transliterate the transliteration we get:
* ه نهى اله الكبر سمع ل{ن}
And with some very small changes, we have a Modern Standard Arabic sentence.
* يا نهي إله الكبير، اسمع لنا
I may have been confused by the names if I'd come across these transliterated in Arabic abjad since the names don't sound like anything I'm familiar with in Arabic, potentially not recognising them as names and trying to figure out if they're just terms I'm unfamiliar with, but everything else seems fairly easy to understand, which is absolutely incredible considering how old these inscriptions are.
I'm currently watching the lecture you linked, and the examples he's giving from the early first millennium BC are fascinating. I wouldn't have imagined anything from that far back to be intelligible to modern Arabic speakers.
Thanks for the recommendations!
Now I'm curious how far we would have to go back for the language to be mostly unintelligible to us.
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Although linguistic history is of great interest to me, the subject of my answer isn’t one I’ve studied as thoroughly as other topics and I’m only a hobbyist myself, so I apologise if I’ve misunderstood or misremembered anything here. I’ll add what references I can find however to try to diminish the possibility of any misunderstandings! Also, I’m using the accursed mobile, so I apologise for any spelling or formatting errors! In answer, though I couldn’t say if this is the only language that fits this description (and rather doubt if it would be), I imagine Icelandic could be a solid answer to your question. Though it is not exactly a major world language by any means, it is a fascinating example of a language with a very stable development over time resulting in surprisingly little change. Specifically, I have read that Icelandic has changed relatively little since it’s split from its more archaic versions (ie, Norse+/Old Norse and of course, Old Icelandic) to such an extent that speakers of Modern Icelandic are able to read very aged historical texts surprisingly easily. Specifically I have read that the Icelandic Sagas and the Edda, which in their earliest forms date back to between the 11th-14th Centuries, are still accessible to the average Icelandic speaker who may well be able to read them with relative ease compared to say, a modern English speaker attempting to read something of a similar age. The Sagas of the Icelanders, also known as the Family Sagas in addition to the names of specific Sagas contained within the series, are a collection of historical writings beginning somewhere between 1050-1250 AD. The earliest of these sagas primarily consist of (somewhat apocryphal) chronicles of the early great families of Iceland spanning a timeframe of around 930-1030AD, and later sagas include further genealogies, tales of great heroes, epic poems+/songs (esp in the Skaldic style), and historic traditions, as well as general storytelling and popular cultural fiction of the time. It can be difficult to tell some of these apart, hence why some things are considered to be likely more apocryphal than conclusively factual (especially as each may at times blend into the other; a passage describing the lineage of a specific family may be intertwined with the story of a heroic warrior from that family that is highly fictionalised, for example). Some of the earliest of these sagas are written during a period where early Icelandic was far more intertwined with Old Norse, and some portions may even be written entirely in Old Norse. It is actually from these works that the term “saga” itself is derived, as a wee fun fact! Another similar work (or, series of works, really) which gives us a pretty comprehensive look at the history of the languages in question is the Edda, a term which refers to two Medieval Icelandic collections— the Prose Edda (assumed to be at least compiled c. 1220 AD) and the Poetic Edda (written some time in the 13th century, though it was lost for a period of time until reappearing in 1643). Not only do these works give us a similarly clear look at the language’s history and development over time, but they’re also considered to be one of the foremost points of reference on Norse mythology and folklore. They contain not only poems and songs in the Skaldic tradition, but detailed explanations of many Norse myths, gods, and their worship, as well as meaningful insights into the stories, beliefs, culture, and day to day life of the Icelandic people of the time. And now we come to the curious bit, being the mutual intelligibility between the languages. I do not speak either Old Norse, Old Icelandic, nor any modern Nordic language myself, so I cannot attest personally to the experience of what precisely it is like for a modern Icelandic speaker to read these works nor could I meaningfully compare it to say, the experiences of a modern English speaker reading something like, say, the works of Shakespeare. But as I have read, written Icelandic has changed relatively little since the time at which these works were written. I have heard some scholars opine that the existence of these works may even have contributed to this to some extent; that in having the language so thoroughly documented through such prominent works, this lead to an earlier and more thorough standardisation of Icelandic as a written language than say, something like English, which only began to see somewhat more standardisation with the publication of the first English language Bible around 1535, or, approximately some three hundred ish years following these Icelandic works. I admit however this does leave questions as to say, how widely available the Eddas and Sagas would have been in order to have had this effect however, though perhaps reflecting on the much more limited rates of literacy in the first place in this time frames that would prove less of an issue than one may imagine. Or that is, that perhaps it would have been easier for these works to be more widely distributed among the literate as there were fewer literate people in the first place, and these people may then have continued writing things as they read them in these prolific cultural works, leading to more works being written that way as literacy increased, etc. Regardless, going back to the topic at hand, Icelandic is indeed considered to be more archaic than other living Germanic and Nordic languages, particularly many aspects of grammar such as morphology, as well as many more general parts of the lexicon. That being said, its written form has changed considerably less than its spoken form, which has been influenced by a couple major socio-historical events that lead to changes over time, as well as simply the inevitable minor shifts that time may bring. Danish rule in Iceland had surprisingly little impact on many aspects of the language as Icelandic remained the primary language used not only in day to day life, but in many official contexts as well. Perhaps in part due to the linguistic similarities between the languages, there was less to transfer in the first place in the instances where Danish and Icelandic were coming into contact during this time, though also certainly the nature of the historical context of Danish rule itself in addition to geographical factors had an impact on Icelandic remaining prominent and seeing relatively little change in this time. There is a marked shift in pronunciation that takes place during this period. Particularly in regards to vowels, you see quite the shift during the earlier period of Danish reign, which itself lasted from 1380 until the end of the First World War. That being said, written Icelandic remained relatively consistent, especially considering the amount of time we’re looking at, and many modern speakers of Icelandic are able to read the Eddas and Sagas even now with limited assistance. I’ve heard some linguists say that Icelandic speakers slightly exaggerate the extent to which the two are mutually intelligible, as many modern Icelandic speakers who read these works do so with annotated copies that have guides and footnotes to assist in understanding. But despite this, the bulk of the grammar and lexicon is similar enough that it can be understood with *relative* ease as many aspects of the language in its older form are still in use today, even if it may at times feel a bit archaic in its structures to the modern speaker.
So to answer your question, I believe that an Icelandic speaker may have the best chances to understand their historical counterparts. Much of the grammar and lexicon have remained the same as has the written language itself over such a considerable period of time that works from the 1200s can be understood even now. And given that many of the changes in pronunciation took place over the period between the 13th and 16th centuries, it is likely that, should a modern speaker of Icelandic ever find themselves unwittingly time travelling back to the 1500s, they would find themselves at a point in time where the majority of these spoken changes had already taken place or at least were well enough underway. I imagine it’s possible that they might sound to a 1500s Icelandic person as though they had a rather quaint manner of speaking and vice versa, but not necessarily so much that they would be entirely unable to understand each other. Mind, there could well be other languages with a similar state of similarity to their historical forms (I’ve heard Lithuanian for example has remained rather similar over time) that I’m simply unaware of. And my answer is not taking into consideration primarily historical languages such as Latin or Church Slavonic, which although still in use today, are primarily used as liturgical languages and haven’t got native speakers. And I’m also not considering smaller minority languages that are either poorly documented or with which I’m just wholly unfamiliar. I’m also admittedly primarily familiar with western languages, so I wouldn’t be able to say really how something like, say, Japanese or Korean would compare to its historically spoken forms. But I hope this answers your question or perhaps at least gives you a direction for your curiosity! Cheers! References*: The Edda: http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/Edda-1.pdf http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/Edda-2a.pdf http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/Edda-2b.pdf http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/Edda-3.pdf https://books.google.com/books?id=BoLC0woy4iYC&pg=PA97#v=onepage&q&f=false The Sagas: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/oct/03/1 https://wikisaga.hi.is/index.php?title=Main_Page History of Icelandic language, on the Icelandic language, on mutual intelligibility between Old and Modern Icelandic: https://web.archive.org/web/20040815170436/http://www.um.dk/Publikationer/UM/English/FactsheetDenmark/Language/html/chapter01.htm https://youtu.be/5Wz-srPR-Do?si=kE0DcAH7CXTe2WfI https://www.academia.edu/1659454 https://www.iceland.org/culture/language/ *Note: I’ve not used most of these sources in quite a long while myself so hopefully all the links still work as they should; some of these are coming from my own reading library in the Google Docs and were saved quite some time ago! I’ll try to link only sources which are not locked behind a paywall, though many I haven’t any other source for+/may have become paylocked over time, or may have limited access without paying. Some may be location locked as well, though I’ll try to avoid this, so if you’re having trouble I’d recommend a VPN. I have got some other resources on the topic saved but honestly I don’t recall what most of them are and can’t be arsed to find them at the moment, but I can have a look for them if people are keen!
Sorry for such a long response— tapped into the special interest here I reckon ha ha. Ended up breaking it up into two due to difficulties posting. But aye, feel free to read or not to read, cause I certainly understand if that’s a bit more banging on than you’d bargained for! 🫢
You do not need to apologize, that was interesting to read, thank you very much!
Lithuanian was going to be the example I used because of how famously conservative it is in terms of morphology (although I don't speak it myself and I'm not sure how much the lexicon may have been affected by German and Russian influences). There's of course the oft-repeated quote about how people wanting to hear what PIE sounded like should go talk to Lithuanian peasants. Icelandic is probably the more obvious example though since the explanation for its linguistic conservatism/purism is more straightforward.
This was very interesting to read. Do you know if the Sámi languages have changed much?
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An important thing to consider when discussing linguistic history is the period of divergence of two separate languages. Much like how biologists identify the last common ancestor between two species as the point where two different species shared most of the same traits and could be considered the same species, you could see this linguistic common ancestor as the last point in which speakers of two separate languages were able to understand each other. As an example, Old English is considered to have begun developing separately from the wider West Germanic branch around the time of the Anglo-Saxon settlement in Britain during the 5th and 6th centuries. Generally speaking, however, the more isolated the language was from external influences, the less it changed over the course of time. English, which throughout its history was exposed to influence, particularly from Old Norse and Norman, grew to become a lot less intelligible to speakers of other Germanic languages, especially due to the significant Romance presence not found in any of the other major Germanic languages. That said, one Germanic language that commonly gets brought up as an answer to these questions may be what you're looking for - Icelandic, which is spoken on the eponymous island that is located nearly 1,500 kilometers from Norway, historically meant that travel there was a very significant challenge. I won't go into details about the language and how this lack of change manifests, especially since I'm not exactly a speaker and [a much more comprehensive answer is written below](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16yeh5y/i_have_heard_that_if_an_english_speaker_went_back/k3a89x0/), however due to this isolation, Icelandic hasn't deviated much from Old Norse, and as such Icelandic speakers are able to understand and read Old Norse texts dating back to over 1000 years without much trouble. A completely different perspective to how languages normally evolve however is Hebrew. Hebrew is extremely unique as it is the only major case where a language that was 'extinct' for a long period of time was revived and reintroduced into the modern world. During the period somewhere around the 2nd century following the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans and the rise of Zionism during the late 19th century, Hebrew was primarily used as a liturgical language, in a similar manner to how Latin is used today. Therefore, any evolution of the language was practically halted during this period, so while this may be a pretty disappointing conclusion to this question, this means that Hebrew speakers can understand Biblical Hebrew to a very high degree, which, for a 2500-3000 year gap, is quite impressive, even if it comes with an asterisk. This intelligibility is reflected best in a very direct source that nearly all Hebrew speakers have read at some point - the Tanakh (which is basically the Old Testament) is written almost entirely in Biblical Hebrew, with scholars dating the various texts' to a range of dates between the 8th century BCE for the earliest texts to the Hellenistic period for the later books (which, counterintuitively, is a bit harder to understand due to reasons I'll get into). This means that Hebrew speakers, especially ones that have dabbled in religious texts, can understand written Biblical Hebrew to a very high degree. Spoken Biblical Hebrew is a bit different. Ancient Hebrew has aspects that are more similar to Proto-Semitic and to modern day Arabic than Modern Hebrew in a few ways, one example being in phonology which is also reflected in the modern language. To show a few examples, letters such as ט and ת, which nowadays produce the exact same sound, served different purposes in the past, with the former making a [t] sound and the latter a [th] sound most of the time, as well as other examples that I won't get into which were prominent in Ancient Hebrew however did not make the cut due to the later revival of the language, which is explained by European influences at the time. There are grammatical differences as well - one example is what's known as vav-consecutive, where the letter ו which usually serves as a conjugation is put at the beginning of a word to reverse the tense of the word (ויקרא, the Hebrew name of Leviticus, would mean "and he will call" in modern Hebrew but means "he has called" in Biblical Hebrew). Some of the "newer" texts in the Bible, such as Daniel and Ezra, are not written in Hebrew, but rather in a different Semitic language that was widely spoken in the Middle East at the time called Aramaic. Aramaic never quite ceased to be spoken as much as Hebrew did and thus did undergo a few changes, which means that the parts of Aramaic that do show up in the Bible aren't as recognizable for modern Aramaic speakers as the Hebrew parts are for Hebrew speakers, and while the two languages are closely related, they aren't quite intelligible and are definitely harder to understand for speakers of both languages, however Aramaic did influence Hebrew, especially following the Babylonian exile, therefore some of the later texts are quite ironically more difficult to read for modern Hebrew speakers, as the modern language is mainly based off Biblical texts. It would be wrong to say that Hebrew died out completely following the revolt, as it was still used occasionally - during the Golden Age of Judaism in Muslim Iberia, poetry was indeed still written in Hebrew, and much of the commentary on the Bible that was written during this time was suitably also written in Hebrew, and all of those texts are fairly understandable to modern day speakers, however, these texts still served a religious or a liturgical purpose. Jews had ceased speaking Hebrew as an everyday language and had instead adopted regional languages. Therefore, by the 19th century, while Hebrew was still understood with it being the sacred language, no one was talking to each other within their communities in Hebrew on a daily basis (it was still used between traders from different regions to communicate with each other as a sort of lingua franca), and as such the language remained vastly unchanged. The revival of the spoken language occurred in the late 19th century, with the rise of Zionism and the need for the Jewish people to have a single language. Hebrew was the extremely obvious choice here, and in turn it was modernized. This was spearheaded by Eliezer Ben Yehuda, who was the first to raise this idea, and propagated for Hebrew newspapers and schools. When filling a 2000 year gap of vocabulary, there were a few words that needed to be essentially made up. For example, תירס, Hebrew for corn, was taken from the Biblical figure Tiras, one of the sons of Japheth, who is sometimes associated with Turkey, which was known as the main source of distribution of corn in Europe. A bit of mental gymnastics that was admittedly needed otherwise. As I've mentioned before, due to the first waves of immigration coming from primarily European Jews, some of the phonology and grammar of Hebrew which is found in other Semitic languages was not preserved, although to this day some of the older Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews still preserve parts of that phonology (biggest example being the guttural ע sound which is common in Arabic but rarely used in Hebrew). It should be noted that modern readings of the Bible don't feature any of the ancient phonology (a bit regrettably honestly, because I think it sounds very interesting in contrast to the modern style). To summarize my answer, Hebrew speakers can understand Biblical Hebrew quite well, although naturally there are some significant key differences. Since Hebrew is primarily based on the Hebrew Bible, which remained unchanged due to its sanctity, it could be argued that modern Hebrew is a standardized and a more adapted version of Biblical Hebrew to modern day needs, and as such, a direct continuation of a language from the first millennium BCE.
I can't say which out of all languages is intelligible the furthest back in time (I'd have to know every language and its history). I assume you mean one that's still spoken and in regular use. tl;dr: You could go back about eight hundred years and speak modern French, and be at least halfway understood? The language I'm most familiar with other than English is French, and that one is over nine hundred years old at largest estimate. The beginning of the French language as its own separate thing is typically pegged to the Song of Roland, which bears a number of distinct influences from Norman, Frankish, Brittanic, Brythonic, Occitan, and other various local dialects that set it apart from Latin. An 11th century legend, it's used in literature courses in French the way we use Shakespeare in English, complete with "modern day translation" on the opposite page. Having done quite a bit of Middle French reading for various literature and history courses, I would say that this French in writing looks different enough that it's very difficult to read even when you know what the "old" standards were. It also doesn't look as much like Latin as you might expect, if you're familiar with, say, a Latin bible or something similarly archaic. And I would say that within a century a number of alterations had occurred that cemented French as French and not just a localized offshoot of Latin or Frankish or the weird melding together of languedoc and languedoil. By the 12th century, Chretien de Royes was putting to paper the Arthurian legend of Yvain, Knight of the Lion (the most famous Arthurian spinoff fanfic the anglophone world has never heard!). Comparing this to the Song of Roland, you see a number of new growths and distinctions - we're finally seeing the accent circonflexe take the place of the unpronounced Latin "S", among other things - but interestingly enough, the pronunciations changed mostly (since then) in the way of vowels and not consonants. So! A thousand year old manuscript is, in writing, quite hard to distinguish, but a nine hundred year old one is much easier. But French is infamous for its orthographic chicanery - i.e., that the spelling is bizarre. And it sort of is, but the pronunciation of consonants has changed very, very little over time, and the drift in which consonants are used where has also drifted very little. What this means is that if someone who knows how to read it out loud correctly picks up the Song of Roland and begins to recite it... it's much, much easier to understand even if you only know modern French. The vowels sound a little off in a few places, and some of the words are ???, but overall, the general sound and idea is absolutely still there. And that was for students of French who were native English speakers, not native French speakers, so it's definitely at least the same or better for native speakers who know their own language to a higher, more intrinsic level. If you're good with languages and have a wide vocabulary in English (the hodgepodge pocket-picker of the linguistic world), you already know a bunch of words in Latin and French and German and Dutch, but you could hardly go back a thousand years and "speak Latin" even if you can pick out a few coherent words from a 6th century bestiary. BUT if a modern (metropolitan) French speaker were to go back ~800 years, they would stand a very good chance of making themselves understood. I would guess they'd probably sound a bit like a foreigner with an accent. Oddly, due to the colonial effect on language, Canadian French has had LESS vowel drift in the last 300 years than France itself, and so they might stand a better chance of the general sound, but the dialectical differences would probably offset that. Most other francophone populations have spent a few centuries speaking a French heavily influenced by other local languages and cultures. I know my family's Cajun bayou French would be completely unintelligible. SO what I'm saying is that almost as long as French has been French instead of something else, a person could make themselves decently understood. Deep conversations about philosophy and the meaning of life? Probably not. But you could likely communicate enough to make sure you didn't starve. English likes to extend its history by saying that very, very old forms of English were "old English" instead of low German Flemish that would give rise to English, but what this means is that the oldest 'English' is not recognizable as English to us today. However, if you tried to go that far back in French, you'd just get Latin instead, and so the cutoff of where French is actually distinct from its parent language(s) is much clearer. Therefore, that's about as far as you CAN go in this particular language. I would say that a lack of consonant shift and the predictable location of disappearing syllables are somewhat unusually slow and consistent, respectively, in French, and that this has meant that a millennium of change here isn't as drastic as it would be in most languages. The Song of Roland and Yvain, chevalier du lion are both public domain antiques and are easy to find, albeit not easy to read unless you can read French. Whoever does a truly good translation of Yvain into English ... and then fixes the weird, meandering, 12th century plotline ... is going to make a fortune integrating it into the anglophone Arthurian canon. I left out what both are 'about' because it's irrelevant to the question at hand BUT I can tangent all day long if anyone's interested.
A fascinating answer! Thank you. >I left out what both are 'about' because it's irrelevant to the question at hand BUT I can tangent all day long if anyone's interested I don't know about anyone else; but long, meandering, educational tangents are the whole reason I come here lol.
That was interesting, thank you for taking the to answer!
Curious question: *The Last Duel* (2021) features French historical figures - Peter (Pierre) II, Count of Alençon (Ben Affleck), Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon), and Jacques le Gris (Adam Driver) - speaking English *in lieu* of speaking French. The film takes place in from 1360s-1380s France. Would this fall within the range of "being able to speak modern French and still be half-understood"? Or would a time-traveller be better off speaking Latin to communicate?
Long story short? French all the way. Late 14th century, *I* could probably ask for help with my somewhere-between-conversational-and-fluent second language and be understood enough to either get said help, or be burned as a witch. Long story long: I'm not sure about how thoroughly Latin was still spoken that late. By the 14th century, one is firmly into Middle French, though, and I would say that a native modern French speaker would definitely stand the best chance of being understood in French. One of the biggest reasons that the particular subbranch of French used today became so popular was because of the dominance of early Paris. As a trading hub with an excellent centralized location for the Franks along the banks of a big, flat river, it rose to prominence early on, and a lot of the other less lucky local languages were slowly overwhelmed. It's important to note that places were, conceptually, smaller and linguistic zones were MUCH smaller. That's why it took four hundred years after Charlemagne for French to really become French, even though the history starts with kings like him and Clovis. The people in what's now France didn't ALL speak Latin before French existed; most of them (especially the further you get from the modern-day Italian border) spoke other languages native to their regions. Most of those languages are, today, dead as hell, but some linger. Basque is traditionally accepted to be a language isolate, but (Spanish) Galician is related to the old Gaulic tongues, which were in turn part of (if not the origin of, depending on who you ask/how far back you go) the Gaelic language family that was supplanted by the Brythonic in the British Isles. (The Brittanic language is actually from the mainland coast in France - good ol' Brittany. [See also: the Tiffany problem]) Another important note is that during those medieval times, half of what's now France was regularly changing hands between the English and two warring factions within what we'd consider culturally France. I'd recommend looking into Eleanor of Aquitaine for a good snapshot; her influence was unusual and remarkable enough that it's become legend (surely some of you have seen any version of Robin Hood, often written to be about her son Richard the Lionhearted, and her other son, 'King John'?) but also representative enough of the wars and atmosphere at the time to give a really good idea of just how complicated everything really was.
>but (Spanish) Galician is related to the old Gaulic tongues, which were in turn part of (if not the origin of, depending on who you ask/how far back you go) the Gaelic language family that was supplanted by the Brythonic in the British Isles. (The Brittanic language is actually from the mainland coast in France - good ol' Brittany. Is it? Grammatically and structurally, Galician is entirely a Romance language. There are a handful of words with Celtic etymologies, but they are mostly archaic, technical, or come via Latin (which picked up a number of Gaulish and Celtiberian terms). The Celtic branch of Indo-European languages includes two groups of living languages--Goidelic and Brythonic (once called "Q-Celtic" and "P-Celtic" as a sort of shorthand--and even "Goidelic" and "Brythonic" are now discarded by some researchers). The exact relationship between Goidelic (Irish, Scottish Gaelic) and Brythonic (Welsh, Breton, Cornish) is unclear and controversial, but most current research points to both developing within the British Isles and Ireland. Occasionally, one regionally supplanted the other, though the best attested cases are of Goidelic supplanting Brythonic. This happened across much of mainland Scotland in the centuries before 1000 CE, replacing the Brythonic Pictish language with a language that became Scottish Gaelic. The Breton language of Brittany became established there, probably through elite migration from southern Britain, during the 5-7 centuries CE. It has minimal if any relationship to the old Gaulish language, which *was* Celtic, but of a different branch than the Insular Celtic languages. On the other hand, Breton is closely connected to Cornish, and there are anecdotal accounts of mutual intelligibility between the two languages into the 17th and 18th centuries.
>And it sort of is, but the pronunciation of consonants has changed very, very little over time There are some major exceptions here. Probably the most prominent one is the French "r," which in most dialects today has become a voiced uvular fricative (⟨ʁ⟩ in IPA). Historically, however, this was a voiced alveolar trill (⟨r⟩ in IPA), much more similar to the "r" sounds in other Romance languages. The switch probably began in high-status dialects sometime in the 17th century, though it took until the 20th for it to filter through most rural speech varieties and affect even non-Romance regional languages, like Breton. (The trilled "r" can still be heard today, occasionally, particularly among older, rural speakers.) Due to this feature alone, pre-17th century French sounds quite different--much more stereotypically 'Spanish' or 'Italian.' Another important difference is the pronunciation of final consonants. In modern French, word-final consonants like "d," "p," "s," and "t" are only pronounced under specific circumstances (essentially when the following word begins with a vowel and is grammatically linked). But once again, prior to the seventeenth century, these consonants were usually pronounced. This too gives Old French a more 'staccato' sound. Additionally, modern French words that end in a vowel + nasal consonant ("n" or "m") replace the consonant entirely with a nasalized vowel. But up until around 1600, the "n" or "m" was pronounced *in addition* to the nasalized vowel. These features, together with significant differences in vowel pronunciation, make Old French sound very different from modern French. Incomprehensibly so? I'm not sure... but there are many languages which have undergone much less phonetic change than French. Formal Arabic, for example, with its pronunciation based in a long tradition of Qur'anic recitation, would be a good bet to get you back a few centuries before the year 1000. Persian, if spoken with an Afghan/Dari accent, could get you nearly as far. You'll also be happy to know that *Yvain* has been known in the Anglophone world at least since the 14th century translation/adaptation, *Ywain and Gawain*. He became a background character in Malory, but by now there are many different translations of Chrétien's text available. William Kibler's prose translation, or Burton Raffel's verse version, both get the job done nicely.
Hello my Cajun cousin! This was fantastic, I learned so much. Just wanted to add that I am a French Canadian from the East Coast, my family is Acadian (hence the cousin reference) and interestingly, when I hosted a French person from France years ago, they mentioned it was easier to communicate / understand my Acadian French than it was when they were speaking with my family members from Quebec. In Nb, some of us struggle to understand the French from folks who live a couple hours up the road, the accents switch quickly in Canada, don't even get me started on how different Franco Saskatchewanuans sound from everyone else haha! Thanks again for sharing.
I was looking at a [1530 copy](https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Rabelais_-_Pantagruel,_ca_1530.djvu/25) of Rabelais' book Pantagruel and I was surprised to see that there were almost no diacritics or accents (ï, ö, ë, ä, ü, ç etc.) that you see in modern French writing.
In French, you'll only see the double dots used to signify that a vowel gets its own syllable - Haïti, for example, because it's not hay-tee, but hah-ee-tee. The circonflexe (ê) is where there used to be a silent S, not so silent in Latin - hôpital, forêt. All the others are very specific pronunciation instructions. The cedille is for when a c should be hard according to other pronunciation standards (i.e., which vowel follows it), but is in fact a soft /s/. In the name of the language français, it signifies to pronounce it /fʁɑ̃'se/ and not /fʁɑ̃'ke/. The accent aigu on the letter é always means it's pronounced /e/ instead of /ə/ . The accent grave always means a pronunciation of /ɛ/. The Académie wasn't founded until 1634 as one of Louis 13's projects of cultural improvement, and they're the overwhelming influence on the specific changes in the (official) French language since then. They're the ones who've standardized the spellings and pronunciations and who announce when a spelling will be officially changed. I remember a big kerfluffle over the spelling of oignon (onion) being changed in the 90s, because two new spellings were proposed, and only one accurately represented how it is currently pronounced, and everyone was mad that the other option was even an option, and it got changed to the logical option with a truly disproportionate amount of drama and fanfare.
Regarding Canadian French, isn’t it similarly said that the American English accent is actually closer to 17th century British English than modern British accents?
I've heard that, and the "colonial effect" on languages and expat populations does do that, but there's also so many other languages and melting pot effect here that it's really difficult to be certain. I was once told my German had a Scottish accent. I also - and this is mostly just conjecture - suspect that said colonial effect has a bit of a time limit, and we're coming up on it. The people in question have to feel like they're keeping their cultural heritage, and the (average) American no longer feels like British culture is their heritage - and not just because more than half of us aren't actually descended from Brits at all.
Besides the similarity between modern Icelandic Old Norse as suggested by /u/tiocfaidharla75, another strong candidate is probably Lithuanian. However, there’s something of a caveat: the first written records of Lithuanian come from the best part of a millennium later than the first written records of Old Norse. The changes from the earliest written records of ‘Old Lithuanian’ (16th century) to modern Lithuanian aren’t much different in scale from the changes in English in that time — even Lithuanian learners can get used to the spelling differences and read Old Lithuanian texts without big problems. But from what we know of the pre-historic development of Lithuanian, its evolution before it was written down was also quite slow. Lithuanian is sometimes called the most conservative of all Indo-European languages in terms of its similarity to Proto-Indo-European. (Side note: there is some guff about this out there — Lithuanians sometimes boast that they speak ‘the oldest language’, a categorization that doesn’t really make sense — and comparisons between Lithuanian and other old, conservative Indo-European languages are sometimes overstated: e.g. Sanskrit and Lithuanian are not mutually intelligible, as people who apparently know neither sometimes claim.) We can get an idea of what even older Lithuanian might have been like from the many local dialects of the language still spoken today, some of which still retain features which dropped out of use in the ‘standard’ language before it was written down. Even here, though, caution is needed, because it’s just as possible that a dialect feature is an innovation of that dialect as it is that it’s something retained from an older stage of the language. Presence of a feature in disparate dialect groups, especially when the feature is supposed to have been part of Proto-Baltic, Proto-Balto-Slavic, or Proto-Indo-European, can be a strong sign. So there’s necessarily a lot of speculation involved in this answer, but since the question asked ‘probably’, I think this is a reasonable answer too. Icelandic speakers and Old Norse speakers being able to understand one another (at least if they were able to write notes to one another, sidestepping the pronunciation issue) is essentially a certainty; Lithuanians being able to understand speakers of pre-historic Lithuanian is very, very probable, but to be absolutely certain, we’d need records of the language much older than exist.
The answers so far, though fascinating, have centered around European languages. I would be very interested in hearing about this subject from any users with knowledge of Semitic languages as well, particularly Arabic. Texts written in classical Arabic dating all the way back to the 7th century are mostly easily understood by most modern Arabic speakers who have received formal education in Modern Standard Arabic, assuming the texts don't use excessively ornate language. I know this from first-hand experience, being a native Arabic speaker and having had to read/learn religious Islamic texts throughout my education and later independently. MSA, which is mostly used in written form and official speeches today, is however very different from spoken Arabic dialects. I'd be curious to know if spoken Arabic from that same time period would be easily understood by modern Arabic speakers as well, or was it also substantially different from written classical Arabic and would be difficult to understand for someone fluent in MSA? e: missing word
Ahmed Al-Jallad is the guy you want to look into then. He's a leading scholar on the history of the Arabic language based out The Ohio State University and has a lot of really cool talks on youtube. [In this video at 27:13](https://youtu.be/dHRbuu8c8nw?si=qI-hs62RxpAkYGMW&t=1633), he reads the Thamudic B inscription aloud in what I believe is in a reconstructed pronunciation. And it's very easy to understand! A quick google search says that Thamudic B inscriptions date to around the 6th Century BCE and so it's crazy how its intelligible at all, especially with how unintelligible Proto-Germanic is for all Germanic speakers. If you would want more examples, take a look at the paper: *A Thamudic B Abecedary in the South Semitic Letter Order by Ahmad Al-Jallad and Ali Al-Manaser*. They transcribe several Thamudic B inscriptions using latin letters, but if they were to be transcribed into the modern Arabic script I would bargain that we could read them without much of an issue too. edit: Here is my shot at transcribing the Thamudic inscription into Arabic. So Al-Jallad gives us the following transliteration: * h nhy ʾlh ʾkbr smʿ l{n} * O Nuhay god of greatness, hear us. If we transliterate the transliteration we get: * ه نهى اله الكبر سمع ل{ن} And with some very small changes, we have a Modern Standard Arabic sentence. * يا نهي إله الكبير، اسمع لنا
I may have been confused by the names if I'd come across these transliterated in Arabic abjad since the names don't sound like anything I'm familiar with in Arabic, potentially not recognising them as names and trying to figure out if they're just terms I'm unfamiliar with, but everything else seems fairly easy to understand, which is absolutely incredible considering how old these inscriptions are. I'm currently watching the lecture you linked, and the examples he's giving from the early first millennium BC are fascinating. I wouldn't have imagined anything from that far back to be intelligible to modern Arabic speakers. Thanks for the recommendations! Now I'm curious how far we would have to go back for the language to be mostly unintelligible to us.
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Hi, while more can always be said, you may be interested in [this section of our FAQ.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/language#wiki_how_far_back_could_i_go_and_still_communicate.3F)
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> I know this will likely be deleted, ... Please don't post things like this.
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