Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 November 2

= November 2 =

When do ancestor and descendant languages become different languages?
At what point do an ancestor language and its descendants become different languages entirely? Are modern Persian and Achaemenid-era Old Persian different languages? What about Old Chinese and the modern varieties? Old English is around 960 years removed from the present day; is it a different language from Modern English? Primal Groudon (talk) 05:00, 2 November 2023 (UTC)


 * At no specific point. It's a gradual process, only apparent with hindsight. The pace of change can vary with circumstances (e.g. the Norman invasion leading to a massive increase in English vocabulary in a relatively short time), but languages are never static. Even without external influence they drift, and throw in a bit of external contact or social change and they can move rapidly. AndyTheGrump (talk) 05:23, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Quoting the lead paragraph of our article Periodization: "Periodizations can provide a convenient segmentation of time, wherein events within the period might consist of relatively similar characteristics. However, determining the precise beginning and ending of any 'period' is often arbitrary, since it has changed over time and over the course of history. Systems of periodization are more or less arbitrary, yet it provides a framework to help us understand them." The same applies to the segmentation of an evolving natural language. To a speaker of Modern English, texts in Old English are about as little understandable as text in Icelandic, so it makes sense to consider Old English and Modern English as different languages. --Lambiam 10:50, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * To answer the original question, Achaemenid Old Persian and modern Persian are definitely not the same language. (Modern Iranian Persian is not very conservative among the other modern languages of the Iranian linguistic grouping, and around 2,500 years separate it from Old Persian.)  For a relatively low rate of change in a written language, see Icelandic, where there's been a conscious effort to maintain some compatibility with the language of the Sagas (though the pronunciation of Icelandic has changed significantly since the era of the sagas).  For a relatively high rate of change in a written language, see Turkish, where various reform efforts in the 1930s make it very difficult for someone educated after the reforms to read things written before the reforms, even without the additional barrier of the change of script (Arabic to Latin).  (Basic spoken Turkish was less affected.) AnonMoos (talk) 15:10, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Fun fact: the reconstructed Old Persian ancestor of Modern Persian's word for flower, گل (gol), is *vr̥da- . This reconstruction is not only based on cognates in other languages, but also on the regular sound changes observed in the evolution of Persian. Few languages have undergone such dramatic sound changes; a speaker of Old Persian hauled in a time-travel capsule to today's Iran would not understand anything said to them. --Lambiam 19:06, 2 November 2023 (UTC)


 * I agree with what's been written, it's a gradual process. But it's worth highlighting the peculiarities of Old Chinese. Not that the language is odd, just it's incredibly hard to get a handle on how it was spoken. China has a long literary tradition but Chinese characters are not phonetic. Evidence as to how Chinese was spoken depends on things like poetic rhymes, rime tables, and words in other languages which were imported into or derived from Chinese. So scholars often zoom in on one particular instance of how it was spoken, given e.g. by a particular literary source. But it's a continuity like every other language.--2A04:4A43:90AF:FAB6:9C30:B453:45CF:1C0A (talk) 03:28, 3 November 2023 (UTC)


 * Some languages have conventional limits. The change between Old Spanish language and Spanish language is 1492 in Spain. The change between Medieval Greek language and Modern Greek language is the conquest of Constantinople in 1453.:
 * The end of the Medieval Greek period and the beginning of Modern Greek is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic features of the modern language arose centuries earlier, beginning around the fourth century AD.
 * The dates are more clear for pidgins. Before the initial contact, there were only the ancestor languages. After the contact, the parties tried to find a common language and, from that effort, the pidgin is formed.
 * --Error (talk) 17:24, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

Portuguese categories
I have checked some pt Wikipedia categories for colleges and universities and found that en:Category:Academics of University College Dublin is translated as pt:Categoria:Professores da University College Dublin. "University" seems to be treated as feminine and "College" as masculine, so I would have expected "Professores do University College Dublin". Which is correct or more natural sounding or is this a grey area? TSventon (talk) 15:09, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't know, but inside the Portuguese Wikipedia article it's "A" pt:University College Dublin but "O" pt:University College London. Spanish Wikipedia has "La" es:University College de Londres, "La" es:Universidad Colegio Dublín, and "El" es:University College. The Portuguese article for UCL translates it as "Colégio Universitário de Londres", which seems to parse it with College as the main noun and University describing it. It seems to depend whether you think "College" or "University" is the head noun, and that's not obvious. --Amble (talk) 15:48, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Irish language says nouns decline for two genders (masculine and feminine).  Maybe Coláiste is feminine? 2A00:23A8:4015:F501:ECF0:5FC:1553:EDF8 (talk) 16:17, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * According to Wiktionary it is either. In the Gaelic name of UCB, the Gaelic Wikipedia treats it as masculine: An Coláiste Ollscoile, Baile Átha Cliath, and so does UCD itself. (If feminine, the first part would have been An Choláiste Ollscoile.) --Lambiam 18:27, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Both the genesis of the English name and the Gaelic name show that the parsing should be: College of the University. Treating University College Dublin or University College London as feminine in a Romance language suggests a misinterpretation of the English name. There are many Spanish-language sources that treat the name University College Dublin as masculine. --Lambiam 18:50, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you Amble and Lambiam, es Wikipedia is an interesting comparison. UCD is "La" es:Universidad Colegio Dublín as noted. The only other Universidad Colegio is "La" es:Universidad Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca so "La" UCD may sound more natural in Spanish. An advanced search of Spanish language Google books has "la University College Dublin" 504 results and "el University College Dublin" 386 results. For comparison, Google books has "la Universidad Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca" 1,860 results and "el Universidad Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca" 0 results.
 * es:University College Oxford takes "El", possibly because it is not a university and by analogy with other Oxford colleges. Google books also prefers "El". TSventon (talk) 14:11, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
 * It would be bad to translate University Hall by Universidad Salón instead of Salón Universitario as seen e.g. here. The translation Universidad Colegio for University College is just as bad. A good translation is Colegio Universitario de Dublín, as seen here. The case of the Universidad Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca is different. The parsing is not "(Universidad Colegio) Mayor de Cundinamarca" but "Universidad (Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca)"; the name arose in this form when the earlier Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca was granted university status. --Lambiam 19:53, 4 November 2023 (UTC)