5 ms·
Like Coptic to Egyptian, modern Greek to Old Greek, Italian to Latin, etc.
by peter303 8y ago
Like Coptic to Egyptian, modern Greek to Old Greek, Italian to Latin, etc.
- Koshkin 8y agoActually, the modern Greek is quite close to the classical Greek (much, much closer than, say, Italian is to Latin). As to Egyptian, it has gone through several stages (Coptic being the last one) which, for some reason, were all rather dissimilar.
- amself 8y agoAs a Greek, while of course Modern is not the same as Ancient, it is a lot closer to it than the other mentioned languages, for sure. I can read Ancient Greek texts easily, after only minimal education, which focuses a lot more on learning different meanings of the same words than new words (for instance δαίμονας). Heck, the grammar is practically the same on many things.
- schoen 8y agoI think that comparison is in controversy, because in these cases the older language didn't stop being spoken while transforming into the newer one. In the Assyrian case, scholars seem confident that ancient Assyrian stopped being spoken entirely some time before the emergence of modern Assyrian and that modern Assyrian can't be viewed as directly derived from ancient Assyrian (although both are Semitic languages).
- 0xBABAD00C 8y agoNo, not like that at all. Old Assyrian = Akkadian, New Assyrian = Aramaic. A closer analogy would've been "Arabic to Egyptian", or "Macedonian-Slavic to Ancient Macedonian", as in it's the same language family, but a very different language. In other words, Aramaic did not evolve from Akkadian, it replaced it.