4 ms·
I think Persian and a handful of other languages are the outliers. The main difference between old, middle, and modern Persian is the writing system. Old Persi
by namirez 8y ago
I think Persian and a handful of other languages are the outliers. The main difference between old, middle, and modern Persian is the writing system.
Old Persian is quite hard to read and understand for a modern Persian speaker, but if one spends a few weeks learning the writing system of middle Persian (called Pahlavi), they will be able to understand a lot of texts written before 500 AD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahlavi_scripts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahlavi_scripts
- psoy 8y agoSame with Armenian: I can read and understand 5th century texts simply as an educated native speaker. It probably has to do with how much the culture relies on its written texts (because there are spoken dialects of Armenian that I dom't understand at all, while having no trouble with the written dialect from 1500 years ago)