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I would like to register my scepticism that Indian languages have not changed their pronunciation over multiple millennia. My wife had a professor from India w
by bregma 5y ago
I would like to register my scepticism that Indian languages have not changed their pronunciation over multiple millennia.
My wife had a professor from India who spoke Hindi as a mother tongue. His wife, also from India, also had Hindi as a mother tongue but was from a different village. The couple spoke only English at home because it was the only language they had in common. You do not get that kind of mutually-unintelligible divergence unless the language has had changes in pronunciation, and profound ones at that.
It's quite possible that among a small subset of elites that languages have remained unchanged, but I think even that is highly unlikely. The Latin spoken by the educated elites of Europe at the time of the renaissance would have been unintelligble to someone on the streets of the eternal city during the republic. I suspect that such an assertion that the languages have remained unchanged for millennia is just simply not backed by facts.