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Bookmark or Share- How long does it take for languages to diverge?If two groups of speakers from the original language were isolated for these lengths of time, the resulting dialects would probably be considered new languages. So the lower limit is probably 500 years and a reasonable limit would be 1000 years for a language to have diverged enough to be mutually incomprehensible.
- How would Universal Translators affect the development of language ...Imagine if every generation used only nicknames for a whole generation and without any outside exposure, the proper terms would quickly become practically a foreign language. Realistically speaking, it will probably be a massive conglomeration of each possibility as the translation will affect different people in different ways.
- internal consistency - How far back in time would English be ...after the normans conquered england, the conqueror's "old french" mixed with the commoner's "old english" to form a new simpler language we today call "english". that said, it took a few generations for the languages to mix, so in 1073 you would be just about as lost as 1065, but by 1300's things would start sounding familiar (e.g. the ...
- Forcing everyone to speak the same languageSometimes people trying to learn a foreign language by total immersion take a promise not to say a word of any other language for a given period. There is a separate issue in that the only way to check what language people spoke in private would be constant surveillance.
- In the future, around year 2500, will only one language exist on earth?This is usually English, which is the most common language learned as an additional language in the western hemisphere, but most day to day business is conducted in the national language. Before the fall of the Soviet Union (CCCP), there was a large block in which Russian had that position, and still day to day life was done in the national ...
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