Hey, language people. HELP?!?

Question

Ok, so you know how there is an Old-Fashioned style of talking English Language. Like "he hath done" and "it shall be done", well, i was wondering if other languages have old-fashioned ways of talking it. Just wanted to know. Thanx.

Answer 1

All languages have old fashioned ways of speaking, because all languages are in transition. In fact, your examples are all from early modern English. Old English would actually look more like German to you: "On onfenge gescapode se God..." in Genesis 1.1.

Spanish was once Latin, but few Spanish speakers could read "Thomas autem, unus ex Duodecim, qui dicitur Didymus, non erat cvm eis." It's not Latin anymore. Likewise Greek and every other language has changed. (I had to edit that, because of the censor).

Answer 2

In Dutch the spelling has changed twice in the last twenty years alone.
So for people who learn the newest spelling in school, all text in an older spelling seem old-fashioned.
In the 1930's there was a big change, and for people who learned to read after the mid '40's the old spelling is real annoying.
Before the 19th century there was no fixed spelling and all writers used their own version, so all books written then seem even odder now.

But the 'official' old language is the language used in the first translation of the bible, the 'Staten Bijbel' and unless you were brought up with the language (some protestant churches use it daily) it is very hard to understand.
Medieval texts are like a foreign language that need a translation.

Answer 3

Yes, most languages change constantly, some new languages are born and some die.
"An extinct language (also called a dead language or a dead tongue) is a language which no longer has any native speakers. Normally this occurs when a language undergoes language death while being directly replaced by a different one. For example: Coptic, which was replaced by Arabic, and many Native American languages, which were replaced by English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese.

Language extinction also occurs when a language undergoes a rapid evolution or assimilation until it eventually gives birth to an offspring, yet, dissimilar language (or family of languages). Such is the case with Latin; an extinct (dead) language but the parent of the modern Romance languages. Likewise Sanskrit is the parent of the modern Indo-Aryan languages and Old English is the parent of Modern English. There are apparently children using Sanskrit as a revived language in Mathoor village (India) [1].

In some cases, an extinct language remains in use for scientific, legal, or ecclesiastical functions. Sanskrit, Latin, Old Church Slavonic, Avestan, Coptic, Old Tibetan and Ge'ez are among the many extinct languages used as sacred languages.

A language that does have living native speakers is called a modern language. Ethnologue claims there are 6,912 living languages known. [2]

Hebrew is an example of a formerly extinct liturgical language that has been revived to become a living language. There have been other attempts at language revival (such as Manx and Cornish), but the success of these attempts has been subject to debate, as it is not clear they will ever become the common native language of a community of speakers."

Answer 4

Yes, we are constantly evolving our language and words. Dropping extra letters that aren't pronounced is one way we become more efficient and goes along with Darwin's theory that we evolved from a lower life form. All languages are evolving so Spanish, Chinese, Basque all have arcane forms. In the bible we learned that we all spoke one language until we built the tower of Babel and then we all learned separate languages. Either way, yes, language ages along with art.

Answer 5

in Portuguese, my mother tongue, the language in books from around the 1600 is very peculiar. But no one knows it. We start studying the literature with texts that are already modern language. If someone spake old Portuguese no one would recognise it, but think that it's some weird foreign language.