Is the Old Tongue entirely alien to modern speakers?
I’m sorry?
I know it sounds alien, but don’t they recognize even a couple of words or word?
No, not really. You know, scholars would.
How come, a language, over three thousand years—isn’t that right?—three thousand years of the books’ story, everyone spoke the Old Tongue didn’t they? So over three thousand years the language has managed to change so much that you can’t even understand a word or a phrase of that language. But over one thousand years, on the other hand, it has changed so little that you basically understand it as an accent.
If you consider English. You wouldn’t understand Old English. You couldn’t even read it. You could read the letters, probably. I couldn’t; I’ve seen manuscripts. But printing does stabilize a language, so there is some shift, because, say, a thousand years, a little bit of shift. See, what I have got here, look at these points. This is the Breaking, the Trolloc Wars, the War of the Hundred years and now. Okay. From here to here the language changes somewhat, and from here to here the language changes somewhat. Now, a person here, from this period, right here, just before the War of the Hundred Years could understand somewhat the Old Tongue, but would think “he’s got a strange accent”. He’s got a strange way of expressing himself, his grammar is strange. He puts the words together oddly and he’s got a very strange accent, but that’s the extend of it. It might be that the gap is not all the way from here to there, but maybe from here to here, that he thinks “I should understand this, but I don’t quite, I don’t quite understand” and a guy here, listening to this language, says “Yeah, I can understand him. He’s got a funny accent, but I understand him.” So okay, from here to here, he says, the guy here listens to someone from here speaking and he says “he’s got a funny accent, but I understand him”. A guy from here listening to someone from this point says “you know, I understand some of that, but it’s not quite, you know” and from here to here he says “yeah, I almost think I should understand that, but I can’t make out a word” and from here to here he says “What?” I know that the intervals and the true progression of a language are never that smooth, and that’s one reason why I have never tried to put it in the books as exactly where these points of commonality existed and where the points shifted from being “I understand him with an effort” to “I think I should be able to understand this but I can’t” to “what the hell is he saying, is he talking, I don’t know this”.
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