Language and the Human Understanding Through Time Essay...

If we were time travelers, would we be able to understand our ancestors? Would we even be speaking the same language? Important questions about the definition of a language arise when temporal shifts come into play. Where is the line between a new language, and simply a dialect? Were Shakespeare and Chaucer writing in different languages? Does Barack Obama use a different dialect than George Washington did? The deciding factor of whether a language has evolved past the point of dialectical variation is mutual intelligibility, which can apply to linguistic changes based on geography, ethnicity, and, although it is less concrete, time. But this begs an important question: how can we test this? Because we are relying solely on textual†¦show more content†¦If two dialects of a language change enough–because of the combination of geographic distance and time–so that the dialect from one region is not understandable by the people using the other dialect, then the two are no longer dialects of one language. Instead, they have become two entirely different languages. Although it is, for the most part, impossible to isolate geography from time, it is possible to isolate time from geography. The rule of mutual intelligibility still applies: when a language changes to the point where its modern users cannot understand its traditional texts, then the traditional language and the modern one can be considered two separate languages. Mutual unintelligibility is not the case with the English used today as compared to the English used in the late 1770s. For example, Barack Obama and George Washington, although there may have been small discrepancies, undoubtedly would have been able to understand each other’s writing and speech. We, as students at the University of Chicago, frequently read texts written in the 1770s and before, and are able to comprehend them even if they are unabridged. English has not changed enough in the last two hundred years to constitute two separate languages. However, when it comes to Shakespeare and Chaucer, it is difficult to say whether they would have been able to understand each other. Although the time gap between them was roughly the same as the one between ObamaShow MoreRelatedWhat Is Anthropology? Essay1245 Words   |  5 Pagescuriosity about humans. Not only concerned with an interest in human beings and their developements, Anthropology is much more broad in concept of trying to understand the relationships between human beings and all possible questions about them. 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