wild_kuken: (Default)
Julia Beilschmidt ([personal profile] wild_kuken) wrote in [personal profile] aphanon_meme 2014-06-28 02:38 am (UTC)

Re: ooc≁❀

Not a problem at all anon, though it's 3am so forgive me if my reply is an incoherent mess lmao.

They most certainly have the ability to pick up on all the language changes I agree (and to borrow from assby, if they have to remember 1000s of years of history surely they can fit 1000s of years of language), and I'd even say they can understand many more dialects than they can speak, even beyond what what a human might consider the edges of mutual intelligibility, but yeah it's just the massive amount of change most of them have seen over their lifetimes in their languages...like damn if they were real you could learn so much about the boundaries of mutual ineligibility and processing synchronic change and just wow. AND THIS ISN'T EVEN TOUCHING THE FACT MANY OF THEM ARE LIKELY MULTILINGUAL ON TOP OF THAT.

It works like humans but on a much more massive scale is a nice answer when I'm not staying up 'til 3am contemplating the intricacies of it all and why my modern Prussia and my Teutonic Knight can talk to each other lol, that's mostly the context in which I fret over this.

For the stopping point though, oh my god, could you imagine if any of them did know PIE though, so many people trying to get their hands on them. Of course Austria at least has a canon birth year (976) so I think it's PRETTY SAFE TO SAY PIE is way outside the realm of possibility. Though it makes me wonder how far back Germania goes...maybe he spoke Proto-Germanic??? The Scandis bring up an important point about how the cultures use and view the older variants of their language too. I bet retention rates vary wildly despite the absurd language facility we're giving them for our amusement. Japan is another nation I can see with a confident grasp of the older variants of his language.

Given all the national variations on how to read Latin, I would say despite the fact many of the European nations probably had Latin as a native or highly productive L2 as kids, they probably do fall into your last point of unconscious pronunciation shifts. Imagine Grandpa Rome coming to visit from heaven and the Italies, France, and Spain all have the strangest and different accents to him.

I know I'm gonna dream about this now lmao.

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