Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu writes:

>I strongly suspect that literacy is a necessary prerequisite for
>artificially keeping a language static over many centuries.

-- Sanskrit was preserved orally for centuries; however, it was used only for
religious purposes, and primarily as religious poetry.  Nobody spoke it in
day-to-day life, and children did not learn it from their parents as infants;
it was 'dead'.

>Second, the main point in Steve Long's hypothetical case was not merely that
>a language could remain unchanged over time, but that daughter languages
>could periodically branch off from it and innovate.

-- I think this is the clincher.  These 'learned' liturgical/scholarly
languages aren't used for everyday communication, and therefore they can't
produce descendant languages themselves, since they're not subject to the
same process of gradual change.