: about language change that's very misleading I mean there is no such thing as a language in France I mean up until they the turn of the century you could find people in nearby villages in France who couldn't understand what virtually could not understand one another the idea of a national language is a pretty modern phenomenon it has to do with the rise of nationalism and communication and so on or take say Italy today or Germany today I mean the difference is among the things that we call German are enormous so enormous is to lead to non mutual intelligibility you have to learn the national language when you go to school it's a different language than the one you spoke at home and when we talk about language changing what's actually happening is that there's some kind of like species changing there's a mixture of all sorts of dialects and the the mix changes over time either because of conquest or some political change or boundaries are drawn in a different place or you know some kind of commercial interchange or whatever the mixture of these things changes over time and you know you take a look at it a few centuries apart it looks like there's a different language but what's happened is what happens is it between generations there are usually small changes having to do with other influences from the outside and so on and these things are cumulative sometimes they lead to pretty dramatic changes nothing within a couple of generations the language can have a contained structurally in quite dramatic ways and of course in say lexicon you know the words of the language will that's a different matter altogether so when technology develops you get a whole new vocabulary