1369: Learning off Old Materials Sep 10, 2018

Following of yesterday's post, a necessary element of living languages is that they change. So while this poses a challenge for revival efforts, this is most often an issue for people interested in studying a language with few speakers and or little documentation. Famously this was a challenge for those studying Dyirbal, which within a generation changed to become unintelligible, and records needed to be almost entirely remade, but even in popularly learned languages, this can can be a challenge. Usually, unlike with Young Dyirbal, the grammar doesn't change significantly, but enough of lexicon may alter that someone learning off of old materials may come across as stilted.