Excuse me, Divine Valar, but shouldn't Gollum's understanding of language be five-hundred years out of date...

Excuse me, Divine Valar, but shouldn't Gollum's understanding of language be five-hundred years out of date? By this I mean it should be nearly impossible for the other hobbits to understand him due to linguistic drift. I could understand a normal fantasy writer forgetting about this detail, but Tolkien in particular specialized in linguistics, so he must have known.

Stop asking dumb questions fag, I dont control this sort of shit

Are we still doing these?

He does talk like a fucking weirdo you retard

this

also he seems to talk more like a goblin or orc, probably from overhearing their conversations while living near them or something.

The truly sad thing is that these are better than the average thread these days

Yeah I mean it's not just the precious fucking up his speech patternses.

hurr durr how can students in the 1950s understand plays written in the 1500s

dead poets society a shit

No it's not, it's the same vane shit from the same shitty OP,

Did you know if you are fluent in modern Greek, you have a childs' understanding of ancient Greek because of how little the language has shifted.
Several ancient Chinese dialects survive, somewhat unchanged, today.
French over half a millennium old is close enough to modern French the speaker of one would sound like a dumb tourist reading from a guidebook to the other.

Just because English in incomprehensible in a century, don't blame everyone else.

Gollum maintained minimal contact with the Goblins but there was contact and a chance to learn how languages changed over time.

Yeah, why do you think he talks so funny? It's not because he's got some broken grammar, it's because his knowledge of prepositions is five hundred years old.

kys OP

It's an interesting question, for a change.
But there is real life precedent that this is totally possible. A modern French person could reasonably understand French from the 1600's without too much trouble, and that's French, a language that has had massive influences from its neighbours.

Whereas the hobbits are a sedentary, insular province keen on keeping to themselves and having as little contact with outsiders.

So for the hobbits to meet their ancestor would be pretty much like a modern person meeting an old one. Sure there might be some accent problems at first, but without a doubt communication would be possible after a while.

This is a spammed repeat question he's asked several times before.

Middle Earth's timescale is kinda fucked. Remember that the War of the Ring came 3,000 years after the War of the Last Alliance.

Also, hobbits live for like a hundred years, so if anything their linguistic drift would be less pronounced than in humans tongues.

Actually, English only gets weird at around 500-600 years ago.

If you picked up an original text of Shakespeare, READING it would kind of suck, as spelling had yet to be standardized, but you can understand people SPEAKING it without a huge amount of trouble. It's just a rather thick, strange accent.

The Globe in London actually does shows in two different forms of "OP", with "Original Pronunciation", where actors use the accent historians have worked out that Elizabethans used, and "Original Practice", where they replicate props, casting, and embracing direct address, where soliloquies and asides are taken directly to the audience, and the actors are permitted to really interact with the crowd.

This actually brings up an interesting idea for gaming: Elves or Dwarves receiving a bonus to History checks, or maybe getting a bonus to deciphering old languages, due to their increased familiarity.

For example, a Venerable Elf (using 3.5's numbers) could quite possibly have ATTENDED the original performances of Shakespeare. An Old Elf was reaching adulthood when America rebelled.

Why DON'T those races get bonuses to checks about historical knowledge?

How can OP be this retarded?

>Why DON'T those races get bonuses to checks about historical knowledge?
Dwarves do. As for elves, I always assumed that 'reverie' was basically brain de-fragmentation for them, and they would permanently store or discard memories. So Elves don't get bonuses because they often forget these unimportant details. Dwarves remember everything and pass it down, but don't live as long.

Checking over the last three editions of D&D, Dwarves only get bonuses on history related to Stonework in 5e, and Eladrin get a straight bonus in 4e.

Which at least the Eladrin makes sense.

Your theory makes sense too, with a tweak for dwarves' natural stone-based autism.

>Implying you cannot easily read something written in your language 500 years before
>Implying linguistic drift would have the same impact in a world where people live twice as long

Educate yourself fagit

>The Globe in London actually does shows in two different forms of "OP"

Where both of them still fags?

I hoped that joke would show up.

>the actors are permitted to really interact with the crowd
Actor here, this shit is the best
Time to go to London