Is it possible for a language to remain almost unchanged for hundreds for years?

[ghostly]

So in my story SKYSHIP, one of the main characters, Wati, discovers a flying ship from 354 years ago. In this ship, there's a monstrous amount of books from that time. Wati needs to read them for plot reasons (and she also is really interested in the ''ancient world''), but the problem is that I'm not sure if it's believable to have her language be somewhat similar to what it was 300 years ago. It's not exactly the same. There are words that changed, and the idioms/expressions are not that same. She would have some difficulties to read the books and understand the meaning of some things.

Is it realistic ?

[tayo_rafferty]

Consider it this way, can you read a story written in English from 300 years ago? Shakespeare's plays are over 300 years old but we are able to interpret and analyse those. I think the fact that your protagonist is interested in the "ancient world" makes their ability to read the text even more believable.

It's important for a main character to 'stand out' in some way from the rest of the cast so maybe the way your protagonist stands out is that they have a 'codex' of knowledge on this old civilisation which enables them to interpret the language.

[ahhvecadoes]

I mean, formal written English really hasn't changed in the USA since the Constitution was written, which was 240 years ago. I think it's pretty realistic.

[69Michi]

It's honestly depend on different country with different language, but I don't see why not like some people have said before. (Though there is also the occasion of complete change in language like my mother language, Vietnamese. The old Vietnamese was literally based off of Chinese alphabet and if you ask whether or not I can read it nowadays, no I can't.)

[Evan]

It probably wouildn't be exactly the same, but it would still be reasonably similar.

Obviously slang might be different and a few words might have different meanings, but it would be reasonably still understandable.

[punkarsenic]

i think it would likely be a little difficult, depending on how wide your characters knowledge of the world is. 300 years ago is like, charles dickens, not shakespeare - everyone can understand it, it just might feel a bit stiff and have odd references.

[kyupol]

Lol forget 300 years... Even 20 years, language changes somehow. Like "selfie" or "Google" lol

[J.Z.Castillo]

I would look up the real manuscripts from older books in "ye olde English" and see how it differs from today and use that as a base. I wouldn't say they are unreadable but they would just sound and look weird to a modern reader. Besides, language changes all the time as a society advances, for example, "cellphone" wasn't a word until the 1980s, so keep that in mind

[ghostly]

Thank you. You gave me an idea with the cellphone example. Since many things from 300 years ago doesn't really exist anymore, Wati would know what some objets are !

[lunaartemisasama]

No unless it is a dead language. A good example is latin it will never change because anybody use it for daily activities but it is the root of many languages such as Spanish, Italian or French.

[Pandastrophic]

I don't think 300 years is that long so yeah it is realistic, languages like arabic, while arabic dialects have developed and changed, formal arabic had been kept the same for much much longer than that because there is an effort to keep it the same, like we learn it in schools and it's the language used for anything formal (speeches, the news, etc) and it is the language used in writing but not in speech.
I'm not sure if you're going for your own language in your story but if it's not english then I suggest looking at languages from other cultures too, because there are a few that didn't change as much as english.

[Rhombik]

It depends on the language but I wouldn't say it'd be a big problem. After all some people still read Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Cruesoe for fun and they are from the 18th Century.

Some countries strictly regulate their language so if you wanted to take care of the problem, you could explain away the problem like this. Or maybe say that they study the old forms of the language in school like people do with Latin.