Is Language Change only in the Past?

For more than 25 years, ever since I was exposed to Latin in high school and then to Ancient Greek while an undergraduate at Yale, I have been fascinated by language and more particularly by the ancient languages of the wide-ranging group of languages known as the Indo-European family (to which English, French, Spanish, Lithuanian, Russian, Hindi, etc. all belong). This early enthusiasm deepened into a general interest in the ways languages change--a branch of linguistics known as historical linguistics--during my junior year in college, when I spent two semesters as a student on a junior year abroad program in Athens, Greece and began learning Modern Greek while at the same time continuing my studies of Ancient Greek. Gaining a perspective over more than 2500 years of linguistic development through my study of Ancient Greek and Modern Greek simultaneously heightened my awareness of the fact that languages do change over time and fueled my interest in this phenomenon. It soon became clear to me that similar observations of change through time are possible with all languages. To demonstrate this with an example from a familiar langauage, consider this brief excerpt from the Old English Bible: And him wæs mycel m′′enegu t›o gegaderod, sw›a