Five Thousand (5,000) Years of Cheating and Stealing

Egyptian hieroglyphics is just a writing system. The language itself has never died - yet. It is still alive just under a different writing system, Coptic. So that's not a good example.

However when it comes to most everything else Egyptian culture has died or more precisely intergrated. Still there are some things that survive today like some spring festivals.

 

If the character remains unchanged does that also mean that the meaning is also unchanged? The language? You may be able to spell out and read something so it is leggible but it doesn't mean you can understand it it isn't really intelligible..? Is medieval Chinese and 2000 year ago Chinese little unchanged to modern Chinese as a language?

Yes I have a personal interest in this question because my own language has remained extremely unchanged compared to every other indoeuropean language (according to linguists) but they attribute that to the Bible.
Funny how only one book can stiffle the evolution of a whole language. I mean I can see that since good luck having an english speaker or german speaker be able to read and comprehend even medieval english or german without special knowledge while I can 75%+ understand everything in the last 2000 years.
So I wanted to compare it to other ancient languages. But the writing system makes it very difficult for a direct comparison. I mean with my knowledge about Chinese.

 

Since Chinese is a logogram language, the meaning will be mostly unchanged for each character. Each character generally has meaning or multiple meanings.

My guess is that without studying, a lay person that has been out of school for a long time would have trouble reading really old texts.

Take myself for example, my family immigrated to the US from Taiwan when I was 9 years old. My Chinese skill is approximately being able to read newspaper and modern novels without many issues. I did not have any classical Chinese training since it wasn't taught at my age.

I found a site with a bunch of texts in different eras https://ctext.org/post-han
I understand about 90% of anything post 1500s, about 30% of anything around 1000s, maybe 15% of anything from the 200s. The characters are all known, but it's used in a combination and order that's different from modern speech and writing. Some characters may also have archaic meaning that I don't know.

That's without any studying. I am confident that I would be able to get to nearly 100% of surface understanding on any of these works with time to study and some reference material. If someone had formal high school or college education, I am sure their comprehension would be very good.