Languages change with time

Every language changes radically with the passage of time. Shakespeare's plays are no longer intelligible to the man on the street, Chaucer seems to have written in an alien language. I know that even Arabic has changed, and the Arab of Egypt speaks a different Arabic than the Arab of Saudi Arabia. 

I saw this in Madina, when two Pakistanis at a jewelry shop roundly abused the young shopkeeper in Arabic. When they were gone, the young man turned to me and asked, "What were they saying?" I said, I'm not an Arab, you are, you should know." He shook his head. "I am a Syrian, we don't understand the Arabic spoken in Saudi Arabia". In Egypt, I met a factory owner who said that real, original Arabic is spoken by Egyptians, while the one spoken in Saudi Arabia was developed later. I asked him why he and Palestinians or Yemenis couldn't pronounce the "g" in "general", while Saudis had no problem with it. He had no answer.

In Pakistan, so many languages are spoken that I wonder what was the language of the original inhabitants. Pashto (which is close to Persian) has probably been brought here by Pathans from Afghanistan, Hindko is similar to Punjabi, which in turn is related to Seraiki (perhaps the original language of the country, as both  Sindhis and Punjabis can understand it easily).

I once came across the son of an Iranian diplomat in 1968 during a trip to Murree. He could converse easily with local Pathans, like another Iranian businessman I met twenty years back. My ancestors spoke a dialect which is apparently derived from Sindhi, but I have great difficulty in understanding the latter. 

My greatest regret is not pursuing the study of German, which I started in 1962 but had to give up due to my studies in engineering college.