Rule 97 and Language Change

Rule 97
Rule 97 in the Annals of Writing about Grammar and Spelling:
Inevitably, if you want to write a rant about grammar and spelling, you will write a grammatical, spelling, or typographical error.

Waited a long enough?
Thanks for your overwhelming (and mostly supportive) responses about my last entry. And a special thanks to the anonymous commenter who pointed out the glaring typo on the first sentence! I edited the entry for posterity, but you all know the horrible truth about my imperfect skills.
 
My Idiot Brother
My idiot brother Michael once argued that languages didn’t change over time, that there was one language when the Earth was created by God, and God split languages into many different ones at the Tower of Babel.
Never mind that he also thinks evolution doesn’t happen—arguing that languages don’t change over time is one of the most ludicrous ideas I’ve ever heard. Don’t believe me? Here’s a snippet of what he wrote to me back in 2001:
To reiterate a little, science has no claim over history. If it cannot be repeated again and again, then science cannot pronounce a verdict upon it. In essence, the event of the pre-Flood language stasis is history. By this simple statement, it is (or rather, was.) As a historical account, it should be judged as such. However, even taking this issue aside, your statement of “live languages must change over time,” is a gross misstatement. Here is why. When you say must, you imply absolute causality. If you were to say live languages do change over time, you might reflect science. For one thing, if we are talking about science, we require observation. What observation is your language scientist going to quote of this change or non-change of the pre-Flood society? Do you even know what language it was? There is a challenge. Quote a single word change of this language! 
Michael then argued that the only way he’d believe that language changed over time would be to hear it independently from my linguistics professor, who was dean of the linguistics department of my large university at the time. I balked at bothering her with such embarrassing matters as having my creationist brother talk to her, which he declared as defeat on my part. Hrmph.
I’ve been bitter about the incident and the 40 or so emails that we exchanged before we both abandoned the cause. He tried in vain to convince me to stop being an atheist, and I stopped trying to get him to accept my new position as a logical one.
 
Language Change
Getting back to language change, anyone with a brain between their ears could see that language changes over time.
Three Quick Examples:

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?-1400 C.E.) Excerpt from Prologue – Middle English
Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
When April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;
 
Excerpt from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1375-1400 C.E.) – Middle English
for wonder of his hwe men hade
set in his semblaunt sene
he ferde as freke were fade
and oueral enker grene
Great wonder of the knight
Folk had in hall, I ween,
Full fierce he was to sight,
And over all bright green.
 
*

PIE
No, not the delicious kind. I love that kind of pie. Proto-Indo-European, affectionately known as PIE in a very small circle of linguistics people.
 I took up an interest in Proto-Indo-European, and even purchased several books about it, including The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (2nd Ed.). To the uninitiated, it states:
Indo-European is the name given for geographic reasons to the large and well-defined linguistic family that includes most of the languages of Europe, past and present, as well as those found in a vast area extending across Iran and Afghanistan to the northern half of the Indian subcontinent. In modern times, the family has spread by colonization throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Linguists have painstakingly teased out the roots and basic structure of PIE, a language spoken before the human race had invented the art of writing. To quote one distinguished scholar on the subject, the reconstructed protolanguage is “a glorious artifact, one which is far more precious than anything an archaeologist can ever hope to unearth.”
Sometime around 5,000 B.C.E., the Kurgan peoples expanded from the steppe zone north of the Black Sea and beyond the Volga into the Balkans and adjacent areas. They bore a new mobile and aggressive culture into Neolithic Europe, and it was not unreasonable to associate them with the coming of the Indo-Europeans.
To think that they may have been the ancestors of Proto-Indo-European—that is to say, the ancestors of the languages of approximately half the population of the earth! What stories did they tell around the firelight? We can only guess from the words we speak in common today.

* If you’re wondering why the Old English poem excerpt is a picture, it’s because Open Diary hates hates hates special characters. Good thing we mostly speak modern English.