Reminds me of a story an old friend of mine loved to tell.

In her undergrad, she majored in classics and archaeology. One summer she was working at a dig on the island of Cyprus. One day she needed to go into town for some supplies. She walks into the store, and suddenly she realizes. "Fuck. I don't speak a word of modern Greek. How am I going to talk to the shopkeeper in this tiny town in rural Cyprus?"

She decides to just do the best she can, and she tries to talk to him in the only Greek she knows...Ancient Greek.

The shopkeeper gets befuddled, then looks her dead in the eye and says, in English, "lady, no one has talked like that here in 2000 years!"