you really don't find a substantive break. Lots of little changes.
Those, with Lithuanian, are equally old. But in some cases the orthography hides the changes (with Persian) or we can look past the changes because they don't show up quite so much in what we think is important (Lithuanian).
I like Lithuanian, with the negation occurring after the verbal prefix (so, for example, Russian would have prefix-verb for the positive and negative prefix-verb for negation, but Lithuanian would have prefix-negation-verb). Problem with Lithuanian is that it may keep some old rules, but it has a bunch of new rules and it's not really written until recently. But knowing Russian really helped in my Lithuanian class. (You study Slavic and historical linguistics, you learn basic Lithuanian. Helped to deal with Gimbutas from time to time, too.)
Macedonian's a weird example here. OCS had a rich tense and case system, and was developing (late) aspect. It's phonology was also disintegrating, with phonemic length being lost and some short vowels dropping. Macedonian's lost its cases. It's with Albanian and Romanian in having post-posed articles. It's kept much of the verbal system (with some innovations). It's claim to being "like" OCS is as much geographic as factual: It's been hypothesized that K & M didn't form an interlanguage but used largely the Slavic dialectal base from the area that is now Macedonia (and parts of Greece--Slavic sort of overran Greece). This claim is really quite nationalistic. (Bulgarians claimed the area, too. And there was a Bohemian recension of the language, it would appear, as well.) Those palatal stops and the counting system that's really Greek's in disguise make it different from the other Slavic languages, but also from OCS. (Yeah, for a while Greek counted back 3 morae to get to the position of the stress; Macedonian does the same, but since every vowel is short and has one mora, it looks like a tri-syllabic rule.)
Hebrew is like Arabic in that native speakers who are educated can read their ancient writings. But otherwise modern Hebrew is, to the cries of 'foul' from many, a blended language. The phonology is very much not proper to any of the varieties of Biblical Hebrew, being downright Slavic (Wexler would like the reference, I'm sure) and the grammar's also heavily Slavicized. I learned Biblical. I can't sing the settings of the Psalms I've run into in modern Hebrew. The lyrics don't scan.
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