> The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus , but this isn't exactly obscure material. )
The entire project is to replace a failing part of the ship with an identical, but not yet failing, part.
I'm surprised also by your take on the paradox. I've always understood that the difficulty lay with the use of identical materials to replace the old ones.
It might be clearer to consider the similar formulation of 'Trigger's Broom' from the show Only Fools and Horses on UK tv. Trigger has the 'same' broom for years, despite having replaced the head several times, and the handle several times. Clearly the same materials are used here.
I would say that replacing the wooden planks with metals ones is less of a paradox - that is more clearly a different ship! Replacing the decayed planks with other decayed planks makes no sense, so I don't understand your perspective on this ...
That isn't a difference. There was never a time when they were speaking Latin.
The Romans, over in Italy, spoke Latin, but the Anatolians, in Turkey, never did. They spoke Greek before any contact with the Romans and they continued to speak Greek long after the Romans were gone.
> it's like the Ship of Theseus, all those changes add up over time.
The Ship of Theseus is more about changes that don't add up over time. If I repair a hole in the ship, it's still the same in pretty much all useful senses of "being the same", and the question is whether a set of changes like that which end up covering the entire ship still leave the whole ship "the same".
If I repair a hole in the ship by replacing it with part of an 18th-century ironclad, and as damage to the wood accrues I just build an ironclad over where the ship used to be, no one is going to think I'm posing some kind of deep question when I ask whether, at the end of the process, I still have the same ship.