What’s the world’s oldest language?
scientificamerican.com
What’s the world’s oldest language?
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Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?
#2[flagged]
Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?
#3But it’s impossible to prove the existence of a proto-human language—the hypothetical direct ancestor of every language in the world.
Maybe not in the bulletproof sense, but it seems pretty obvious that since human beings raised without language cannot learn it as adults or even as teenagers, the facility for learning language at a particular age is an evolved trait. That and the fact there's strong evidence neanderthals used language means language is effectively older than our species. All known languages and language groups within the last fifty thousand years, therefore, are just the distant descendants of a language five, ten, or twenty times older. Those "bragging rights" are scientifically irrelevant.
Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?
#4[deleted]
Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?
#5What makes them think that there was just one proto-language not several ones that appeared independently from each other?
Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?
#6A bit offtopic, but if you are interested in languages, the great courses by John McWhorter are some of the most informative and entertaining resources on the subject that I have come across. He provides a wealth of knowledge on language evolution, both as to how they tend to evolve and how they actually did evolve, and he provides it in a way that makes you sad it's over.
You can find them on Audible, I think some are available with the monthly subscription, but it is definitely worth the money.
Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?
#7There are so many fascinating things about languages. Here are a couple:
- Toss people together who don't really have a common language, and they quickly evolve a pidgin, which is a very simplified kind of language that lets them communicate. Over a couple of generations, the pidgin evolves into a full language. This has happened repeatedly over history, often through things like conquering or enslaving other groups or nations.
- Isolate people, and they quickly develop their own dialect. Continue the isolation, and the dialect will diverge into a separate language. Dutch is an evolved German dialect. On the other end of Germany, Swiss German is much the same, but isn't quite regarded as its own language.
As another comment says: it really makes no sense to suppose there was one, unique, proto-language. Evolution is a gradual process, and the complexity of communication will have evolved just as gradually. Likely, different tribes will have had different communication patterns. Interbreeding, warfare and slavery will have mixed things up occasionally, but there will surely have been many different dialects and languages.
Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?
#8Historians and linguists generally agree that Sumerian, Akkadian and Egyptian are the oldest languages with a clear written record. All three are extinct
Umm, what? Coptic is a (barely) living Egyptian. It is close enough for us to have deciphered hieroglyphs, hieratic, and demotic, at the old, middle, and late stages. Yes the Greek on the Rosetta stone helped but Coptic sealed the deal, particularly with transliteration. Thus I would say using the term “Egyptian” to refer to any particular language with obvious stages and then saying it’s dead when you have a stage still spoken is absurd, and does a great disservice to linguistic communities that need help. I expect better from a publication as “woke” as Scientific American. Copts and their language may not be thriving nor reviving but news of the death of the Egyptian language is a bit exaggerated.
Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?
#9Very disappointing article, and a reminder to me that, when the headline is a question, the article rarely contains the answer.
It's as though the author went down a rabbit hole of her own curiosity for a couple hours, came up with next to nothing, but had to justify the time spent.
Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?
#10What makes them think that there was just one proto-language not several ones that appeared independently from each other?
There’s no evidence that Homo Sapiens, aside from some interbreeding with other hominids interacted with other hominids who were capable of complex language for that to be possible. And a multiple origin scenario for behaviourally modern humans flies in the face of modern science, archaeology, and palaeontology to such a degree that it would basically require magic.