61–70 of 93 posts
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> I expect better from a publication as “woke” as Scientific American. This strikes me as a prime example of "woke" having lost all meaning. What would it mean here? Having an orientation towards truth? Giving a shit about minorities?
Saying racism is without scientific merit, that trans people shouldn't kill themselves, and/or not being overtly fascist.
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It's not cultural egotism to say for example, that Hebrew is older than English. Being old doesn't confer extra prestige on a language. The problem is in deciding whether a language spoken 1000 years ago is still the same language as today. I'm not enough of a linguist to know the correct answer to this.
English and Hebrew are equally old. Just like humans and chimps are. There are species with less "evolution" than others.
If you had a time machine could you bring me an English speaker from the year 1 CE?
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OK, excluding constructed languages such as Esperanto.
“All spoken languages are equally old” but then in the next point: Welsh is older than English. You must have miscommunicated here? Obviously all spoken languages are not “equally old”…
This question keeps cropping up, and whenever it does, people claim it was their language. The question needs to be precisely framed. Oldest spoken language in the world? All equally old. Oldest still spoken language in a particular area? It's easier to answer this for islands or archipelagos, e.g. Great Britain: Welsh. New Zealand: Maori. Japan: Ainu (but maybe not for much longer). Oldest written language? Sumerian…
> Oldest spoken language in the world? All equally old. That doesn’t seem possible. Surely some spoken languages are older then others.
A better question is what language has the longest period of mutual comprehensibility, e.g. if you took a speaker from time A to time B. As an English speaker, I could talk to Shakespeare with some mild accommodations, but I would have a lot of trouble talking to Chaucer.
For written languages, the period of mutual comprehensibility can end up being thousands of years long because people in later generations are trained on the earlier texts, but for spoken languages, things tend to break up after a few hundred years. The best chance for a spoken language to maintain intelligibility is to have some kind of religious community that insists on preserving the old dialect, like Sanskrit (where there is a well preserved canon of pronunciation), Classical Arabic (Quran recitation), Hebrew, Latin, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not cultural egotism to say for example, that Hebrew is older than English. Being old doesn't confer extra prestige on a language. The problem is in deciding whether a language spoken 1000 years ago is still the same language as today. I'm not enough of a linguist to know the correct answer to this.
English and Hebrew are equally old. Just like humans and chimps are. There are species with less "evolution" than others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
English and Hebrew are equally old. Just like humans and chimps are. There are species with less "evolution" than others.
> English and Hebrew are equally old. If you had a time machine could you bring me an English speaker from the year 1 CE?
This question keeps cropping up, and whenever it does, people claim it was their language. The question needs to be precisely framed. Oldest spoken language in the world? All equally old. Oldest still spoken language in a particular area? It's easier to answer this for islands or archipelagos, e.g. Great Britain: Welsh. New Zealand: Maori. Japan: Ainu (but maybe not for much longer). Oldest written language? Sumerian…
It is generally assumed that their language is, phonetically, the most "different" in the world and therefore we can suppose that it was one of the first to derive from the hypothetical "proto-language".
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> English and Hebrew are equally old. If you had a time machine could you bring me an English speaker from the year 1 CE?
In 1CE, people in Palestine mostly spoke Aramaic, and Hebrew was a religious language rapidly declining in vernacular use. :-)
Would I find an English speaker if I then popped over to Britannia and offered gold? Or would they say "What the fuck is English?"
This question keeps cropping up, and whenever it does, people claim it was their language. The question needs to be precisely framed. Oldest spoken language in the world? All equally old. Oldest still spoken language in a particular area? It's easier to answer this for islands or archipelagos, e.g. Great Britain: Welsh. New Zealand: Maori. Japan: Ainu (but maybe not for much longer). Oldest written language? Sumerian…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Oldest spoken language in the world? All equally old. That doesn’t seem possible. Surely some spoken languages are older then others.
Without written language, no record can exist of the spoken language. Since spoken language significantly predates written language, we’ll never know when the former originated. It’s just practical to say they’re all equally old to avoid any cultural egotism that inevitably creeps in.
It's possible to go back further, at least if there are multiple descendants. We have a reasonably good understanding of spoken Proto-Germanic based on literature in Gothic, Old English, and Old Norse. We can even go back further to Proto-Indo-European as we have records in Hittite, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit.