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What’s the world’s oldest language?

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Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?

#71

Post by parabyl »

diego_moita wrote: post #67
DonaldFisk wrote: post #41

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…

What about languages we can only speculate about? E.g: the several languages of the Khoe-Sān people in South Africa. 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".

Blanking on a source right now, but I recall reading about a study on the 'oldness' of languages and found that the unique sort of phonetics in !Kung and other Khoe or San languages appeared to reduce over time, and simpler hard consonants would emerge in their place - implying that they are indeed some of the oldest languages still around.

Interstingly, there are a number of words from these languages that are still widely used in South African slang: Dagga for Marijuana, Eina for "Ouch!", Gogga for Bug or Insect, and Kerrie for Stick, usually used as the neologism Knobkerrie. Very possibly some of the oldest slang in the world!

Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?

#72

Post by retrac »

ClaraForm wrote: post #21
LordGronk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it has a steady liturgical use and children are raised to understand it in church, along with small spoken revival groups here in the states so, while not exactly living, I would say it’s in a far better state in its community than Latin post vatican 2. But note, I never said it was alive. Just that it’s not as dead as, say, Sumerian (in fact it’s about as alive amongst the coptic community I know as Sumerian was at…

As a Copt who speaks but doesn't understand very much of what I say, my father can speak it, as does anyone who has a liturgical inclination. I can always go learn more of it, and it will likely remain as alive as it currently is for the foreseeable future. It's impossible to be devout without speaking it, it's impossible to connect to our identity without seeking to be devout. Just supporting what you're saying.

Coptic is used actively. It remains important. It is spoken by its community, it is very religiously and culturally significant. Sanskrit may have been a better analogy than Latin. And I thank you for your perspective. I was only debating a fairly technical linguistic point.

A living language is a language that is used to teach children how to peel vegetables, that people shout when they stub their toe, and a language lovers whisper together. If none of that is going on, if it is used only in some contexts, by people who start learning it after they already know another language (their native language), then it is probably a dead language.

Perhaps "dead" sounds pejorative, it is meant to be descriptive. Does that intense degree of language use occur? If no one speaks a language as their first, primary language, then the language is generally considered "dead" - even if hundreds of thousands of people use it every day. Another way of looking at it: if Coptic is still used in a thousand years, would it be recognizable? Or would it be like how Latin and Sanskrit are nearly unchanged, since they were last living languages? Living languages evolve.

Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?

#74

Post by giraffe_lady »

BurningFrog wrote: post #49
bradley13 wrote: post #7

There 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…

> Over a couple of generations, the pidgin evolves into a full language What I read is that children born into a pidgin speaking society will turn it into a full (creole) language, because that's how people work.

So, yes, but it can take a little time.

The two main things is that a language will meet the needs of its speakers, and that people will have at least one native language. You can't prevent either thing across a group.

A new & true pidgin has no native speakers, so no group will depend on it for all of their communication needs, falling back to their native languages when possible/necessary. It will be a native language of the first generation born into its communities. But critically they will also usually be native speakers of another language, the one their parents use at home, and will still be able to fall back to that for some of their communication needs.

So the pidgin will grow and change from the use of the first native speaker cohort, but it can take multiple generations for it to have a base of native speakers who depend on it absolutely. Though in other cases, esp with more than two combined languages, it can happen in one generation.

And as it's happening, it's fuzzy on whether it's a pidgin or a creole. I don't think linguists consider them separate non-overlapping categories, but more like the two modes in a bimodal distribution. Understanding is also complicated by the fact that these emerge relatively rarely, and tend to be in groups & parts of the world, until relatively recently, without a lot of scholarly attention on them.

Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?

#75

Post by vikramkr »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #63
solumunus wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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”…

Older = spoken earlier. A direct ancestor of Welsh was spoken earlier than a direct ancestor of English in Great Britain , but as both languages are direct descendants of Proto-Indo-European, they are equally old somewhere .

But there's an added wrinkle of which language (either spoken or written) stays mutually intelligible with the current variant for the furthest amount of time back. And tons of languages exist that are Creoles and formed from pidgins and essentially came into existence during the recent colonial era. And events like the massive flood of French vocab into English create some discontinuities in intelligibility over time. Evolution of any sort tends to not be a smooth linear process

Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?

#76

Post by [deleted] »

celeritascelery wrote: post #45
DonaldFisk wrote: post #41

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.

[deleted]

Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?

#77

Post by BurningFrog »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #74
BurningFrog wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over a couple of generations, the pidgin evolves into a full language What I read is that children born into a pidgin speaking society will turn it into a full (creole) language, because that's how people work.

So, yes, but it can take a little time. The two main things is that a language will meet the needs of its speakers, and that people will have at least one native language. You can't prevent either thing across a group. A new & true pidgin has no native speakers, so no group will depend on it for all of their communication needs, falling back to their native languages when possible/necessary. It will be a native langu…

That sounds right. I appreciate the added detail.

I learned what little I know on this from John McWorther's book "The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language": https://a.co/d/edvzLuB

Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?

#78

Post by tyg13 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #65
heywhatupboys wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English and Hebrew are equally old. Just like humans and chimps are. There are species with less "evolution" than others.

You are making a semantic argument that virtually no linguists accept. We get your point, we just don't think it makes sense for how we define languages.

I'm no linguist, but I do study it as a hobby. As far as I'm aware, linguists are not generally in the business of making ridiculous claims like "this language is older than another." The concept of "age" for a language for something as fluid as language is fundamentally flawed.

Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?

#79

Post by tyg13 »

triceratops wrote: post #68
earthboundkid wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1CE, people in Palestine mostly spoke Aramaic, and Hebrew was a religious language rapidly declining in vernacular use. :-)

If I offered 100 pieces of gold I bet I could find at least one Hebrew speaker in Judaea in the year 1. 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?"

Hebrew as it's spoken today in Israel, or ancient Hebrew? There's a lot of intelligibility between the two, but it's mostly in the written form. In ancient Judea you'd be more likely to find a speaker of dialect that'd entirely dead today.

As far as English goes, obviously you wouldn't find any English speakers in ancient Britain, but you could find Saxons that spoke a language that English is descended from. There won't be much intelligibility, if any at all, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was equally unintelligible as ancient spoken Hebrew.

Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?

#80

Post by tyg13 »

ffhhttt wrote: post #33
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isolate people, and they quickly develop their own dialect. Are you sure of that? I think the absence of external communication would make a language more conservative.

Yeah, it’s generally the inverse from what they are saying. Isolated groups retain the old form of the language for much longer. e.g. Romansh or even Basque.

It seems multi-dimensional. Isolation allows for parallel language development, but that development could be conservative relative to the rest of the speakers, or it could be heavily divergent.

Basque is an example where there's an obvious motivation for linguistic conservatism: the maintenance of a language that is "untainted" by the constant and unbalanced contact with French and Spanish speakers. There's a need to preserve a language that would otherwise be consumed and die out.

English is actually a great example, I think, of how isolation can lead to divergence. Compared to other languages in its family (e.g. Dutch and German) it's wildly unintelligible, largely owing to the fact that English was spoken on an island where contact with speakers of other Germanic languages was much less common.

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