What is the oldest language still in use today? Also, second and third?
Well, according to this site, it’s Sanskrit, though I was under the impression that nobody actually spoke it anymore.
The site noted about also states that
Imagine the chaos if NASA had to start converting between English, metric, and Sanskrit units.
I’m not sure about non-Indo-European languages, but the Baltic languages, Latvian and Lithuanian (Estonian doesn’t count, being a non-Indo-European language) stand as the oldest ones currently being used - they still maintain a good deal of the grammatical complexity of the original proto-Indo-European that gave rise to almost every language that originated between Iceland and India.
Chinese and Japanese have very old literary traditions (I think they have the oldest continuously-used writing systems) - modern Chinese and Japanese people can read two-thousand year old writings with only a little difficulty. Can you read two-thousand year old Latin inscriptions? Scandinavian runes? I bet even Icelanders would find it a bit tough to understand their language as it was two thousand years ago. I can’t even make much sense of The Canterbury Tales without hurting myself - and those were written about five hundred years ago.
And you’re right - Sanskrit is a dead language. It’s still used by some people, and is learned for the same reason someone would learn Latin or Old English.
I think the government in India is trying to revive Sanskrit as a living language. They have given it official status I believe and are funding it better at the university level.
I’m not too sure about that site’s superhero claims for Sanskrit though. IA NASankritSpeaker but I doubt NASA has enough people fluent in every other language on the planet to be able to make such a claim for a language.
As for Iceland, I don’t think there were any Icelanders 2000 years ago. The first arrivals were Irish monks a bout a thousand years ago. The present inhabitants are descendants of people from elsewhere in Scandinavia.i
There is no such thing as an unambiguous language. Even if there were, why would NASA be responsible for checking languages to find out how ambiguous they are? I suspect that claim is either a lie or a complete misreading of something.
What do you mean by the term “oldest language.” Every language now existing (except for a few which were actually created in the past few centuries) are probably all descended from the same ultimate ancestor. They have an unbroken chain of speakers going back to the time of that ancestor. Thus they are all the same age.
Greek, for example, has changed enough from the classical to the modern that it might not meet your criterion.
I would think maybe Basque, or one of the Persian dialects.
All languages have changed over their history. There isn’t even really that much of a difference in the rates at which they have changed. I think this question is simply meaningless.
When I read English I remember someone pointing out that it’s very hard to define how many languages there are. For example, we usually treat “Old English” (Anglo-Saxon - eg Beowulf/Sir Gawain/Owl and Nightingale) as a separate tongue from Modern English. But then there’s Middle English/Chaucerian, which very much bridges the two.
So for example do you count Italian and Latin as two languages, or count Latin as Old Italian?
What I mean is, all languages today have derived from ancient roots, so all are arguably equally old. Perhaps we need to ask which is the most “unchanged” language today? Maybe an Aboriginal Australian language?
But one of the key things we did learn was that “You cannot embalm a language” - the only true “preserved” languages are “dead” ones like Latin, or technical ones such as legal English, which has changed far less over the past century than commonly-spoken English.
It was also pointed out that people always talk of “Language decay” - but then it was pointed out that nowhere on earth is there any tongue described as a truly “decayed” language.
This is going off on a tangent I know, but I found them interesting points and relevant to all questions of historical linguistics.
There is no “oldest language” as others have already pointed out. Languages change over time, and sometimes they get a change of name, but that doesn’t mean much.
However, some languages are believed to be more “conservative” than others. Some examples are Icelandic, which is closer to Old Norse than other Scandinavian languages are,
Lithuanian (and Latvian) are conservative both in grammar (old case forms) and phonology,
Possibly Greenlandic, where I believe West and East Greenlandic diverged over a thousand years ago and are still somewhat mutually comprehensible.
The language spoke on Fårö, near Gotland, is supposed to be the most conservative variety of East Scandinavian.
istara, why do you think an Australian language is likely to be most conservative? Just curious.
Well being so cut off for so many thousands of years, they can’t have had as much word-borrowing as other world languages have. Also they didn’t develop highly different technologies, and they seem to have adhered to many ancient customs and practices, so they wouldn’t have had to find new words - plastic/computer/iron/electricity/fascist/radiation - like developed world nations have.
That said, there are an amazing amount of different Aboriginal languages and dialects, so changes and progressions have taken place.
What about Hebrew. Still written and spoken in Israel…
True, I modern Hebrew speaker could read a text written 2500 years ago and understand most of it - although the phrasing would be archaic and the idioms obscure - but Hebrew is more a revived language. It’s old, but only because it was kept in linguistic cryogenic sleep until the late 129th cenury.
It isn’t in fact true that all languages are as old as each other: the process of creolization is a very common one, and each time it happens, a new language is created.
In fact, this illustrates a very important point: languages do not exist as abstract entities but rather are constantly recreated and reshaped in the mind of each child who learns them.
[If you’re unfamiliar with creolization, well…
When people with no common language need to communicate, a pidgin often develops: this is a simplified form of language, with a limited vocabulary, non-existent grammar, simplified sound system and poor expressive capability (for an example of a pidgin with many English roots in its base vocabulary, check out Tok Pisin, a trading language used in New Guinea).
However, children born in a community using a pidgin create a true language called a creole out of the pidgin, giving it grammatical structure and the capacity to express any thought that comes to their minds.
Creoles are very common throughout the world, especially in former colonies: Bahasa, the most common language of Indonesia, is in origin a creole, as are the patois of Jamaica, Mauritius and many other places; the process of creolization was observed as recently as the 1980s among deaf children in Nicaragua.]
I think the OP was referring to something along the lines of this…
Go back 200 years, could a French (for example) speaker today understand a French speaker 200 years ago. Yes? If so then let’s go back…
Then let’s go back farther could say an English speaker of today understand an English speaker 500 years ago. No? If so then English is eliminated.
According to sites I see on the internet both Latvian and Lithuanian make this claim for being the oldest. Icelandic speakers claim they can read old norse without any difficulty.
I found a site that claims Basque was spoken by caveman? So any other ideas?
It’s got to be Body Language.
Perhaps Basque was spoken by cavemen, but since they didn’t left texts nor recordings, it’s difficult to compare.
Basque is the language which has been spoken for the longest time in Europe. It predates there all the other languages which were brought by various invaders. But it doesn’t mean that its ancestor language spoken by the “cavemen” was more similar to the current language than Indo-european was to modern english.
And actually, I don’t think that the concept of “cavemen” could refer to the neolithic population.
i have heard that amogst european languages the italian language is not changing for very long period of time… dante wrote his books the same language like it is by now… it did not change since 1300?.. i am not sure…
When researching the country and language of Romania before my 1994 visit, I repeatedly came across this factoid: Romanian is the closest living language to the original Latin. It was similar enough that a Hispanic member of my team was able to communicate to the natives through his Spanish and their
Curiously, it didn’t sound very Latin, but rather more Slavic.
Well then–just looked it up on the Net, and this explains it:
Just so yah know. And stuff.
[list][list][list][list][list]The Tower of Babel?
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