What is the oldest Existent Language?
Pretty well sums up the question. I would suppose Hebrew and Coptic would both be in the running.
Juveniles.
One of the Australian Aboriginal languages.
What about Aramaic (even though it’s essentially a dead language).
Also, aren’t there some North/South Native American dialects from antiquity? I vaguely recall reading an article a year or so back where a study was done on the Algonquin language, and it too was pretty old.
Tripler
Just throwing out a few recollections.
A quick Google found this page, which makes some excellent points. Chinese was written down around 1500 BCE, but bears only a passing resemblance to modern Mandarin or Cantonese (indeed, most English speakers struggle with the ‘English’ of Chaucer, or even Shakespeare). Welsh and Basque are really only considered the ‘oldest languages in Europe’ because they were spoken by the first people to settle those geographic areas.
Actually, I know an Aramaic speaker. A male trapped in a Lebanese body. Very kinky.
The word you are groping for is “Extant” not “existent”. :rolleyes:
And the Basque language may, at least in part, date back to the Neolithic, or perhaps even earlier!
There is no provable “oldest” language. All existing languages have roots in the first utterances of the first hominids capable of speech (whether these hominids were a single group or were several geographically and temporally separated groups is undetermined).
Written records establish nothing – humans could speak long, long before they could write.
You are of course right. I was looking for ‘extant.’ Nonetheless, I will soon be on five weeks of vacation teasing Mexican real estate agents. So my mind was elsewhere.
Proto-Indoeuropean, that is.
Well after a fashion, anyway. Lithuanian is said to be the most archaic member of the Indo-European language family. Like PIE, it possesses an elaborate case system, including the vocative, yet.
Lithuanian has grammatical features that are considered to be “archaic” in the sense that Lithuanian has not shed as many parts of its case system as other descendents of PIE have. But this does not mean that modern speakers of Lithuanian can go back several millenia in time and converse with anyone.
Well, let’s work this.
Chinese is sort of in the running and sort of not – its pictographic written form goes back a substantial way, but, owing to its nonalphabetic status, does not stand for any particular spoken language that dates back that far.
Likewise, as SoP (perfect name for quarrying out evidence of the past, by the way! :)) pointed out, Proto-Indo-European would be nice – but what we have is hypothetical reconstructions, including four “pharyngeal consonants” that are presumed to underly later presumed transforms but which nobody has a clear idea how they wre sounded. IOW, if you know PIE, you can discuss learnedly with another PIE scholar why the girl and her uncle found two walnuts in the apple orchard (known vocabulary is fairly limited, but that sentence is fairly certain) – but it’s questionable whether you’d be able to converse with the people who spoke it, which would be the point to reconstructing a language.
Although Ancient Egyptian > Demotic Egyptian > Coptic, and Christian Egyptians know and speak Coptic as a sacred language (think of Church Latin of 60 years ago), I’d be disinclined to deem that a “surviving” language – if you do, then you have to consider that Latin had 750,000,000 speakers as of 1961 AD, that being the estimate of Roman Catholics worldwide on the eve of Vatican II.
Greek, on the other hand, is clearly known back to about 1200 BC, has preserved effectively the same grammar, syntax, basic vocabulary (obviously expanded over the years), and pronunciation that’s varied in defined and limited ways. Dress Nikos Kazantzakis in a chiton, load him in your time machine, and plunk him down next to Aristotle or Homer, and while they’d probably think that he’s a hick from Thrace with a simply atrocious accent, they’d understand him, and he them. (Pick up on any Aussie/“Strine” joke here, or think of any Paul Hogan movie, as a parallel – the similarities and differences in speech are pretty much on the same lines.)
Aramaic before the Persian Empire was the language of a small confederacy of tribes in the Damascus area – it only flourished and became a lingua franca under the Persians and later the Romans, and declined with the spread of Hellenistic Greek. And it is preserved as a “living language” only in two widely divergent dialects spoken by only a few hundred each – though that does not rule it out.
Hebrew we can be certain of back to about 1000 BC – but has the interesting problem of not having been a spoken language for several hundred years – being preserved as a “sacred language” or a cultural legacy (take your pick; both can be argued and probably both are true). Dates prior to 1000 BC are speculative and depend heavily on how much credence you give Biblical accounts as history (this isn’t a religious discussion, but the quite separate question of who did what when prior to the Davidic monarchy – and the Book of Judges, which is episodic rather than strictly chronological in its narrative, is little help).
No European language is known to have preceded Roman times and have modern descendants that are organically the same, though cases can be made for Welsh and Irish on the basis of semi-validatable legend. Basque is a good question – there’s no doubt it survived in the western Pyrenees and their environs for a long, long time – but that it is the same thing as is documented by early Romans and Carthaginians as “Iberic” – much less the preceding Tartessian – is purely speculative.
According to the Indian census, there are about 1000 people who claim their primary language is Sanskrit – as with Irish and a number of other instances, this is a case of preservation of cultural heritage. But accepting that claim, you can get back to the Vedic writings and Upanishads, where dating is speculative (and someone with more expertise in early Indian history is welcome to address this in much more detail).
Intriguingly, Himyarite, or Sabaean, spoken in parts of Yemen, appears to be lineally descended from the tongue glancingly referenced in the Bible a few times, notably in connection with the visit of the Queen of Sheba. But even if that claim is accepted, it ties with Hebrew.
It would take several paragraphs and a lot of research to address the knotty question of the Iranic languages and what the connection between the ancient and modern ones is, but suffice it to say that Cyrus Pahlevi could not duplicate with his conquering namesake or with Zoroaster what we speculatively sent Nikos K. to do with Aristotle and Homer.
Nor did I intend to suggest that they could. I only brought up Lithuanian because it is in many ways archaic, and therefore might be interesting to someone who wants to know about old languages.
True, which is one thing that makes Lithuanian relevant here. We do know the phonology, morphology, and vocabulary of that language in great detail, and the rudiments of this knowledge are easily available to anyone who has access to the internet and can read English. And presumably other major European languages as well.
Point taken – but Lithuanian diverged from PIE in definite known ways, first as Proto-Balto-Slavic, then as Proto-Slavic, then Old Lithuanian, and finally the modern language. I grant its extreme conservatism (and throw Latvian into the mix as well; they’re only marginally less conservative) but it really doesn’t constitute a preserved population of almost-PIE speakers. (Though I was intrigued by a possibly-apocryphal account of someone carefully constructing valid sentences in Sanskrit that were understandable, if slightly ungrammatical, to a Lithuanian with no familiarity with Sanskrit – though the words had to be carefully chosen, along the lines of “Good butter and good cheese” --the famous short poem in good English and in good Frisian.
Thank you for your thoughtful and illuminating post, Polycarp.
What exactly do you mean by “as with Irish” here? Irish is, in fact, the native and primary language of thousands of people in the Gaeltacht areas.
True – but Irish is generally preserved and taught for “cultural treasure” reasons elsewhere in Ireland (and in the world – my wife took a course in Irish in upstate New York, simply because she wanted to learn it, though it’s hardly a language of colloquial discourse anywhere in the New World). Whether or not these people speak Sanskrit in their homes is irrelevant; the point is that they claim to have it as their primary language for much the same reasons as the Republic of Ireland fosters the teaching of Irish throughout the country, including areas in the Pale that have been almost exclusively English-speaking since the days of Edward IV, if not Strongbow.
That doesn’t make sense. The whole point of a identifying a primary language is that it’s the one they speak by default.
On the other hand, if you were to take a modern Italian and send him via time machine to ancient Rome, he’d probably be similarly understandable. Just because the name of the language happened to change from “Latin” to “Italian” (as it didn’t change for “Greek”) doesn’t mean that the language itself changed all that dramatically.
As another contender, I’ve heard that the Icelandic language has existed in essentially its modern form for centuries or millennia. Supposedly, an Islander can read the ancient epics in their original form as easily as he can the morning’s newspaper.
Aramaic is also a living language among the Assyrian Christians of northern Iraq. At least, it was a living language not too long ago – Saddam Hussein cracked down on it pretty hard. (The Akkadian language of the ancient Assyrians is long since extinct.) See [ur]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic.