Sorry, that’s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian.
Nitpick: Lithuanian is a Baltic language, not Slavic.
The OP really means: Which extant language has changed the least over time?
English is just as “old” as Basque. Basque just hasn’t been disected as much chronologically.
From my understanding, Finnish is a very conservative language. It has borrowed words from other languages (especially Scandinavian) and they tend to remain, unchanged, for a long time. Icelandic, similarly is very conservative and it is often said that Icelandic schoolchildren can read the Sagas fairly easily. Try that on Beowulf, somtime.
But there is no real way to answer this question since there are many different ways to measure “change” in a language.
:o I wanted to pick up on the Balto-Slavic connection – and then accidentally typed the wrong half of it!
You think? Seems to me Old English is so different from Modern English that it can’t be classed as the same language at all.
Do you have a sample of Basque from the year AD 900? 
It’s important to distinguish between the “oldness” of the Basque people (in that they have, as a genetic group, inhabitted their area of Europe for a very long time), and the oldness of the Basque language Actually, their territory was larger the farther back in time you go, but that’s not really important.
As such, the Basque language has “stayed put” for a long time, but it has certainly changed over time so that if you went back in time far enough, the language would not be intelligible to a modern speaker.
I’ll have to dig out my copy of Genes, Peoples, and Languages and see what ol’ LLC-S has to say about the Basque language.
Absent samples written in phonetic or near-phonetic alphabets, how do we know which languages have changed a lot over time and which haven’t? How, for instance, do we know that modern Lithuanian is so close ancient Lithuanian or to PIE? Points which posters above seem to treat as well established.
Is there any possible way to correlate genetic drift and linguistic drift? I ask in relation to the Basques and the Balts.
Lithuanian has a long literary tradition, for one. It also has related languages (some of which have an even older literary tradition) which allow us to reconstruct proto-languages and see which daughter languages are more similar to these reconstructed languages.
Much of the original Ind0-European language and grammar has been reconstructed in this way. When that is done, Lithuanian stands out as having remained closer to the original than other extant languages.
Basque is a language isolate, and lacking any written documents, we don’t have any way to reconstruct older versions back in time further than those written documents that do exist.
The question in the OP simply makes no sense. You might be able to find languages that had the same name as a modern language which existed a couple of thousand years ago, but the modern form and the ancient form of the language wouldn’t be mutually intelligible. There isn’t that much of a difference in the amount of change in languages over time. Any modern speaker of a language would find the precursor language 1000 years ago at least extremely hard to understand. Any modern speaker of a language would find the precursor language 2000 years ago unintelligible.
I remeber a PBS episode of Nova stating that Basque was not derived from Indo-European.
That’s right - it’s a language isolate. Wikipedia lists various others.
It’s an interesting thing to ponder. My point was that all existing languages are more or less timeless, all being theoretically traceable back in time to the dawn of human language. Your point is that all existing languages have “moved” so much in recent centuries that today’s tongues aren’t really the same “languages” they were 1000 years ago.
Due to the nature of language, we are both correct in a very real sense.
What do you mean by “correlate”? They are fairly similar in the way they change over time, except that languages change faster. But niether causes the other. The book I reference above, Genes, Peoples, and Languages, is an excellent study of both if you’re interested.
2000 years, probably, but 1000 years maybe not. The Icelandic sagas were written about 1000 years ago, some longer ago than that, and the language hasn’t changed that much (at least not in the written form).
We’d all have a very hard time understanding much of Beowulf in Old English (except maybe people who speak Icelandic, which is pretty closely related to Old English ), but English has a history very different from a lot of languages. English went thru a ***tremendous ***vocabulary change in the period after the Norman Invasion (1066), as French words flooded into the language. English is NOT a very good example to use of how a typical language has changed in the last 1000 years.
Or not. What does that even mean? English stems from a language spoken in the Neolithic. Does that mean we’re speaking a Neolithic language? Languages change, and they all change at the same rate over enough time, and the dividing lines between languages are arbitrary. But Basque has, within historic times, evolved from Aquitanian. So it certainly hasn’t remained unaltered. No language survives that would be comprehensible to anyone a couple thousand years ago. No language is older than any other - their birthdays are arbitrary and none of them is much like anything spoken long ago.
And what’s the commonly-spoken “Basque is Neolithic” claim supposed to mean, anyhow? Remember, any extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof, and Basque just happens to get saddled with a lot of extraordinary claims. This goes in the dustbin with all the claims that Basque is related to Dravidian, or the Native American languages, or is actually the original Adamic language, or whatever else people go around saying about it.
It’s interesting to note that many of the languages mentioned in this thread are from countries/regions with strong nationalistic movements. I’m not saying that Basque isn’t old - it clearly is.
But the thing is that you find what you’re looking for. The incentive to find the roots of a language might be a lot bigger, if you’re going to use that fact as an argument in favor of said nationalistic movement. AFAIK there’s no strong nationalistic tendencies in Morocco, which is a mess of different languages and ethnic groups. What about Berber or Maghreb? Is anyone interested? Has there been research?
Not so with Hebrew - the 2000(+) year old Old testament is quite easily readable by Israeli school-children. Probably more, but we know for a fact that the Old Testament was “sealed” sometime during the 1[sup]st[/sup] century CE and not a letter has been changed since.
Of course, the fact that Hebrew was not used as a spoken language for most of that time and was revived based in large amount upon the Old Testament may have something to do with this… Still, the fact remains that I (and my children) can read Genesis and Ezekiel in a 2000-year-old form.
Dani
Wouldn’t an African language be older than any European one? I’m thinking of the language that has the clicks in it, for example.