What is the oldest Existent Language?

Factual Questions
41

Er, no.

Having studied both Modern and classical Greek, I can tell you that aside from a shared alphabet, they’re quite different. Yes, knowing one helps in learning the other, but there’s more than a few very laughable jokes about the classical studies professor attempting to get along in modern-day Greece speaking classical Greek and being thoroughly misunderstood. Hell, classical Greek versus biblical Greek versus Homeric Greek are very different - if I recall correctly when I moved from classical Greek to Homeric Greek I had to purchase a dictionary specific to Homeric Greek.

Not to mention, of course, that we know very little about how classical Greek sounded, so any attempt to make statements based on its spoken similiarity to modern Greek can be at best hypothesis.

42

Well, there’s a sense in which the thread-title question makes no sense – all languages are equally old, in that they descend from languages that descend from languages that…

As I understood the question, though, it was asking, by inference, what extant language is known to have the oldest ancestry. It’s quite possible that Itelmen or Nambicuara or Ewe is older than anything else, in terms of having preserved speech forms that would be understandable by people in the past – but there’s no proof that that’s true. For all practical purposes, that moots the question for about 80% of the world’s languages.

To address the remark about Latin and Italian as opposed to Ancient and Modern Greek, there is a distinct difference. Latin had a grammar and speech forms and even phonemes that are not preserved in Italian; Attic Classical Greek bears the same relation to modern Dhimotika Greek. But alongside Dhimotika is Katharevousa, the formal “It is I/If thou beest whom thou sayest” form of Greek, known to every Greek-speaker who’s attended even primary school. And that effectively preserves one dialect of Ancient Greek as a cultural artifact that is also the “high speech” known to most Greeks. So Greek can claim historical intelligibility across two and a half millennia – which only Hebrew and Sanskrit can lay parallel claims to, and both highly debatable for one reason or another.

I don’t believe there is another language (except Hebrew) that predates the Iliad’s composition that can claim speakers who both use it as their native tongue and can understand the language as it was spoken and written that far back. I’ve been trying to run through ancient civilizations in my head and match languages to cultures, and I cannot come up with any.

There is, however, one dark horse in the race – Brahui. The script used by the Indus Valley Civilization, and therefore the language spoken by them, is not known. But since it predates the Indo-Aryan invasions, it’s highly likely to have been a Dravidian tongue. And Brahui, the surviving Dravidian tongue in what is now Pakistan, is in the right time and place to be the descendant of the Mohenjo-Daro tongue. However, until a Rosetta Stone puts in an appearance to give the decipherment of the Mohenjo-Daro script and what its characters represent phonemically, the Brahui connection can only be a bit of unsupported speculation.

43

Don’t leave out Tamil when it’s a question of continuity of intelligibility over long periods of time. Tamil texts dated to the 1st century B.C. can still be read and understood by modern literate Tamil speakers. Sure, spoken Tamil has changed over the past two millennia, but alongside the spoken (demotic, if you will) dialects, literary Tamil is still used in everyday life. This is called diglossia.

It’s also true of Arabic. Similarly to Tamil, Arabic texts dated to the 6th century can be read by anyone who can understand Modern Standard Arabic. As with Tamil, the demotic dialects are used for ordinary conversation, even by educated people, but for writing and making speeches, the formal register is language that would be intelligible to someone visiting in a time machine from 1500 years ago. In Tamil, the intelligible time depth is known to reach at least 2200 years back.

Ancient Arabic pronunciation has been kept current all this time by study and oral recitation of the Qur’an. This has preserved the pronunciation of 1400 years ago, which is still used for Modern Standard Arabic, a living language. The pronunciation of Tamil has definitely changed over the last 2000 years, though I’m not sure how much modern standard Tamil pronunciation differs from ancient Tamil pronunciation. Probably not enough to completely destroy intelligibilty, if an ancient Tamilian were to time-travel to the present, but certainly enough to impair intelligibility.

Modern Greek did have comparable diglossia until a few years ago, when the government abolished Katharevousa. Even when they still used Katharevousa (which was an invention of 19th-century Greek nationalists, by the way), they used Modern Greek pronunciation for it. It’s often warned that we don’t know exactly how ancient Greek was pronounced. Well, we do have a pretty good idea of it with reasonable certainty, based on evidence from that time, such as transcription of Greek words into Latin, and other comparative linguistics. We do know for a fact that Greek pronunciation has changed so much over the past 2400 years that Aristotle would have at best a very, very difficult time understanding a speaker of modern Katharevousa. Classical Greek had 14 different vowels and diphthongs: [symbol]a, e, h, i, o, u, w, ai, au, ei, eu, oi, ou, ui[/symbol]. Modern Greek pronunciation has collapsed these into only 5 vowel sounds: /a/, /[symbol]e[/symbol]/, /i/, /o/, /u/. The two surviving diphthongs [symbol]au[/symbol] and [symbol]eu[/symbol] are now pronounced as vowel-consonant combinations av~af and ev~ef. I mean, this would sound like a foreign language to Aristotle’s ears.

Taking all things into consideration, one could make a strong case for Tamil being the longest-enduring living language that is still used pretty much the way it was in ancient times. So with all the linguistic caveats noted by Dopers in this thread (that the question was badly formed and is now reformulated ), I propose Tamil as the “answer” to the OP.

44

The Khoisan language family is what you’re thinking of. I have seen it hypothesized that these “click” languages might be living links to the oldest language, and that all other languages lost the “clicks” over time. But that’s mainly based on the the genetic evidence of the speakers of some of those languages rather than on the languages themselves.

But if you take the Out of Aftica theory of human evolution to be true, then it would indeed seem to make sense that the oldes language is an African language. But then, the OoA theory would also imply that ALL languages are decendents of that oldest languange and are equally eligible to be called the “oldest” language.

45

I would be impressed that this thread is still running. I am however still on vacation and so I refuse to be impressed.

A few more precious days.

46

Possible links between a neolithic culture and modern Basque society–

http://www.evertype.com/misc/basque-jies/basque-jies.html

Includes references to religious words/names.
More links

http://www.buber.net/Basque/Euskara/lang.lt.html

http://www.fikas.no/~sprocket/snpa/chapter-XI17.htm

A Basque-English word list

http://www.buber.net/Basque/Euskara/hitz.html

47

O.K., there are a couple of exceptions to the generalization that languages change at the same rate. One is a case like Hebrew. It disappeared as a first language for children about 2000 years ago. That is, it ceased to be the language that children learned to speak when they learned to talk. It continued as the language used by some adults to be able to read the Hebrew scriptures. I presume that there was some new writing in Hebrew by adults. It was revived in the 20th century and taught to children by adults. Consequently it is little different from the way it was 2000 years ago. I believe this to be the only true example of a revived language. This doesn’t prove that a language can go a long time without changing. It just proves that it’s possible to put a language in suspended animation if it’s only learned by adults.

Second, there are cases like classical Greek. Modern Greek is quite different. In so far as Greek children can read classical Greek, it’s because they are taught to use it in school. I believe this to also be the case for Koranic Arabic or Tamil (used in some religious texts) or Latin, for example. What happens is that a particular stage of the language is preserved. The ordinary conversational version of the language continues to change, but a classical version of the language is put in suspended animation. Notice that both cases of this require that there be religious texts of the language which make it important that many people learn the suspended version of the language.

48

I may be misunderstanding you, but it seems that you are trying to claim that the vast majority of languages change at roughly the same rate. If so, do have a cite? I don’t know whether linguists consider there to be a standard rate of change for languages, but it just seems like the factors that would dirve change in a language (number of speakers, migration/immigration, geographic proximity to other language communities, whether there is a standardized written form, etc) vary quite a bit, and so I’d expect the rate of change to vary as well.

49

Wendell Wagner, it’s true what you said about the religious texts in Qur’anic Arabic preserving the earlier form of the language — but note that Modern Standard Arabic, an updated continuation of Classical Arabic, is not just a dusty literary language but is still spoken as an everyday living language, though only used in certain registers.

However, what you said doesn’t apply to Tamil, because the religious scriptures and liturgies used in Tamil country for the last 2000 years have all been in Sanskrit. It is only within the past century or so that Tamil linguistic nationalists have urged replacing Sanskrit with Tamil as a religious language. But during the 1900+ years prior to that movement (still only partially successful), Tamil was not used as a religious language at all. Nevertheless it has resisted change enough that Tamil texts from 2100 years ago are still intelligible to modern readers in a way that Beowulf or Cicero aren’t. This is the reason for my nominating Tamil as the living language that has maintained the oldest, strongest connectivity with its ancient form. Hebrew goes back even further, of course, but its having been revived after being dead is a break in continuity.

It ought to be clear by now that it’s meaningless to anoint any language as “the oldest;” my nomination of Tamil is hedged about with all these qualifications and caveats.

What about Lithuanian? Hard to evaluate. Written Lithuanian texts don’t go back all that far. The oldest known text is dated to 1545. Lithuanian only began to be written down then under the influence of Lutheranism. There are orally preserved folk songs (liaudies dainos) with mythological content that apparently go back to pre-Christian antiquity, although they are undatable. But since Lithuanian inflections are comparable to older stages in Indo-European languages represented by Latin, Classical Greek, and Sanskrit, it is very tempting to speculate that modern Lithuanian could still be mutually intelligible with its ancestor of 2000 or more years ago. This could very well be true, but we don’t have the evidence to either confirm or refute it.

50

Yes, that’s what I’m saying, that languages all tend to change at about the same rate. That’s what makes lexicostatistical glottochronology possible. Look up the work of Morris Swadesh and Robert Lees on glottochronology. They say that, for instance, the number of words that change over a period of time for a given set of 100 concepts (the Swadesh-Lee list) tends to be about the same. (Here to say that a new word has taken the place of the old one means that the new one is not just a cognate of the old one.) They use this technique to measure the time distance between languages.

51

The oldest writings are in Hebrew. That is the first language, I believe.

52

The oldest writings aren’t in Hebrew, and anyway, even if they were, it wouldn’t make it the oldest language (assuming there could be an “oldest” language, that is), only the oldest written language.

53

The oldest writings are in Sumerian.

54

The argument supporting that that I’ve run into is some notion that clicks couldn’t develop in language - they can disappear from a language, but they don’t appear anew. (Which poses some problems with Zulu, in that it’s unrelated but has picked up clicks from neighboring Khoisan languages over time. There’s also a ritual language used somewhere in Australia that features click phonemes, but I forget what it’s called.)

But even assuming there’s something ‘special’ about clicks (which has not been proven - hell, the meaning of the claim hasn’t even been explained in a reasonable way) that’s not to say that the Khoisan languages are any closer to the (hypothetical) Proto-World language; if Proto-World and the Khoisan family both employ clicks, it’s one particular phonological feature that hasn’t changed, which says nothing about whether there are any other meaningful similarities.

The Evertype link doesn’t load for me. But yes, there’s quite possibly meaningful evidence that the Basques have stayed in the same spot for thousands upon thousands of years. (That’s the gist of most everything I’ve read, but I’m not versed enough in archaeology to make any claims that it’s true.) That doesn’t mean they’re still speaking the same language.

Sure, the Basques are very much a distinct ethnic group (no one was arguing that) but that seems to be the only claim your links have put forward. I don’t understand why you assume that means their language is somehow “ancient” - how does that demonstrate that they still speak the same way they did in the Neolithic period? And Basque is an extremely poor candidate since so few records of it exist prior to fairly recent history; the Basques themselves didn’t write until modern times, and so not much is known about the evolution of the language. What survives of Aquitanian is mostly names and place-names, and only a few at that - so it’s a stretch (to put it mildly) to conclude that the Aquitanian of Roman times - much less the “proto-Basque” we assume to have been spoken in the Stone Age - is identical to modern Basque.

If you claim Basque is a “Neolithic language” I assume you’re suggesting that Basque, as spoken today (minus, presumably, the large number of loanwords relating to modern technological conveniences and the like) is somehow quite similar to Basque as spoken thousands of years ago. And none of your links seem to even suggest that. Now, for a language to freeze in time this way for thousands of years would be truly exceptional - no language ever studied has done that, and Basque, with it’s diminutive corpus until the modern times, is an unlikely candidate to provide evidence.

The odd romanticism of Basque is probably more interesting than the language itself, which is one of quite a large number of language isolates, and has a fairly ordinary grammatical structure except when compared only to its immediate neighbors. True, the Basques may well have stayed in the same place since Cro-Magnon first wandered off the savannah, but that doesn’t mean, or even suggest, that their language is identical. (And seriously - we’re all neolithic to the same degree. All humans are descended from the same common ancestors, so the only remarkable thing about the Basques is they don’t seem to have moved around much. That’s not particularly amazing to me, at least.)

No language survives for incredible lengths of time unaltered. Surely a speaker of Modern Hebrew can step in and point this out - I don’t speak a word of it myself, but my layman’s understanding is that it’s quite different from Biblical Hebrew, with (obviously) an incredible number of new words invented as well as some simplification of its grammar.

55

No. The number of new words is relatively small (and mostly transliterated from English rather than invented out of whole cloth in some sort of mock-Hebrew), and the grammatical rules, while containing fewer exceptions than you’d find in Biblical verses (hence the simplification), are based on Biblical grammatical rules. Any modern Hebrew speaker will have little trouble with understanding the Bible, and any Yeshiva student will make out quite well with modern Hebrew.

56

Modern Hebrew also has a stratum of Arabic loanwords that entered Hebrew in the Middle Ages.

57

GOOGLE came up with this:
Ask a Linquist FAQ

58

For any language to survive for that long requires the speakers to be physically or culturally isolated, or both. The Basques were both, for ages. Therefore, given that, & the lack of similar languages in the same geographical area, we may say they are a good bet.

And I did not claim it was an unchanged language. I merely claimed it might be closely connected to a Neolithic language.

59

Bravo. Well said.

60

But what does that mean: “closely connected”? In what way would Basque be more closely connected than English? English can be considered a hodgepodge of Germanic and Romance languages, but both of those language sources could be considered “closely connected” to Neolithic languages.