Which language has changed the least in the greatest amount of time, AND remained a living one while doing so?
There's a lot of talk about languages dying out, but are there new ones being born? If so, what is the youngest language?
I'm a native speaker of Serbian, and I've heard people claiming it to be the closest living thing there is to the primordial Indo-Europian language. Could this be true?So far, I’m getting cites for the following:
Welsh
Basque
Mandarin Chinese
Tamil (and possibly Sanskrit, though I don’t think it counts as “living”)
Arabic
as well as Serbian, or Serbo-Croatian.
It looks like there’s a lot of disagreement between linguists as far as how to classify, the oldest living language.
As far as languages that have changed the least I keep getting cites for:
Lithuanian
Icelandic
Min Chinese
If you want the cites (there’s a ton of them) let me know, and I’ll link you. Someone may be along who’s more versed in this subject than I am, as I’m a linguistic dilettante.
It depends on how you define a language, www.dictionary.com offers this definition:
From that definition it occurs to me that body language would be the oldest and perhaps least changed, of course it is impossible to date when body language started to be used to communicate but it is safe to say it was a very long time ago.
Working on the written symbols path I think the Mesopotamian clay tablets from the temple of Uruk date to around 3200 B.C. though there is a challenge from the Egyptologists that the labels found in tomb U-j predate the clay tablets. It’s hard to say which came first as carbon dating has a sizable margin of error when dealing with the distant past.
I presume that when you posted this question you were thinking more along the lines of the spoken word but I thought I would throw in my two-penneth on other forms of language all the same 
The question makes no sense. Here’s one of the previous threads where we discussed this subject:
There are no “oldest” living languages. There are languages which are the “most conservative”.
Among the Austronesian languages, the most conservative are the ones in Taiwan and those in the Philippines, from what I understand. These languages all preserve, for instance, a certain verbal infix -um-, which is functional and productive in the Taiwanese and Philippine languages, but has become lost or fossilized in the Polynesian languages (which would be considered the least conservative, as they’ve lost a lot of the morphology and workings that proto-Austrnesian had)
For newest language –
Everywhere two populations with different languages start interacting, a pidgin is born. As soon as the next generation of children reach speaking age they turn the pidgin into a creole, which is considered to be a genuine language with rules of grammar and all.
So there are probably dozens of languages being born around the world right now.
I don’t know why anyone would claim this, as there just isn’t much evidence. There’s little known about earlier forms of Basque; I believe a few inscriptions survive from its predecessor, Aquitanian, but not enough to develop much understanding of how the language was spoken.
Definitely not. Mandarin is probably one of the least conservative Chinese languages - it’s lost many initial and final consonants, and its tone system is probably one of the simplest amongst the Chinese languages, which has caused it to develop into a language composed of largely multisyllabic words, which is a major change from the other Chinese languages. It’s very, very different from Middle or Old Chinese.
Again, no dice. Classical Arabic is still taught as a standard form, especially for written or formal communications, based upon the form used in the Quran. Nevertheless, modern Arabic differs greatly from country to country, to the point that many forms are not intelligible with other ones. It’s a political or cultural definition that considers them identical, not a linguistic one.
Lithuanian does preserve many features of Proto-Indo-European that are now lost in other Indo-European languages, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s some sort of living fossil. It’s very easy for a language to preserve some archaic features while losing others. For instance, returning to Chinese, the Wu dialects preserve voiced initial consonants, which existed in Middle Chinese but don’t exist in other modern Chinese languages (and their loss led to major changes in the languages’ tone systems). However, they also possess far fewer final consonants, and Shanghainese, which is one of the Wu dialects, hardly even has a tone system anymore. So even if a language preserves features that don’t exist in its sisters, it’s not necessarily any more archaic.
I’ve heard that modern Icelandic is fairly intelligible with the language of the Icelandic Sagas, which is interesting, and demonstrates that Icelandic has made an effort to use native word forms rather than the Latin/Greek roots that underlie new words in many other European languages. However, Icelandic only goes back about a thousand years, which isn’t really all that long.
As Wendell says, it’s not really a meaningful question. What gets defined as a language is generally a cultural decision. Thus, Basque is listed because it appears to be a single language spoken by a single culture for a long time. But it may have changed to an enormous degree since Roman times, and we just don’t know how much intelligibility exists with earlier forms. The Basque of today may be very different than that spoken a thousand years ago. If that’s the case, then it doesn’t really count. Languages develop in such a way that there’s no clear dividing line between adjacent languages in many cases, and no way to decide when a language has changed sufficiently that it is now an offspring of its mother language rather than a later form of it.
The Indo-European languages have existed for thousands of years; they are really all the same age, since they all descended from Proto-Indo-European. How can we decide when one dialect of it stopped being Proto-Indo-European and started being Greek, or Albanian, or Proto-Germanic? We can’t. And they’re all very different from the original language.
It’s a question that doesn’t really have an answer, then. All languages change over time, and there’s just no meaningful answer because (1) we don’t know the in depth history of most languages for a long enough period, and (2) it requires decisions about what constitutes enough change that it’s a different language. That latter question really is unanswerable, and the complications become apparent if you learn about historical linguistics.
Languages (except in the case of artifically constructed languages such as Esperanto) aren’t born, they evolve. It is not possible to say exactly when a new language has formed from an old one.
When a dialect or useage variant becomes mutually untelligible than another from the same mother language, we might consider them discrete. But Norwegian, Danish and Swedish are listed as separate languages, though they are mutually intelligible at a basic level.
In terms of “ancient” languages: some linguists describe Italian and Spanish as “modern Latin”. They are certainly closer to (original) Latin than modern English is to Old English/Ango Saxon (which is completely unintelligible to a modern English speaker).
There was some bizarre attempt to write a poem in proto-Indo-European, IIRC the guy used Lithuanian for much of the vocab and/or verb forms.
Latin might qualify. It’s been continuiously used since roughly 600 B.C., either as a spoken language or in the Church. In fact, I used Latin today to swear at people 
istara, could you post this poem if you find it? It wouldn’t make much sense to rely on Lithuanian, when Proto-Indo-European vocabulary and verb forms have been reconstructed. Lithuanian is just one piece of the puzzle.
August Schleicher wrote a little animal fable in the version of Proto-Indo-European that existed in his day, the 1860s. It relied very heavily on Sanskrit models. In part this was because there hadn’t yet been sufficient data on Indo-European obtained yet for a more accurate reconstruction. The existence of Hittite, for example, was still unknown. So Schleicher relied more on Sanskrit, perhaps for the reason that they suspected the Vedas of being older than literature in any other Indo-European language.
In any case, this certainly is erroneous. All of the Slavic languages have diverged from the original. Serbian happens to be one of the languages that has changed quite a bit. Church Slavonic, which was never really a spoken language, is probably closest to the original proto-Slavic, with Old Church Slavonic being even closer. Of the modern spoken languages, Russian is fairly conservative all-around, and even preserves the jat’ in some dialects; Polish still retains the nasal vowels of Old Slavonic; Bulgarian still preserves ъ as a vowel; Ukrainian still pronounces г as a fricative; Serbian and Slovenian still preserve the ancient pitch accent in some dialects; and so on. None of them are really any closer than the others to proto-Indo-European.
Greek was spoken earlier, but I suppose it would depend on if you considered ancient and modern Greek to be the same language. Certainly archaic Latin was rather different from classical Latin, which is again very different from the modern Romance languages.
Do the same sort of changes tend to happen over and over to languages? I get the impression that a lot of languages in the Indo-European group have simplifies their verb conjugations, cases, noun declensions, etc, and moved the complexity into prepositions and a less flexible word order. Are there cases where languages have evolved in the opposite direction?
Yes, according to Introduction to Typology by Lindsay J. Whaley (page 138). There seems to be a cycle where isolating languages (those without inflection) tend to move to cases where words are merged (so that, for instance, prepositions or postpositions become part of the nouns). These tend to get worn down to where they are interpreted as prefixes or suffixes. Eventually, new function words (like prepositions or postpositions) are generated, so the old inflections start to disappear and the language moves back to being isolating again. This sort of cycle can take thousands of years.
I would go with a language based on changing pitches (oriental) or clicks and pops (san [bushman]). These seem to me to resonate with the proto-speech of early humans.
It also seems to me that Australian Aboriginal would have a direct line to the language of the first wave of humans out of Africa.
This does not necessarily fit the OP as they have been around so long that they surely have changed considerably.
My $.02
rwj
How conservative is Hebrew? Is it in a situation similar to Arabic, where there’s a classical form that everyone knows and variations?
I’ve heard (sorry, no cite) that the Aborigines have the world’s oldest continuously maintained culture. Would that also mean that they have the oldest continuously maintained language?
There isn’t any scientific evidence to support any of those hypotheses. This is GQ, and it really doesn’t help posting absolute nonsense like that in this forum. We don’t know one thing about “proto-speech” and what would “resonate” with it. There is some genetic evidence that that !Kung/San (bushmen) of South Africa have preserved some of the oldest genetic material of Modern Humans, but that says *nada *about their language.
Having said that, the OP has no factual answer. Icelandic has a fairly long literary tradition (well over 1000 years) and the language hasn’t changed much since then. Finnish is also a very conservative language.
As someone else has noted, there have been a few threads about this exact subject in the last year or so. There just isn’t a factual answer to this question.
Yes – Hebrew had pretty much died out as a spoken, living language until it was revived by Zionists in the 19th century. The modern pronunciation bears little resemblance to the original – Hebrew originally had most of the full complement of Semitic gutteral consonants, which are today only preserved by the Yemenite Jews (and, if my coworker is to be believed, a few Sephardim as well).
Not necessarily. The Pama-Nyungan languages are spread over most of Australia, which would indicate a relatively recent expansion, possibly displacing older languages. A better candidate would be the languages of the New Guinea highlands, where each linguistic group has its own little valley. But even linguistic continuity doesn’t mean lack of change. The Sardinian languages are without a doubt the most conservative of the Romance languages, but they are far from being mutually comprehensible with Latin.
Language features come and go; some feature disappear or become simplified, while others will develop to serve purposes that didn’t exist before. Look at, for instance, the grammatical forms that distinguish between formal and informal uses in the Romance languages. These didn’t exist in Latin, but were developed in each of the Romance languages during medieval times, although now they’re disappearing again (particularly in Brazilian Portuguese.) Or, for another example taken from Chinese: Middle Chinese had four tones, but it had an entire series of consonants missing from most of the modern Chinese languages. When these voiced consonants merged with their unvoiced counterparts, the number of tones doubled - though the tone system simplified again in most (all?) of the modern Chinese languages.
We discussed the Khoe languages (the ones with clicks) a bit in the other thread. They are, for the most part, a unique feature of that group of languages, along with a few Bantu languages that picked them up through contact. But as much as they seem to amaze people, and although they do probably draw back to the oldest language in that particular phylum, there’s nothing that suggests that they are somehow “older” than any other language. “These seem to me to resonate with the proto-speech of early humans” is, you realize, a completely meaningless phrase. Particularly since you don’t know anything about the “proto-speech of early humans.” Are you saying that clicks and tones seem “primitive” to you? Would you like to try to debate that point?
As for tonal languages (which are not only Asian; many, many languages in Africa, as well as various other parts of the world, also use tones) I’ve mentioned in this thread some of the changes that have occured in Mandarin. Tonal languages are not somehow magically insulated from the passage of time - they change just as any other language does. The history of the Chinese language is particularly well-documented, since China has possessed writing for a long time, but of course the characters obscure phonetic changes. Nevertheless, rhyming dictionaries have been found dating back well over a thousand years, along with discussions on how ancient poems no longer sounded good after language change had occured. Tones are just another phonetic feature, and they spread through language contact into many of the unrelated languages in the region. Languages have picked up or dropped tone distinctions, and the actual contours of the different tones actually seem to be one of the most changeable features amongst the Chinese languages, differing tremendously between different areas. Where you draw the line is arbitrary, but there’s no standard that would hold Middle Chinese to be the same language as any of the modern Chinese languages, and that was spoken as recently as 1,100 years or so ago. So there’s nothing ancient at all about the Chinese languages, and the same could be said of any of the languages of Asia.
And this line reveals the fundamental problem with the question. All languages have a direct line to whatever people spoke when they left Africa. There’s nothing mystical about the Australian Aboriginal languages - the Aborigines did not spend 40,000 years trapped in a mysterious slumber only to awake when Westerners visited. They had their own cultures and societies, and during that time their languages changed just as much as anyone else’s. Languages split apart, and languages died, just as in every other part of the world. All languages extend directly back to the dawn of language - just as everyone’s family tree extends right back to the beginning of humanity. The only languages that don’t change are dead.
There seems to be some fundamental lack of comprehension that I just can’t understand here. We’re all speaking languages that had their roots thousands upon thousands of years ago. English descends from various Germanic dialects carried into Britain by tribes from Continental Europe a millennium and a half ago. Those languages descended from the single ancestor of all the Germanic languages, spoken by the first Germanic tribe. That language, and its sisters - proto-Italic, proto-Celtic, Hellenic, proto-Indo-Aryan, Proto-Slavic, and so forth - all descend from Proto-Indo-European. We don’t know where that came from, but the point is that we’re all speaking PIE right now, just a heavily-modified form that exists alongside other heavily-modified forms. But English, as a language, exists in an unbroken line that extends into the Stone Age. There was no point in which parents and children could not communicate. At every stage, they would have felt themselves to be speaking the same language as previous generations, and of later generations. Language change is slow but inexorable, and the dividing lines between languages are in many ways our own invention; they don’t always reflect anything about the languages themselves.
It just makes no sense to declare one language “older” and one “younger” - except to some extent in the exceptional case of Hebrew, no one alive today shares a native language with anyone alive two thousand years ago. All languages have changed drastically, and yet every language extends in an unbroken line back to the dawn of language (yes, I tend to believe that there was once a Proto-World language, though it will never be reconstructed.) There’s nothing that makes English younger than Basque or San or Minhua or Dyirbal - none of the languages were developed out of whole cloth; they all are just modifications of earlier languages.
Maybe it’s some fundamental linguistic ignorance on may part – in which case please help stomp out my personal ignorance – but I’m not sure why the original OP is so meaningless. While I agree the title is simplified, I don’t quite understand why the actual sentence
is meaningless. I mean, yes, there’s no clear line when a language was ‘born’, but surely some languages have changed more than others?
Difficult or impossible to answer with current data, yes I can see that. We don’t really know how anything was pronounced more than a century ago.
But I see ‘we don’t have enough data to answer that’ as different from ‘that question makes no sense’.
Unless Excalibre and others are saying that, even if we had a time machine to find out exactly how each language has changed, deciding which of two languages has changed more is inherently subjective, because of the different ways languages can changed. Therefore if language A conserved cases but radically changed vowel sounds and vocabulary, while language B conserved vowel sounds but dropped many cases, it’s only personal opinion as to which one has changed ‘more’. I suppose that makes sense, but in that case a better answer might be “The question is interesting… here’s some possible answers and why you might argue for each one”.
And as an aside, Wendell (or others), can you think of an example in English where a preposition is being absorbed into a word as a proto-inflection?