You are correct-- that part of the OP is not meaningless in the same sense as “which is the oldest language”. The problem is, most languages weren’t written down until very recently, and so we have no way of knowing how they changed over time. How are you going to decide if (for example) Spanish has undergone more changes in the last 1500 years than has some dialect of Apache or one of the languages spoken in Australia? It just can’t be done.
A more reasonable, but still very difficult, question might be: Of the Indo-European languages, which one is the most conservative wrt vocabulary and grammar. It would appear that Lithuanian would be a good candidate, but it’s still very difficult to be certain. Even among the I-E languages, we have much more info about how some languages have changed over time than we do about others.
Let’s try to make the thread-title question meaningful, then.
How about this: What language is it that, if one had a time machine and was fluent in it, one could go the farthest back in time and still speak with its speakers with substantial mutual intelligibility? Needless to say, this imposes all sorts of implicit exclusions on the question. We don’t know what Evenki or Tsongan was like in 1000 AD. We can only make assumptions about what Cherkess or Latvian sounded like at point X. But in defense of my proposed question, it now becomes something that has a meaningful answer. If Diogenes and St. Barnabas could sit down and have a meaningful discussion in katharevousa/koiné, then Greek is a legitimate candidate. If Pope Shenouda and Cleopatra could together do a cost-benefit analysis of the Nile floods, then so is Egyptian/Coptic. If Zev and Ezra could chant kaddish together and know what each other was saying, and then discuss the differences in their understandings of what it means to be Jewish, then Hebrew enters the picture. And so on.
Poly: We know* that an Icelandic speaker could converse with Eric the Red or his son Leif. We also know that you or I could NOT go back to England in 1000 AD and converse with someone beyond the rudimentary level. I’m not certain what the case would be for a Finnish or Lithuanian speaker-- while those languages are known to be relatively conservative, I don’t know how much we know about them from 1000 years ago.
I don’t think you can count Hebrew, since it’s a resurrected language. We certainly could resurrect Latin in a community if we wanted and those speakers could travel back in time and communicate with Julius Ceasar. In fact there are probably thousands of people who speak Latin ewll enough today to do so-- they just don’t all live in the same country.
> We know* that an Icelandic speaker could converse with Eric the Red or his son
> Leif.
You know, I’ve heard this claim before. What’s the evidence for it? Excuse my scepticism, but I’ve heard similar claims for their being little change in some languages where in fact there was a fair amount of change.
Was riding in the car last weekend and the girlgriends kids started talking in gibberest. Goobley google gobble, zippity za da so and such. We had a ten minute conversation that made no sense, but one that everyone understood.
We have the Icelandic sagas, which were written down between 1190 and 1320 AD, so we can compare the written language over a long period of time. Any literate Icelander can read the early sagas without much trouble.
You know, that is exactly how I was going to suggest re-phrasing the question. Except, that I’d add “if one was speaking a native language now…” to avoid “dead” languages. Adding that caveat, and then Icelandic wins. Without that, then perhaps Church Latin or Classical Greek- and Hebrew too.
Note that I would guess that a speaker of “Modern” Icelandic would have a strange accent (not to mention lots of new words and slang), but yes, as far as the experts can tell, you’d be able to make yourself clearly understood. Internal rythms can give us a hint how things were pronounced, and they think Icelandic isn’t very far from Norse/“Viking”.
Do note that “Church latin”- (what most now speak) is thought by most experts to have a very different pronunciation than the Latin spoke around Rome in the time of Caesar. But you could write him a note, and he* could read it, for sure.
*oddly enough- most Latin Literates of the time would almost be considered “semi-literate”. Latin (before Julius) was written without any punctuation, and most non-scribes of the time would have to puzzle their way through a missive once slowly before being able to read and understand it. Julius was known for his almost (for that time period) amazing abilty to read a letter “at one go”.
