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Language X is older than Y | ||
Tags: Age | Foreign Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| j0nas Triglot Groupie Norway Joined 5543 days ago 46 posts - 70 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English, German | Message 1 of 31 18 November 2012 at 1:31pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I often hear people say things like Lithuanian or Basque are very old languages. Or that
Mirandese is older than Portuguese. But somehow I feel it's wrong or at least very inaccurate to put it like that. Wouldn't "conservative" be a better word than just "old"? Any thoughts? 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5131 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 2 of 31 18 November 2012 at 3:10pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Why do you feel "conservative" is a better word? I'm certainly no historical linguist,
but when I think of older languages, particularly those that survive as a spoken language today, that's not a word I'd associate with them. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| j0nas Triglot Groupie Norway Joined 5543 days ago 46 posts - 70 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, German | Message 3 of 31 18 November 2012 at 4:06pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Because they have changed less.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 31 18 November 2012 at 4:11pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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It is debatable when a language was born - it will rarely happen overnight, and there may be not even be a clear point where you can say that its predecessor died and a newborn arose from the ashes like a Phoenix bird. With that parallel in mind I have to agree with j0nas: it s better to say that some languages are conservative in the sense that they tend to stay more or less the same for a very long time. Then we avoid the question about the precise moment where they were born, and we stress the tendency not to change.
The term 'old' rests upon a false analogy with humans, where there is a clear point of depart and an identity that can't be compromised by even the most radical changes in lifestyle. Edited by Iversen on 18 November 2012 at 4:24pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 31 18 November 2012 at 8:39pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
There's a bit of related discussion between three of us in "Popular misconceptions about languages". To reiterate I restrict using "old" when as it involves languages when comparing attestations or usage - i.e. specific examples that can be usefully analyzed or compared on a temporal scale. E.g. Hwæt! is the "old way" of expressing What! as deduced by examining Beowulf). Anything else I avoid because of the lack of precision and potential to make meaningless or dubious insinuation by conflating the senses of "old" (and "new/young" for that matter).
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| sipes23 Diglot Senior Member United States pluteopleno.com/wprs Joined 4871 days ago 134 posts - 235 votes Speaks: English*, Latin Studies: Spanish, Ancient Greek, Persian | Message 6 of 31 19 November 2012 at 1:27am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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The "old" thing drives me nuts—all modern languages are equally "old" if you count from the first development of
language (and even that is an assumption I make). I'm with JOnas on conservative, but with something like Basque that's not even quite right. The thing about Basque is that it doesn't seem like anything else near it—it's an isolate after all. That said, I can see the pride of place a lot of minority-language speakers might have on their language. "It's not as well known as English (or what have you), but it's old." It's also likely that most people never give this sort of thing a second thought. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4950 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 7 of 31 19 November 2012 at 3:21am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Interestingly, in terms of language age, there is the case of creole languages, which depending on which theory of their origin you subscribe to, you can argue one can assign a narrow set of dates as a marker on their birthdate (within 20 years even).
The predominant theory states that creoles are born from pidgins, when the first generation of children born from parents that spoke a pidgin to facilitate communitation adopt it as their native language. So one could assign the date of birth for that language creole to the period of birth of that first generation. While a pidgin is a very simplified for of communication, with a clearly more simple grammar and inflection than normal languages, the first generation that pick it up standarize the grammar and to a lesser extent the vocabulary and accent and convert the pidgin to a full-fledged language (not all scholars subscribe to this theory of origin of pidgins, but many do), and somehow this process brings complexity to the new language, to the point that creoles are just as complex as any other "evolutionary" language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5409 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 8 of 31 19 November 2012 at 12:13pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I can't see why "old(er)" shouldn't be used and replaced by "conservative". For me, these terms refer to two different things.
Ancient Egyptian began to be written around 3200 BC and died as a spoken language somewhere aroud 1100 AD. Should I refrain from saying that this language is older than French ? "Old" might not be a good term from a historical linguistic point of view but replacing it by "A is more/less conservative than B" doesn't make much sense to me. Edited by akkadboy on 19 November 2012 at 12:16pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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