Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority languages)

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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby Sizen » Sat May 29, 2021 5:27 pm

In this thread I'm seeing two broad definitions of the words old and age, as well as two further subdivisions of one of those definitions, and I think they're causing lots of issues.
rdearman wrote:Really, so all of these languages are the same age?

Arabic, Kʼicheʼ Maya, Esperanto, Toki Pona, Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek, English, Sumerian, Archaic Chinese, Hittite, Afrikaans, Lingala, Klingon?

(1) The first is the one seen above. Let's take an example like Ancient Greek, whose modern descendant is Modern Greek (Let's ignore that there were multiple Ancient Greeks and that Modern Greek isn't a monolith either). It is pretty self-evident that Ancient Greek precedes Greek. That's the whole point of drawing out a language's history and giving different periods different names: we want to establish the evolution of the language and show that different forms of the language, marked by different features or lexical inventories, etc, preceded other forms. In this sense, we can say that Ancient Greek is "older" than Modern Greek because Ancient Greek comes before Greek on the timeline by definition.

Can we use this definition when comparing unrelated languages? Sort of. As long as we understand that the dates given for when a language existed are somewhat arbitrary* and can be the subject of scholarly debate. If we limit ourselves to the dates laid out by scholars, we can confidently claim that Ancient Egyptian precedes Modern Japanese, so in that sense, we can say that Ancient Egyptian is older than Modern Japanese. However, when the dates are very close, hotly debated or simply unknown, it starts to not make sense to use this definition. Either language could be older than the other for all we know. We don't have a clear timeline!

*It is ultimately impossible to give concrete dates for when one language turned into another as languages don't tend to change completely over night. This is not to say that there is not merit to the dates given by linguists, just that the dates are more useful as a general indication as to when certain changes that are deemed important to the classification of older forms of a languages were starting, already taking place, or finishing.

(2) The second meaning of old and age becomes more obvious if we ask a different question. Out of Ancient Greek and Modern Greek, which language has a history that extends further into the past than the other? There seem to be two ways of tackling this question in this thread. The first (2a) is to say that both extend into the past equally far, making the two languages equally "old." The logic being that while the two languages weren't contemporaneous, they are still on a shared continuum of evolution and therefore share a history.

The other approach (2b) to answering the above question is similar to (2a), but certain factors can bring us to break up the timeline of a language. If, for example, a traumatic event had occurred that indelibly changed Ancient Greek, giving birth to Modern Greek, this approach holds that the continuum between Ancient Greek and Modern Greek would have ruptured and that therefore the history of Modern Greek would only go as far back as the traumatic event that brought about these changes. If we use this definition (and hypothetical premise), then Ancient Greek would be, like for definition (1), older than Modern Greek. However, since my hypothetical premise here is, in this case, made up, we would likely say that Ancient Greek and Modern Greek are equally as old, like in definition (2a), because their timeline has not been interrupted and they are essentially "the same general language."

I think there are a lot of proponents of definition (2a) in this thread that take umbrage with definitions (1) and (2b) because (1) presupposes to some extent that the dates linguists assign to languages are hard lines and that the methods used to come to these dates are the same for every language, both of which aren't really the case. (1) also hides the fact that languages can have shared histories by virtue of being related (i.e. descended one from the other or issued from the same ancestor), and ends up leading to pissing matches about which language is better, more meritorious, etc. All languages deserve to exist; it doesn't matter which one was around longer. As for (2b), it's seen as somewhat arbitrary. Linguists already differentiate between different periods of a language's history with different names which already take into account the fact that languages evolve on their own and also through outside influence. Sometimes these names are based on historical names that the people who spoke them had for their languages (like Latin and Italian), sometimes they're based on geography (Ancient Egyptian and not the reconstructed name r n km.t), sometimes they're based on the name of the language family (Classical Japanese vs. Modern Japanese, a language that was so influenced by Chinese that its current name in Japanese [and English for that matter] is based on the Chinese word for Japan and didn't exist in early forms of the Classical language).

Personally, my feeling is that definition (2a) is the most useful because it tends to be the one used by linguistics and it avoids the debate of "My language is older and so it's more important than yours!" If we need to talk about how important a language is in order to judge how worthy it is of existing, then we shouldn't be surprised when someone makes the counterargument that Basque isn't very important because barely any people speak it in comparison to French or Spanish and it has fewer records and cultural works of import. This isn't a healthy way to approach the debate and I don't think anyone here, myself included, adheres to this logic. Also, (2b) doesn't really avoid this problem either and it doesn't have much use in academic or non-academic since definitions (2a) and (1), respectively, have those domains covered already.

[edit]
If someone wants to say that the ancestor of Basque was where Modern Basque is now before any of French's predecessors were even close to Western Europe, that's fine. If they want to use that as an argument for why Basque shouldn't be oppressed, I'm not sure I agree that that's a healthy way to view the matter. Reasoning why a language should exist is a quite subjective matter, so I don't think we need to go around finding reasons, especially because it sort of implies that if a language doesn't have a good reason to exist, well, we should just let it die. I know that absolutely no one here actually thinks that, but it is one way of twisting that argument that I'd rather not see as it is opens the debate to a utilitarian view of language preservation: "But French is more useful. And Basques are bilingual . And Basque doesn't have nearly as many important literary works as Spanish. There really aren't any good reasons to help the language survive. The 'better' language will persist and the 'weaker' one will perish." Even if Basque had come from Northern Africa 600 years ago, I'm not sure I'd argue that the language doesn't deserve government assistance.
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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby rdearman » Sat May 29, 2021 6:11 pm

My point is Afrikaans is less than 400 years since it began to be spoken. So Ancient Egyptian stopped being used about 3000 years before Afrikaans started and predates Dutch as well.

So when using a timeline running from BC into AD a language appears continuous or as a block.
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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby Sizen » Sat May 29, 2021 6:23 pm

rdearman wrote:My point is Afrikaans is less than 400 years since it began to be spoken. So Ancient Egyptian stopped being used about 3000 years before Afrikaans started and predates Dutch as well.

Agreed. By definition (1) and perhaps (2b), this is true. By definition (2a), both Dutch and Afrikaans have equally long histories because (2a) includes their ancestors, but we don't know how Ancient Egyptian and Dutch/Afrikaans compare with this definition because we don't know how far their most ancient ancestors go or if they eventually converge on a common proto-language. Both these ideas can be true. It just depends on the definition of "old."

rdearman wrote:So when using a timeline running from BC into AD a language appears continuous or as a block.

This is typically how linguists make timelines for all languages. It is technically a continuous process, but we make "blocks" to represent important evolutions along that continuum so as to better visualise the process. Same for historical periods. Sometimes those blocks get significantly different names from the modern or ancient forms of the language, sometimes the changes are more abrupt than others, and sometimes the timeline splits into multiple heads the closer we get to the present, but it's still the same timeline.
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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby Saim » Sat May 29, 2021 8:33 pm

rdearman wrote:
galaxyrocker wrote:We're arguing that you can't say one language is older, which you admit you agree with.

Really, so all of these languages are the same age?

Arabic, Kʼicheʼ Maya, Esperanto, Toki Pona, Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek, English, Sumerian, Archaic Chinese, Hittite, Afrikaans, Lingala, Klingon?


Klingon and Toki Pona are not “languages” for the purposes of this sort of discussion. When talking about “language” in linguistics we don’t really discuss conlangs. For example if a conlang breaks a proposed linguistic universal, that’s not really of any scientific interest.

Obviously things like Ancient Egyptian are older than modern languages, because this term explicitly refers to an older stage of a language that isn’t spoken nowadays.

rdearman wrote:My point is Afrikaans is less than 400 years since it began to be spoken.


When did Afrikaans “begin” to be spoken? Was there some point where one generation spoke Cape Dutch and the next generation spoke Afrikaans?
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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby Le Baron » Sat May 29, 2021 8:39 pm

Saim wrote:When did Afrikaans “begin” to be spoken? Was there some point where one generation spoke Cape Dutch and the next generation spoke Afrikaans?


This is obviously very true, but there is some point when they stopped calling it specifically Dutch. That would also be a decision based upon politics and nationhood, but to refer to Afrikaans as 'Dutch' is not only false it's a denial of Afrikaans as having its own identity, which it does have.
Same goes for French with regard to Latin. The other discussion above of Greek in relation to ancient Greek(s) seems to me a wholly other thing than Latin and its related offspring languages in Western Europe.
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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby tractor » Sat May 29, 2021 9:02 pm

Le Baron wrote:
Saim wrote:When did Afrikaans “begin” to be spoken? Was there some point where one generation spoke Cape Dutch and the next generation spoke Afrikaans?


This is obviously very true, but there is some point when they stopped calling it specifically Dutch. That would also be a decision based upon politics and nationhood, but to refer to Afrikaans as 'Dutch' is not only false it's a denial of Afrikaans as having its own identity, which it does have.
Same goes for French with regard to Latin.

Maybe I misread you, but according to this logic, Old French and Modern French must be one and the same language because they are both called French, even though Old and Modern French are very different, probably more so than Dutch and Afrikaans. And, following the same logic, Catalan and Valencian cannot be one language, but two.
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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby Saim » Sat May 29, 2021 9:24 pm

Le Baron wrote:This is obviously very true, but there is some point when they stopped calling it specifically Dutch. That would also be a decision based upon politics and nationhood, but to refer to Afrikaans as 'Dutch' is not only false it's a denial of Afrikaans as having its own identity, which it does have.
Same goes for French with regard to Latin. The other discussion above of Greek in relation to ancient Greek(s) seems to me a wholly other thing than Latin and its related offspring languages in Western Europe.


Exactly! This is primarily due to the identity of the speaker community, and not a reliable measure of linguist distance. Both Dutch and Afrikaans are descended from 1600s Dutch, it's just that one branch of the speaker community happened to maintain the same name (although in this case I do think Afrikaans happens to be more grammatically innovative than Dutch). I don't think we're disagreeing on anything any more. :)

The same sort of thing happens with Malayalam and Tamil (both descended from Middle Tamil), or Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx (all descended from Middle Irish; although in this case they've all preserved cognate forms of the same endonym, it's just the English names that are different). Also interesting are speakers of Slovene and Slovak, which use cognates of "Slavic" to refer to their language, whereas other Slavic groups use other names.
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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby Cainntear » Sat May 29, 2021 9:28 pm

rdearman wrote:
galaxyrocker wrote:We're arguing that you can't say one language is older, which you admit you agree with.

Really, so all of these languages are the same age?

Arabic, Kʼicheʼ Maya, Esperanto, Toki Pona, Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek, English, Sumerian, Archaic Chinese, Hittite, Afrikaans, Lingala, Klingon?

You have an interesting POV, but I don't agree with it.

Obviously that's not what any of us mean, and you could point out that what we're saying is literally not true without building a strawman based on a literal interpretation of our words.

Ancient languages are "old" in that they were spoken a long time ago and not today. Conlangs are "new" because they were invented recently.
But natural spoken languages are not old, not new, not young. They change with every generation and just like a like dialect spectrums across large language families at a given point in time, it is impossible to define objectively where the speech of one person is different enough from another to be considered a different language.

For the modern Romance languages, distinguishing between "languages" is in no small part possible due to schooling killing off local dialectal variation, thus breaking the spectrum into distinct blocks, but there has been nothing like that over time. Perhaps language divergence has been slowed by increasing literacy, but it still happens. I do not talk like my parents' generation, and I don't talk like the generation after me.
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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby Sizen » Sat May 29, 2021 9:58 pm

Le Baron wrote:The other discussion above of Greek in relation to ancient Greek(s) seems to me a wholly other thing than Latin and its related offspring languages in Western Europe.

Yes, I've noticed that not everyone is having the same discussion here. That's why I've given this view of the discussion the name (2b). Within the confines of (2b), your arguments are logically sound, at least to me. Within (2b) it makes sense that Proto-Basque and Basque are one and the same and that Latin and French are two separate languages, even if it does mean we have to assume that Basque was never altered to the point that French was during the period of time where we have absolutely no records of older forms of Basque outside of references to their existence. I think that's a pretty fair concession to make for this (2b) argument, though.

The issue is that a number of us don't agree with the assumptions that this view of language takes for granted (i.e. that languages become dissociated from their past given some arbitrary level of outside influence, geographic displacement, political decision or other similar factors, and that they are necessarily labelled with completely different names based on these influences) because they break with the linguistic consensus that French is a distant dialect of Latin in the sense that it is descended from Latin. I'm entirely happy to say that you're right within your definition of the rules of what constitutes a language, but I don't see why I would want to use those rules myself because linguists have already done and continue to do the hard work of creating and honing a pretty rigorous set of rules. [edit: originally "those rules". Don't know what I was thinking when I wrote "those rules."]

I'm not trying to convince you you're wrong at this point. I was just trying to figure out where the discussion had broken down and why everyone is so convinced of their position. The conclusion I've come to is that there are three sets of rules in play and so of course no one is going to agree. There's still room for people to convince each other, but I think I've already done what I can.
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Re: Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority lan

Postby Lianne » Sun May 30, 2021 5:00 am

Sizen wrote:In this thread I'm seeing two broad definitions of the words old and age, as well as two further subdivisions of one of those definitions, and I think they're causing lots of issues.
rdearman wrote:Really, so all of these languages are the same age?

Arabic, Kʼicheʼ Maya, Esperanto, Toki Pona, Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek, English, Sumerian, Archaic Chinese, Hittite, Afrikaans, Lingala, Klingon?

(1) The first is the one seen above. Let's take an example like Ancient Greek, whose modern descendant is Modern Greek (Let's ignore that there were multiple Ancient Greeks and that Modern Greek isn't a monolith either). It is pretty self-evident that Ancient Greek precedes Greek. That's the whole point of drawing out a language's history and giving different periods different names: we want to establish the evolution of the language and show that different forms of the language, marked by different features or lexical inventories, etc, preceded other forms. In this sense, we can say that Ancient Greek is "older" than Modern Greek because Ancient Greek comes before Greek on the timeline by definition.

Can we use this definition when comparing unrelated languages? Sort of. As long as we understand that the dates given for when a language existed are somewhat arbitrary* and can be the subject of scholarly debate. If we limit ourselves to the dates laid out by scholars, we can confidently claim that Ancient Egyptian precedes Modern Japanese, so in that sense, we can say that Ancient Egyptian is older than Modern Japanese. However, when the dates are very close, hotly debated or simply unknown, it starts to not make sense to use this definition. Either language could be older than the other for all we know. We don't have a clear timeline!

*It is ultimately impossible to give concrete dates for when one language turned into another as languages don't tend to change completely over night. This is not to say that there is not merit to the dates given by linguists, just that the dates are more useful as a general indication as to when certain changes that are deemed important to the classification of older forms of a languages were starting, already taking place, or finishing.

(2) The second meaning of old and age becomes more obvious if we ask a different question. Out of Ancient Greek and Modern Greek, which language has a history that extends further into the past than the other? There seem to be two ways of tackling this question in this thread. The first (2a) is to say that both extend into the past equally far, making the two languages equally "old." The logic being that while the two languages weren't contemporaneous, they are still on a shared continuum of evolution and therefore share a history.

The other approach (2b) to answering the above question is similar to (2a), but certain factors can bring us to break up the timeline of a language. If, for example, a traumatic event had occurred that indelibly changed Ancient Greek, giving birth to Modern Greek, this approach holds that the continuum between Ancient Greek and Modern Greek would have ruptured and that therefore the history of Modern Greek would only go as far back as the traumatic event that brought about these changes. If we use this definition (and hypothetical premise), then Ancient Greek would be, like for definition (1), older than Modern Greek. However, since my hypothetical premise here is, in this case, made up, we would likely say that Ancient Greek and Modern Greek are equally as old, like in definition (2a), because their timeline has not been interrupted and they are essentially "the same general language."

I think there are a lot of proponents of definition (2a) in this thread that take umbrage with definitions (1) and (2b) because (1) presupposes to some extent that the dates linguists assign to languages are hard lines and that the methods used to come to these dates are the same for every language, both of which aren't really the case. (1) also hides the fact that languages can have shared histories by virtue of being related (i.e. descended one from the other or issued from the same ancestor), and ends up leading to pissing matches about which language is better, more meritorious, etc. All languages deserve to exist; it doesn't matter which one was around longer. As for (2b), it's seen as somewhat arbitrary. Linguists already differentiate between different periods of a language's history with different names which already take into account the fact that languages evolve on their own and also through outside influence. Sometimes these names are based on historical names that the people who spoke them had for their languages (like Latin and Italian), sometimes they're based on geography (Ancient Egyptian and not the reconstructed name r n km.t), sometimes they're based on the name of the language family (Classical Japanese vs. Modern Japanese, a language that was so influenced by Chinese that its current name in Japanese [and English for that matter] is based on the Chinese word for Japan and didn't exist in early forms of the Classical language).

Personally, my feeling is that definition (2a) is the most useful because it tends to be the one used by linguistics and it avoids the debate of "My language is older and so it's more important than yours!" If we need to talk about how important a language is in order to judge how worthy it is of existing, then we shouldn't be surprised when someone makes the counterargument that Basque isn't very important because barely any people speak it in comparison to French or Spanish and it has fewer records and cultural works of import. This isn't a healthy way to approach the debate and I don't think anyone here, myself included, adheres to this logic. Also, (2b) doesn't really avoid this problem either and it doesn't have much use in academic or non-academic since definitions (2a) and (1), respectively, have those domains covered already.

[edit]
If someone wants to say that the ancestor of Basque was where Modern Basque is now before any of French's predecessors were even close to Western Europe, that's fine. If they want to use that as an argument for why Basque shouldn't be oppressed, I'm not sure I agree that that's a healthy way to view the matter. Reasoning why a language should exist is a quite subjective matter, so I don't think we need to go around finding reasons, especially because it sort of implies that if a language doesn't have a good reason to exist, well, we should just let it die. I know that absolutely no one here actually thinks that, but it is one way of twisting that argument that I'd rather not see as it is opens the debate to a utilitarian view of language preservation: "But French is more useful. And Basques are bilingual . And Basque doesn't have nearly as many important literary works as Spanish. There really aren't any good reasons to help the language survive. The 'better' language will persist and the 'weaker' one will perish." Even if Basque had come from Northern Africa 600 years ago, I'm not sure I'd argue that the language doesn't deserve government assistance.

Thanks for laying out what was/is making this discussion so frustrating. I've been using your definition (1), because regardless of whether that's what linguists use, that is what the average person means when they say "old". Latin is older than French because Latin was being spoken long before French existed. It's been frustrating to say things that feel like common sense and then to be talked to like I'm saying something insane. (And then to have people telling me that humans are fish and I'm just supposed to go along with this logic, definitions of words be damned.)

But I also am not putting any such political thought into this. To me, a language being older doesn't make it more important, and it's weird to me that anyone would think that. Discussing whether French or Basque is older is merely an interesting discussion to me; obviously both languages are worthy of being spoken and protected.
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