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.
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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.