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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

Is 1900-AD English "a dead language" because nobody who spoke it natively is still alive? What about 1800, 1700, or 1000? What year did English die and if it did indeed die, what are we speaking now?

The reasons for considering English circa 1000 and English circa 2020 to be "different stages of the same language" but Latin and French to be "different languages" are an arbitrary cultural distinction not rooted in science. The English of Beowulf is just as different from the modern variety as French is from Latin. And at every point from the introduction of Latin into France thousands of years ago until the present day, everybody could communicate perfectly easily with their own grandparents, and thought they were speaking the same language.

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The natural conclusion to this argument is that everyone on earth is speaking the same language, because they all descended from the Mitochondrial Eve’s utterances 150000 years ago.

No, the natural conclusion is that whether two varieties are "the same language" or "different forms of the same language" is a cultural question, not a scientific one that can be answered objectively.

(Tangent -- certainly not all languages are descended from a hypothetical Proto-World, since we have examples of brand new languages forming: any creole languages, or Nicaraguan Sign Language. Whether most of the major language families are descended from a Proto-World is very much an open question, and probably one that will never be answered, since even if say, English and Navajo are genetically related, they diverged so long before we had written records that no trace remains.)

In any case, there's a meaningful difference between a language gradually changing over hundreds of years such that the newer varieties are quite different from the old ones, and a language truly dying, because it has exactly one remaining native speaker, and that person dies.

> No, the natural conclusion is that whether two varieties are "the same language" or "different forms of the same language" is a cultural question, not a scientific one that can be answered objectively.

It's a question that linguists (who are scientists) strive to answer in ways that are useful to studying, reasoning about, and explaining language. It's not much different than the species problem in biology. Everyone knows that speciation happens gradually, but scientists still propose ways of defining and explaining speciation to aid in scientific inquiry. The labels and dividing lines themselves are not empirically observed, of course, but that doesn't mean they're unscientific or outside the purview of scientific inquiry.

Do you have any examples of serious papers written by serious linguists debating whether X and Y are the same language or not?

I would be very surprised if such a thing exists.

As far as I know, there generally aren’t papers that contain debates between multiple linguists. Scientific papers usually aren’t written as debate transcripts. But there are certainly many papers about dead languages, and about the lines between languages. You can look at pretty much any of the citations on Wikipedia articles about dead languages like a Middle English, or creole languages.

> Scientific papers usually aren’t written as debate transcripts.

Sure they are, although a debate wouldn't be contained in one paper written collaboratively by debating authors, as you seem to imagine -- it would play out over a series of papers, each of which cites previous papers and claims they're wrong.

For example, Timm 1989[1] argues that modern Breton is a VSO language, disputing the claims of Varin 1979[2], who claims it is SVO, which in turn disputes the traditional understanding that it is indeed VSO.

Or the famous paper of Haspelmath 2011[3] citing many other authors' proposed approaches to word segmentation and arguing that they're all wrong (i.e., that "word" is not a meaningfully defined concept in linguistics).

Where are the papers that you claim exist about the lines between languages? If this is really something mainstream linguists care about, you should be able to give examples in non-fringe journals.

I just checked the citations on the Wikipedia article for Middle English like you suggested, and found zero papers about whether Middle English should be considered "the same language" as modern English. Can you tell me which ones specifically you mean?

[1]: Timm, L. (1989). "Word Order in 20th Century Breton". Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, Vol. 7, No. 3, Special Celtic Issue, pp. 361-378 (https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/4047723)

[2]: Varin, A. (1979). "VSO and SVO Order in Breton". Archivum Linguisticum 10, pp. 83-101

[3]: Haspelmath, M. (2011). The indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of morphology and syntax. Folia Linguistica, 45(1). (https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.2011.002)

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