> Oldest spoken language in the world? All equally old.
That doesn’t seem possible. Surely some spoken languages are older then others.
That doesn’t seem possible. Surely some spoken languages are older then others.
A better question is what language has the longest period of mutual comprehensibility, e.g. if you took a speaker from time A to time B. As an English speaker, I could talk to Shakespeare with some mild accommodations, but I would have a lot of trouble talking to Chaucer.
For written languages, the period of mutual comprehensibility can end up being thousands of years long because people in later generations are trained on the earlier texts, but for spoken languages, things tend to break up after a few hundred years. The best chance for a spoken language to maintain intelligibility is to have some kind of religious community that insists on preserving the old dialect, like Sanskrit (where there is a well preserved canon of pronunciation), Classical Arabic (Quran recitation), Hebrew, Latin, etc.
But some spoken languages are newer and we can prove that. The youngest language in the world is arguably the Nicaraguan Sign Language[1], from the early 1980s. The only possible progenitors are home sign systems the kids who developed it used at home, which were not full languages and were themselves quite new, so it's got a pretty strong claim.
Beyond that you've got pidgins, creoles and mixed languages which develop by combining two or more languages. You can argue whether or not their entirely new, since they generally borrow vocabulary from one language and grammar from the another, or just mix several languages more freely together.
It’s just practical to say they’re all equally old to avoid any cultural egotism that inevitably creeps in.
The problem is in deciding whether a language spoken 1000 years ago is still the same language as today. I'm not enough of a linguist to know the correct answer to this.
There are species with less "evolution" than others.
If you had a time machine could you bring me an English speaker from the year 1 CE?
Would I find an English speaker if I then popped over to Britannia and offered gold? Or would they say "What the fuck is English?"
As far as English goes, obviously you wouldn't find any English speakers in ancient Britain, but you could find Saxons that spoke a language that English is descended from. There won't be much intelligibility, if any at all, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was equally unintelligible as ancient spoken Hebrew.
Not in britain you wouldn't, the saxons colonised britain in the 700-800AD range. Britons speaking Brythonic is what you'd find, probably not common Brythonic though, too early for that.
It's possible to go back further, at least if there are multiple descendants. We have a reasonably good understanding of spoken Proto-Germanic based on literature in Gothic, Old English, and Old Norse. We can even go back further to Proto-Indo-European as we have records in Hittite, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit.
no, we share a common ancestor.
Have chimps been in x country for longer than humans? maybe
not the same question