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Comment by civilitty | Hacker News Reader

Without written language, no record can exist of the spoken language. Since spoken language significantly predates written language, we’ll never know when the former originated.

It’s just practical to say they’re all equally old to avoid any cultural egotism that inevitably creeps in.

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It's not cultural egotism to say for example, that Hebrew is older than English. Being old doesn't confer extra prestige on a language.

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.

English and Hebrew are equally old. Just like humans and chimps are.

There are species with less "evolution" than others.

You are making a semantic argument that virtually no linguists accept. We get your point, we just don't think it makes sense for how we define languages.

I'm no linguist, but I do study it as a hobby. As far as I'm aware, linguists are not generally in the business of making ridiculous claims like "this language is older than another." The concept of "age" for a language for something as fluid as language is fundamentally flawed.

> English and Hebrew are equally old.

If you had a time machine could you bring me an English speaker from the year 1 CE?

In 1CE, people in Palestine mostly spoke Aramaic, and Hebrew was a religious language rapidly declining in vernacular use. :-)

If I offered 100 pieces of gold I bet I could find at least one Hebrew speaker in Judaea in the year 1.

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?"

Hebrew as it's spoken today in Israel, or ancient Hebrew? There's a lot of intelligibility between the two, but it's mostly in the written form. In ancient Judea you'd be more likely to find a speaker of dialect that'd entirely dead today.

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.

> but you could find Saxons that spoke a language that English is descended from.

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.

Yes, you are correct the Saxons would be in ancient Saxony, not Britain.

So you concede that Hebrew existed. Well English didn’t and that’s the point.

> Without written language, no record can exist of the spoken language.

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.

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