> It's way older than English
What does it mean for one language to be older than another? They are both Indo-European languages, so they are descended from a common ancestor and have each been continually evolving since then.
What does it mean for one language to be older than another? They are both Indo-European languages, so they are descended from a common ancestor and have each been continually evolving since then.
Prior to the Roman invasion (55,54BC and 43AD) and subsequent conquests, the predominant languages here were Brythonic or Brittanic. I believe that the last Cornish only speakers (a pair of sisters) passed away in the 1960s or 70s. The language has thankfully been revived somewhat and West Wales (Kernow) is rediscovering its roots. I also believe that shepherds across quite a lot of the modern UKoGB used to count their sheep in Cumbric numbers - the language of Cumbria (note how Cumbric looks suspiciously similar to Cwmru).
Discussions about Indo-European languages is paleontology for language! I'm not so good with me Greek to work out the correct term.
The notion of IE languages is analogous to fossils. We are talking about languages that are living, breathing and spoken. Obviously we must allow a bit of slack when ascribing certain attributes but I doubt any language scholar is going to get upset at Welsh being described as older than English.
The history of these islands has involved invasion after invasion after invasion. How on earth that history has resulted into only a few nationalistic identities and one empire is quite something. Bear in mind that sea travel is far quicker than land when you don't have roads so being islands means easy access and not hard access.
Just because some accident caused the name "Brythonic" to be applied to languages older than the oldest language with the name "English" says nothing about the importance or value of Brythonic relative to English. The assigning of names to no-longer-spoken languages is arbitrary enough that you cannot use the names to prove anything about reality.
Allegedly her last words were "Me ne vidn cewsel Sawznek!" ("I don’t want to speak English!").
There is no identifiable specific date at which people were speaking something recognizably "Welsh" or recognizably "English" (as opposed to proto-Indo-European). Both those languages have been evolving continuously, changing slightly every generation, from the point at which they were the same language thousands of years ago until today. Just like there is no specific identifiable date at which a generation of organisms was born that was bonobos or humans rather than proto-Great Apes.
And yet you can talk about certain species being older than another can you not?