Oldest language
The frequently asked question of what is the world's
oldest language is one that admits of several answers, depending on what criteria are used to determine the "age" of a language.
Linguists agree that there are no such things as "primitive" languages: no traditional human language has a "rudimentary" grammar or a vocabulary unequal to the task of talking about the things its speakers want to discuss.
Noam Chomsky and his followers believe that all human languages possess a common deep structure; those structures are shared by all human languages, whatever their superficial differences.
It is often claimed that the
Pirahã language is an example of rudimentary language, on the grounds that it has no numbers, a very small phoneme inventory, and limited clause structure. On the other hand, one of its primary investigators, Daniel Everett, writes "No one should draw the conclusion... that the Pirahã language is in any way 'primitive'. It has the most complex verbal morphology I am aware of and a strikingly complex prosodic system."
The development of language can be observed in the development of various
sign languages, which show the capacity of humans for language, when a critical mass of minds which require a language to communicate are congregated. The spontaneous generation of a language and its development from primitive
home sign-like roots to rudimentary
pidgin-like LSN (Lenguaje de Signos Nicaragüense) and finally to a more complex form in ISN (Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua) can be observed in the
Nicaraguan Sign Language.
Moreover, all languages are subject to processes of
language change. Languages change inevitably in their vocabulary and phonology as old speakers die and are replaced by younger ones. Some linguists have hypothesized that this process is inevitable; linguistic drift, like
genetic drift, could be used to set up a time framework. If linguistic change is inevitable, some have put forth the theory that there might exist a curtain in time behind which the relationships between languages, even if valid, are irrecoverable.
A highly controversial proposal put forth by a number of
comparative linguists such as
Joseph Greenberg and
Merritt Ruhlen proposes that all human languages descend from a single common ancestor, the "
Proto-World language".
If this hypothesis is accepted, one possible criterion for selecting a candidate for the oldest language would be through the use of
cladistics: the languages that appear to have broken from the common stock earliest would be oldest. Under this criterion, most exponents of this hypothesis give pride of place to the
Khoi-San languages, spoken in Africa. Believers here also tend to accept the
single-origin hypothesis for
humans, and look to that hypothesis about human genetic distance for confirmation of their linguistic speculations.
As noted, this hypothesis remains quite controversial. Some linguists object to their methods, which typically revolve around
mass lexical comparison, the comparison of vocabulary in bulk. Instead, they are not convinced except by evidence coming from the
comparative method, which requires the reconstruction of forms in a
protolanguage and the development of a regular set of sound change rules. As mentioned above, some linguists do not believe that linguistic comparison has enough depth of field to be able to reliably see relationships that may have existed in the past, and holds that even if they might have existed they are now irrecoverable.
The languages into which the comparative method has delved most deeply are the
Indo-European languages, but this may be a function of the fact that comparative linguistics began with Indo-European studies. It remains the case that
Proto-Indo-European is the most extensively studied reconstructed protolanguage, and as such may qualify as the oldest language by this criterion. Proto-Indo-European, though, is an academic construct..
Herodotus, the historian, wrote that
Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus I (Psamtik) sought to discover the origin of language by conducting an experiment with two children. Allegedly he gave two newborn babies to a shepherd, with the instructions that no one should speak to them, but that the shepherd should feed and care for them while listening to determine their first words. The hypothesis was that the first word would be uttered in the root language of all people. When one of the children cried "becos" with outstretched arms the shepherd concluded that the word was
Phrygian (a now dead language of ancient
Anatolia) because that was the sound of the Phrygian word for "bread." Thus, they concluded that the Phyrgians were an older people than the Egyptians. Whether or not the Herodotus story is true is not known. However the example of an experiment in language represents at least an interest in the origin of language in antiquity.
Language isolates, with only speculative or unknown relationships to the languages spoken in the areas surrounding them, are often presumed to be older than the surrounding languages; it is thought that the more widespread and related languages were introduced more recently. The
Basque language is often thought to be very old for this reason.
Another criterion for determining which is the world's oldest language would be to examine the depth of its written records.
By this criteria, most
archaeologists concur that
Sumerian is the world's oldest language; it is extant from about
3200 BC. The
hieroglyphs of
Egyptian date to about
3100 BC.
The oldest language with a continuous written tradition is
Chinese; the
oracle script seems to be related to the
seal scripts of early Chinese, and is attested from around
1200 BC, and therefore the descendants of that script are still in use. Speakers of several Semitic languages developed the
abjad or consonantal alphabet some time before
1500 BC.
Languages with very old literatures include
Sanskrit,
Tamil and
Kannada. it has been suggested that the earliest poems of the
Vedas date to between
3500 BC -
1500 BC, though they were preserved by
oral transmission well before they were written down. The antiquity of the texts of the
Hebrew Bible is a controversial subject; some religious believers accept the literal truth of statements that would have the earliest portions of the text written by
Moses, which would put them before
1270 BC. The poems of
Homer are dated by
Herodotus to approximately
850 BC.
*
Origin of language*Ruhlen, Merritt,
The Origin of Language : Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue (Wiley, 1996) ISBN 0471159638
*Coulmas, Florian,
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems (Blackwell, 1999) ISBN 063121481X
*Daniels, Peter T., and William Bright, eds.,
The World's Writing Systems (Oxford, 1996) ISBN 0195079930
