Most oldest (archaic) indo-european languages.

Adam   Sat Apr 28, 2007 6:29 pm GMT
The seond one is actually English written using the Welsh spelling system.

If you can read it in proper English pronounciation then you have an indea of how to read Welsh.
Irrintzi   Sat Apr 28, 2007 7:03 pm GMT
<<Welsh is the oldest-surviving language in Europe. That means it's the oldest-surviving Indo-European language in Europe.>>

Sorry, Sir Adam, I disapprove of what you say.
Welsh isn't the oldest-surviving language in Europe, because Welsh is a celtic language and in fact a indo-european language.
For that, without arrogance, I say that the Basque, a Pre-IndoEuropean language, is the one otherwise the most ancient language of Europe.
Prove the opposite and you can be sure that I shall keep silent. :)

(The Welsh ancestors, its Celtic which colonized the lands of Britain are at the most 2500 years old, but the Basque history counts on ten of milleniums!)

Asko daki zaharrak, erakutsi beharrak .
Ce que l'ancien connaît, la nécessité le lui a enseigné.
What the ancient knows, the necessity taught it to him.
Potom   Sat Apr 28, 2007 10:19 pm GMT
Since the topic isn't supposed to deal only with european languages I naturally opt for sanskrit, which has been unchanged when reaching its "classic" stage about 2500 years ago and is counted amongst the 23 official languages of India. Speaking of most ancient I would say Hatti (extinct), the language of the Hittites the earliest indo-european branch, tracable from 18th century BC in Anatolia.

Oh yeah, for the information of some of you: Basque is a language isolate
Gary   Sun Apr 29, 2007 9:07 am GMT
Without inscriptions and historical evidences

no language can be considered as the oldest

I agree with Potom, it is Sanskrit the Most oldest (archaic) and still in use indo-european language.
Josh Lalonde   Sun Apr 29, 2007 2:56 pm GMT
<<Without inscriptions and historical evidences

no language can be considered as the oldest

I agree with Potom, it is Sanskrit the Most oldest (archaic) and still in use indo-european language.>>

There's really no way to say that one language is older or more archaic than another. All languages come from some other language spoken earlier; just because a language isn't recorded in writing doesn't mean it didn't exist. The earliest attested Indo-European language is Hittite, though it died out around 1 000 BC. And as for Sanskrit still being in use, it is less so than Latin was in the Middle Ages in Europe. From Wikipedia: "The 1991 Indian census reported 49,736 fluent speakers of Sanskrit." No one speaks Sanskrit natively anymore; it is a dead language.
Gary   Sun Apr 29, 2007 3:59 pm GMT
Inscriptions and texts are the only way to confirm historical evidence
of a language

There was no audio-recorder in those times :-)

Catalogue des Textes Hittites

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_texts
Irrintzi   Sun Apr 29, 2007 5:41 pm GMT
<< Oh yeah, for the information of some of you: Basque is a language isolate >>


Milesker gizon! Banakien!
Zer pentsatzen duzu? Ez nakiela Euskarak "isolatua" zela?

I return to the topic, subject is " Most oldest ( archaic ) indo-european languages ", thus I conclude that the Basque is not the most oldest indo-european language, because it's a pre-indoeuropean language...

And then it is indistinct, you speak of the most oldest and ALIVE indo-european languages ? Or already died (Knowing that the oldest language is the former "Indo-European" simply.)?

<< no language can be considered as the oldest >>

I disapprove.
It isn't completely correct, we can determine and distinguish an former and ancient language which didn't evolve since a lot century (Sanscrit, Japanese, Caucasian languages...), and a "new" language which didn't stop evolving as French, English...
uuu   Mon May 07, 2007 10:18 am GMT
it's Sanscrit, no?
Klodjan   Mon Oct 01, 2007 1:42 am GMT
Well it is intresting to hear all this good stuff about your language ,iam Albanian myself and it is tru that my language it is mix with many turkish words some and slavic ,i dont know about greek thow and this hase happent becouse of the invaiters that trait to pas from east to the west and we were the clouses pointe ,anyhow well i have taken my coutryes histroy and i have never read and found anyweare the origjin of my people or were we come from (iam not saying here that we are the oldes or anything of this kind but it needs to bee stady) it is some areas and cities back home in the north which have never have been touch by the forenger armies and the language of these people it is diferent form the ones in south (and the city is it called MIRDITA which aslo means goodafternoon) and thats were someone that might bee intrested will find the pure albanian and ilirian language .let me give you one example in the south people use the word ( babi ) for father whish it is turkish we find this in arabik eaven nowdayes ,now we in north use the word (AT) which mean father also ,and somethig else about our conections with ilirians lots of babies are named after the names of the ilirian kings , those names came from somewhear ,anyhow i wish everyone a great life and thanx for taking your time to make the world richer with knowledge.
Ouest   Fri Oct 05, 2007 3:45 pm GMT
<<<There's really no way to say that one language is older or more archaic than another. All languages come from some other language spoken earlier;>>>

Can't living fossils like crocodiles or sharks be considered older or more archaic than new species like apes or hoses? All these species come from some other earlier species, but some are older, others new.
Since only the Romance languages and English are so new that their genesis is recorded in written texts, it is difficult to say which is the oldest. German, Russian and Greek are probably living fossils like Sanskrit.
billgregg   Sat Oct 06, 2007 4:11 am GMT
"The point is languages don't stay the same, and there is no such thing as a living fossil."

The parallels between organic evolution and linguistic evolution are pretty striking. The main differences are the time scales involved and the ability of languages to exchange massive amounts of "genetic" material in a way that species usually cannot.

True, all languages are constantly changing, as are all species. But languages do change at different rates. English, for example, changed much more rapidly from 1000 to 1500 than it did from 1500 to 2000. Prolonged and intimate contact with French-speaking Normans and later with the Renaissance created drastic changes in English. You could think of these contrasting periods of stasis and change as resembling Stephen Jay Gould's punctuated equilibria in organic evolution.

Some languages never undergo crises like the Norman conquest. If we could ever reconstruct Indo-European with any certainty, I'd bet that in very quantifiable ways (phonology, vocabulary, grammar, syntax) Lithuanian is closer to it than English is. Their lineages are equally ancient because they're both twigs on the the same tree, but they have changed at different rates.

Likewise some species seem to be from another time. I'll use plants as examples since I know their evolutionary history better than animals. Ginkgos, cycads, clubmosses, horsetails and ferns are in some cases nearly indistinguishable from fossilized specimens 100 or even 150 million years old. On the other hand, it's almost a certainty that nothing like ragweed, pineapple or cactus existed during the Jurassic.

So I'd argue that whether you call them living fossils or something else, the tendency of some species (and languages) to change very slowly over long spans of time is a real phenomenon and worth discussing.
billgregg   Sat Oct 06, 2007 6:20 am GMT
"The reason I object to the analogy with biology is that there is no survival pressure on languages. With plants for example, if the environment doesn't change, it's quite possible for the plant to stay basically the same for millions of years. Languages, however, *always* change; there's no situation in which a language could stay the same even for a hundred years."

Languages always change and genomes always change. Slow drift occurs in both. The timeframes are so long with genetic change that there may appear to be no change, but even if the environment stays the same, random genetic drift will occur in a population. Random mutations (at least the inconsequential, nonfatal ones) are errors in transmission of the genetic code, and analogous to the errors in transmission of a language from one generation to the next.

I'd also argue that there is definitely survival pressure on languages. Languages that have less utility will lose speakers over time to languages that are more useful (in other words, fitter). As with species, linguistic extinction is a possibility. There's a subtle (or, perhaps in some places like Quebec, not so subtle), ongoing competition among languages for speakers.

"The biggest change between 1000 and 2000 is probably the introduction of Norman-French vocabulary, but other than that, I think the two halves are pretty even."

The introduction of Norman-French vocabulary was a huge change, wasn't it? That seems rather like saying, "Except for this big change, there wasn't much change in this period." Combine that with the loss of most inflections and the early Renaissance borrowings and it seems like a very busy 500 years, linguistically speaking. I guess it would be difficult proposition to test since he's 400 years deceased, but I think it's easier for me to read Chaucer than it would be for Shakespeare to read Beowulf.
Ouest   Sat Oct 06, 2007 9:27 am GMT
"Also, German and Greek have undergone fairly dramatic changes within the period of written history. See here about German: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift ."

The German consonant shift seems to be a minor change if compared with the "evolution" of Latin into Romance or that of Anglo-Saxon into English. To an educated Modern Greek speaker ancient Koine Greek texts ar intelligible, while an Italian cannot understand a single sentence of a Classical Latin text without learning Latin in school for several years.
Natalie   Thu Oct 11, 2007 5:41 am GMT
All the leading scientists of today agree that the oldest indo-European language is Albanian. It comes from the first people who started farming the land, Ar-ba people, who spoke Arba language (Arba = Alba = Alva, depending on later pronounciations by others). It started almost the same time with Armenian (Ar-me). Today, Albanian is spoken by about 10 million people worldwide.

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:0l4gpr2MPgcJ:www.tech.plym.ac.uk/socce/evolang6/piazza_cavalli-sforza.doc+albanian+origin+luigi+cavalli+sforza&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us


http://www.geocities.com/ga57/albania/tree.html
Slavo-Illyrian   Fri Oct 12, 2007 11:13 am GMT
The earliest written attestation in albanian language is from the 15th century

http://www.answers.com/topic/albanian-language


without inscriptions everyone can claim whatever