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In Sanskrit, there's a word called 'Viraha.'
It's about missing someone deeply. 'Viraha' is for when you're far from someone you love, but you still believe you'll be together again. It shows that love stays strong, no matter how far apart you are.
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Lauren: I do love the idea that Chaucer had no idea that he was moving on from Old English to Middle English because there wasn’t a Modern English yet. Gretchen: How could you describe yourself as “Middle English” – that’s sort of like the “late-stage capitalism” that implies that we’re towards the end of something. Like, we don’t know, folks. Lauren: I don’t think English always does self-deprecating well. English has a lot of belief in its superiority as a language. I think we can say that about the ideology behind English. But I do love that English didn’t go for “Classical English.” Imagine if we said Beowulf was written in “Classical English.” Gretchen: We could have, yeah. We could have. Lauren: We just went with, “Ah, that’s old. I don’t understand it. It’s got cases. It’s got all these extra affixes. It’s old. It’s a bit stuffy.”
Excerpt from Lingthusiasm episode ‘No such thing as the oldest language'
Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about mythbusting and the history of language
Many supporters, with the best intentions, will often claim that “Welsh is the oldest language in Europe” (or one of). I wish they wouldn’t say this, because it’s untrue. It’s worse than that, in fact, because it’s not even wrong, in the sense that the claim itself doesn’t make sense. It’s a bit like claiming that your family is older than someone else’s family. All families, and all languages, ultimately share a common ancestor, so really they’re all as old as each other. Throughout history, parts of one family dynasty or clan have gone on to start another, yet at the time nobody would have noticed the difference. It’s the sort of thing that you can only observe with hindsight (rather like the emergence of new families of species in biological evolution). In the same way, the point at which a modern language is said to have sufficiently developed from its predecessor is rather arbitrary, and an academic convenience more than anything else. [...] The distinction between two languages is political rather than scientific. Norwegian and Danish are classified as two separate languages even though they are much more similar than the versions of vernacular Arabic spoken in Mauritania and Oman, for example, which we merly call dialects. Again, my point is simply that these labels are mainly social constructs. I’m guessing that many of Europe’s languages claim to be among the continent’s “oldest”. Basque, famously, isn’t closely related to any other language in Europe and is said to be a survivor from the time before the Indo-Europeans arrived. Lithuanian, meanwhile, is sometimes called Europe’s most conservative language since it retains many ancient linguistic elements that others have long lost. Both, it may be conceded, would have a better claim to the “oldest language” title than Welsh, but it wouldn’t really be a linguistically meaningful thing to say in those cases either. You may, very reasonably, ask whether any of this really matters. But even if it were true (which it isn’t), I would also argue that it isn’t actually a particularly helpful point for the language’s supporters to be making. Do we really want to imply that our language is some sort of curious fossil? Emphasising Welsh’s so-called antiquity plays into the hands of those who seek to dismiss the language as unfit for the modern age.
Why Welsh makes a good point about the problem with “oldest language” claims that are often brought up in the context of language revitalization. (Although I will note that sign languages are a possible exception: they may inherit gestures that are as old as humanity as inspiration for some signs and some have roots in older sign languages, but other sign languages are genuinely very young.)
Lingthusiasm Episode 88: No such thing as the oldest language
It's easy to find claims that certain languages are old or even the oldest, but which one is actually true? Fortunately, there's an easy (though unsatisfying) answer: none of them! Like how humans are all descended from other humans, even though some of us may have longer or shorter family trees found in written records, all human languages are shaped by contact with other languages. We don't even know whether the oldest language(s) was/were spoken or signed, or even whether there was a singular common ancestor language or several.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what people mean when we talk about a language as being old. We talk about how classifying languages as old or classical is often a political or cultural decision, how the materials that are used to write a language influence whether it gets preserved (from clay to bark), and how people talk about creoles and signed languages in terms of oldness and newness. And finally, how a language doesn't need to be justified in terms of its age for whether it's interesting or worthy of respect.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Lingthusiasm episode 'Tracing languages back before recorded history'
'My Big Fat Greek Wedding- Give me any word and I show you the Greek root' on YouTube
Glottolog entry for 'classical'
Wikipedia entry for 'Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir'
Wikipedia entry for 'Bath curse tablets'
Wikipedia entry for 'Cuneiform'
Wikipedia entry for 'Mesopotamian writing systems'
Wikipedia entry for 'Home Sign'
Lingthusiasm episode 'Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou'
Wikipedia entry for 'Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language'
Wikipedia entry for 'Kata Kolok' (also known as Benkala Sign Language)
True Biz by Sara Nović on Goodreads
Gretchen's thread about reading True Biz
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
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Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
दुनिया की सबसे पुरानी भाषा कौन सी है
प्रस्तावना भाषा मानव सभ्यता का एक अनिवार्य हिस्सा है। यह न केवल संवाद का माध्यम है, बल्कि यह हमारे विचारों, संस्कृतियों और पहचान का भी प्रतिबिंब है। प्राचीन काल से ही, भाषा का विकास और उसकी विविधता मानव समाजों के विकास के साथ-साथ बढ़ी है। मानवता की यात्रा में, हर एक भाषा ने अद्वितीय सांस्कृतिक तत्वों को प्रस्तुत किया है, जो उस समाज की विशिष्ट पहचान में योगदान देते हैं। वैश्विक दृष्टिकोण से…
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The answer depends on how you frame the question.
The Oldest Language In The World (Top 6 Old Languages Still Spoken)
Humans used to communicate through hand gestures and rudimentary spoken noises before civilizations, kingdoms, and social standards were established. Language is what has moved the human race ahead and carried us to this point. Learn more!
The oldest dead language is the Sumerian..tablets come from southern Mesopotamia, and... writing was invented - Oldest Languages In The Worl
