What is the oldest language in the world? (Part 2)
In this second part of the article, there's a lot of talk about Basque — and Greek. I also ask: When does a language become another language?
Last week, I started an article about What is the oldest language in the world? If you haven’t read it, you can go there now.
5. So what about Basque? Isn’t it older than Spanish?
Last week, I tried to argue that no language is older than another one. Some readers may now tell me: this is all well and good, but the truth is that today the Spaniards speak a language that is very different from Latin — while, for example, the Basques speak the same language as they did 7000 years ago! In other words, Basque is older than Spanish, French, Portuguese… There are even those who say that it is the oldest language in the world.
Let’s stay away from written language. Let’s just think about what is spoken. Now, Basque has changed as much or perhaps more than Latin in the nearly 2000 years that separate us from the Romans (and Latin itself never stopped changing during the Empire — even Cicero would complain about the language of the streets…).
Basque changed — and split into different languages, just like Latin. The Basque spoken at home in different regions of the Basque country has differences as stark as the differences between the various Romance languages.
The official Basque taught in schools is Batua Basque, a standard — a written and formal record and a literary language — based on central Basque dialects (but with some contributions from other dialects). It’s only natural that Basques tried to create a unified language — it would be more difficult to protect and promote Basque if it were a collection of languages incomprehensible to each other.
In other words, Basque did not remain unchanged and indivisible for millennia, alongside languages born from Latin.
6. The New Roman Empire
Basically, the Basque situation is similar to what would happen in an alternative universe in which we try to resuscitate Latin like this: we institutionalise the French dialect, change the vocabulary and grammar a bit to bring it closer to the other Latin dialects — and we call this standard “Latin”.
At home, people speak something like Portuguese, Spanish, Italian for centuries — until schools, television and urbanisation begin to spread the new institutionalised Latin standard throughout the New Roman Empire (in this alternative universe, southern Europe is unified in one state).
In present-day Lisbon, grandparents still speak the dialect of the land (the Portuguese of our universe). The younger generations, however, already use Latin (the French of our universe), except when they talk to their grandparents.
Seem strange? It is strange. But this is what happens in the Basque Country — which has the additional complication of having another language in competition with this system of incomprehensible dialects and a common standard (called, by the way, euskera batua) — I’m speaking about Spanish, of course.
7. Has Greek survived for millennia?
There is also the case of Greek. It has kept the same name since Antiquity — is it not obvious that it’s older than Portuguese?
In fact, a Greek person of today will not be able to easily read an Ancient Greek without learning something about the languages. It is not that different from a Portuguese reading a Latin text.
From the nineteenth century until the 1970s there was an attempt to bring Modern Greek closer to Ancient Greek, to impose an artificial literary language with some classical forms. This artificial language is called katharevousa, as opposed to Demotic Greek, that is, the Greek of the street that is now official.
The fights were terrible — people died! The Greek language is sacred for the Greeks and katharevousa was a manifestation of the tendency to sacralize the language of the past as more perfect and genuine (a universal tendency).
The modern Greek standard ended up breaking free from this anachronistic standard and today the official standard is much closer to the language of the street. Some are still wishing for the return of the old language, but the truth is that Greek didn’t freeze in antiquity and Modern Greek is very different from Ancient Greek. Trying to keep it as it was then is an inglorious effort.
All languages are like this — they change constantly. Admittedly, sometimes there are abrupt transitions. For example, when a population adopts the language of another population as its own — the language often jumps through an accelerated simplification. But even so, a population does not create its language out of thin air — a language is not born: it unfolds.
8. When does a language become another language?
I spoke of Basque and Greek to say this: it is almost impossible to determine the age of a language.
If we use the criterion of the name of the language or even its permanence in the same territory, it means we consider that Modern Greek and Ancient Greek are the same language. It doesn’t make much sense: the linguistic differences are comparable to the differences between Latin and French.
If we find that one language is born the moment it separates from another, and there is no mutual understanding, then we will have to speak of several Basque languages — and all of them quite recent. Regarding Portuguese, in this case, it would have appeared when it separated, for example, from Galician — and when was that? Has it already happened?
Languages are like those bacteria that multiply through division: new bacteria appear, it’s true, but none is older than the other — none is the mother of the other. Languages are weird that way.
Someone will say, well, the language is born when the first written documents appear. It is an appealing criterion — it is concrete, it is physical, we can point to a specific date. But if it is so, then most human languages were never born: they were never written.
Basically, the point at which we begin to tell the history of a language is always a choice. It is quite arbitrary.
The third part of this article will be published in the next issue of Language Travels. It will begin with a journey to the beginning of language…